Comment by _swfb
6 months ago
I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.
> This really actually doesn't matter in many cases. These moments are perfect place for you to demonstrate humility and how you deal with feedback.
That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me. It takes me a like thirty seconds to parse their feedback, read to make sure that my code isn't wrong, and then process that I need to somehow respond to it. It's difficult to know what to say at that point.
I dunno. This post has given me a lot to think about.
> I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.
Don't stress on changing that too much - it's unlikely that an interviewer is going as deep as your hacker news profile. Eccentric can mean flaky and unreliable. Wannabe can mean aspiring but perpetually falling short. Neither put your best foot forward. I merely pointed that out as something that if you're generally seeing that view of your self then you might be presenting that outward.
A good way of looking at the interview process is that you want to give out as many strong-hire signals as possible. You need to find ways to turn no-hire signals into weak hire signals. (E.g. silly little things like "I don't have experience with that, but I've worked with ... where ...", or "I <did something that didn't work out> but <learnt> and <carried that learning to succeed in ...>", and you definitely want 0 no-hire signals.
> That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me.
Sounds a bit like you might need to expose yourself to be challenged by external viewpoints more often. Find an open source product to contribute some fixes to and see how the PRs go paying particular note about the communication aspects.
BTW, you might want to reconsider the domain that your GitHub profile currently points at.