Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”
I&#x27;ve mentioned this before.<p>I have a portfolio that consists of six figures LoC of code, across dozens of open-source repos; most of which I am the 100% sole author.<p>I&#x27;ve written a fairly large open-source system that is rapidly becoming the world standard for a specific (rather small) demographic. It deliberately uses old and rather primitive technology (which is a big reason for it becoming a standard).<p>I&#x27;ve written hundreds and hundreds (probably thousands) of pages of documentation and Web site entries, designed Web sites, and helped hundreds of people and organizations to develop online presence (all for free). I&#x27;ve run instructional courses on a number of different topics.<p>I speak Swift without an accent. I can write ship-ready applications for every Apple operating system. I&#x27;ve been writing shipping software for over thirty years.<p>I&#x27;m good with device control. I&#x27;ve written embedded operating systems (long ago -different beast from today&#x27;s).<p>And, of course, I can PROVE it. It&#x27;s all out there.<p>And no one bothers to look at my portfolio when I&#x27;ve been contacted to apply for engineering positions. I usually send a couple of links to repos and&#x2F;or blog entries that apply directly to the position. My portfolio leaves absolutely no question at all about what I can and can&#x27;t do, technically.<p>I once even had someone insinuate that I had somehow faked my portfolio. I&#x27;m not exactly sure how they thought I did it. Maybe I hired an Indian shop to write tens of thousands of lines of code, hundreds of blog entries, design multiple Web sites, and hack GitHub and BitBucket to fake a decade of commit history.<p>At least, that was the reason they gave for ignoring the links I sent, and instead, giving a binary tree &quot;Draw Spunky&quot; test (I don&#x27;t do well on them; never have, never will. I spend exactly 0.0 hours on HackerRank, practicing).<p>I stopped trying to look for work. I don&#x27;t need it, and I was getting tired of the grind.<p>I just set up my own gig, where I do the stuff I want to do. Maybe someone will want to work with me in the future; maybe not.<p>I don&#x27;t really care, and I&#x27;m quite happy.