As a recruiter, what shortcuts can I use to tell if a person can do the job?
You probably don&#x27;t want me. Not because I&#x27;m no good; but because I&#x27;m the wrong stack.<p>However, I do have something that will tell you an unbelievable amount about me; the StackOverflow Story[0].<p>I have a gigantic portfolio, with dozens of repos, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, a decade of commit history, dozens of published articles, going into tremendous detail about the way I think, work, architect and code. I also have a bunch of apps on the App Store, with full source[1].<p>TL;DR: There should be <i>no question</i> as to my abilities, or even &quot;soft&quot; factors, like personality and team dynamics.<p>Maybe you don&#x27;t want a &quot;shortcut.&quot; I was a development manager for a quarter of a century. It was a small, high-functioning team. Every person we hired became part of the &quot;family,&quot; and was a commitment. When they finally rolled up our team, the person with the <i>least</i> seniority had a decade.<p>There was <i>no way</i> that I would “shortcut” that hiring process. Each engineer was a <i>major</i> deal. I would have killed for the type of information that even a quick glance at a GitHub ID will give, let alone an SO Story.<p>It has been my experience that the &quot;shortcut&quot; everyone wants, is a 50-line binary tree leetcode test; which I am pretty terrible at, as are many experienced engineers.<p>For some reason, that tells more about me than the portfolio; which recruiters have always immediately ignored. It was insulting. It was meant to be. After a few of those, I just gave up looking for work long ago. I now just do my own thing. I don’t have a thing to prove to anyone.<p>I am not alone. I routinely visit GitHub pages jammed with detail about how people work.<p>I often see solid green activity logs (like mine[2]).<p>You should look for a portfolio, and ask why not, if they don’t have it. Also, don’t wait for them to come to you. Seek them out. Use your network. It’s a big deal. It’s worth the time and effort.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;cv&#x2F;chrismarshall" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;cv&#x2F;chrismarshall</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;littlegreenviper.com&#x2F;AppDocs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;littlegreenviper.com&#x2F;AppDocs&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ChrisMarshallNY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ChrisMarshallNY</a>