Electronic projects are extraordinarily cheap right now. I’ve built moderately complex PCBs for less than the price of a nice dinner.
Everything definitely has gotten significantly cheaper than when I started working in mechanical/electronic engineering 15 years ago but a moderately complex board with assembly is still hundreds or thousands per board on short (1-2 week) notice. That’s what the GP means when they say that hardware prototypes are orders of magnitude more expensive (sans NRE) and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the much more expensive mechanical side too, which also had gotten cheaper but not overwhelmingly so.
You can tell by reading one of them though, right? For a subject I'm an expert at, I can tell the difference between an expert talking about the basics, and a beginner doing the same.
But in my experience reading a lot of applicants’ blogs, it’s rare to even find a recent post. The most common scenario I see is that the most recent posts are 3-10 years old. Even if you can get enough information out of their blog, you’re getting at best a snapshot of where they were a long time ago. The truth is that often people blog the most when they are beginners in a subject.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the ideal optimal blog that people imagine writing is an extreme rarity. I’ve seen so many people start blogs with high ambitions but then the farthest they get is a couple posts that are now so old that it barely corresponds to their current resume level of skills.
So you’re left doing a lot of guessing and extrapolating.
I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.
It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.
More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.