My personal website definitely helped me get hired. Here's how.
Whenever I create something, either for work or personal, I add it to a "Featured" section on my website's homepage. Over time, it became such a nice and comprehensive list that I now use it every time when talking about past projects or whenever a "Can we see some examples of your past work or appearances?" comes up.
It has different types of work and is exhaustive enough that whoever asks, can find what they're looking for. I had a lot of positive comments from prospective employers about it.
What started as a mini project for me to collect all the scattered links for myself so that I don't forget or lose anything, became a great asset that keeps on giving.
Here's the link that I send when asked about "examples of your work": https://www.velvetshark.com/#featured
It's an anchor link of my homepage that scrolls straight to the Featured section.
Oh, just to clarify: the "Featured" section is not the only thing that people find interesting. Once they're on the page, they can browse around and find articles that are of interest to them. That helps too.
Since its publication it even got featured in a Spanish textbook, and I get tons of traffic to it all the time. The topic seems very much valid for the last few years, with no sign of change.
The main reason seems to be to look good (or even readable) on mobile, but it seems that it's more of a bandwagon than a proven good strategy.
There are many, MANY versions of images from my article on Twitter, with attribution cropped. I wanted to have a subtle and small contribution and to not be obnoxious. It seems that it's not a good idea. Too easy to crop, post as your own and sound smart.
It's even worse on LinkedIn. There were multiple posts with cropped images, literally tens of thousands of likes, and zero attribution, then not even addressing direct comments and calling them out.
David Perell used one of the cropped images but he didn't know the source. When I commented on it, he added the article to his Twitter thread, with proper attribution.
Designers decide that they need to change the logo and come up with 50 variations, from bland to wild. Then a committee decides on "the best" one. With each, someone on the committee finds something they don't like, until there's nothing to take away, just bare, sans serif, black letters.
Same 'committee' effect happens with pop music, each song has many writers and goes through many layers of the music label before it is a released, that the song ends up very generic but also listenable to a lot of people.
Allegedly, the game was rejected 6 times before it was finally approved. Even then, it was approved on the condition that the big bugs will be fixed by December 10.
Apparently, they weren't.
They listed the original delay as due to current gen consoles, it's likely one of the two _did_ veto their previous launch plans on one of the consoles and they decided to delay the whole launch. The question is if it was even worse on consoles 6 weeks ago, or if they just cajoled the platform holder in question into letting them launch anyway.
The article doesn't answer how many, so I've counted.
It takes 1298 GNU/Linux users to change a light bulb.
Including the father of the first user, excluding the 6 that complained, and then complained again (they're counted only once). And also, assuming there's no overlap between all the groups, which is probably unrealistic.
At some point I was even a paid flickr customer.
Last uploaded photo was from 2009 I think. Or 2011?
Can't remember now because when I want to check I see the photo mentioned above.
What if I know I'm bad at something and decide to hire someone who's a professional in this area? And this person does an amazing job. I want to endorse this person to acknowledge the obviously great skill he possesses. But I can't. My skills are not similar.
Point taken, which is why I suggest the second fix using weighting. That being said, limiting to similar skills—while eliminating a few potential genuine recommendations, like the situation you mention—would stop the bogus recommendations as well, and I would guess that there are many more bogus than genuine recommendations being handed out the way it is now.
Also, do note that you're not really able to judge whether the work is professional or not. You can judge whether it works well, but for all you know the behind-the-scenes stuff could be a complete mess which will fall apart tomorrow. This applies to programming, construction, plumbing, managing a financial portfolio, anything. Unless you're an expert, you really can't judge someone's work on anything other than a very superficial level.
On the other hand, my wife endorsed me on several programming skills. She is not a programmer, so her recommendation is kind of pointless at best in this regard.
Sure. I'm not saying that letting anyone endorse is a solution. I'm saying that letting endorse only those who have similar skills is not an answer as well. It has to go deeper.
Whenever I create something, either for work or personal, I add it to a "Featured" section on my website's homepage. Over time, it became such a nice and comprehensive list that I now use it every time when talking about past projects or whenever a "Can we see some examples of your past work or appearances?" comes up.
It has different types of work and is exhaustive enough that whoever asks, can find what they're looking for. I had a lot of positive comments from prospective employers about it.
What started as a mini project for me to collect all the scattered links for myself so that I don't forget or lose anything, became a great asset that keeps on giving.
Here's the link that I send when asked about "examples of your work": https://www.velvetshark.com/#featured It's an anchor link of my homepage that scrolls straight to the Featured section.
Oh, just to clarify: the "Featured" section is not the only thing that people find interesting. Once they're on the page, they can browse around and find articles that are of interest to them. That helps too.