Sit on the other side of the hiring process and observe the impact of your hiring decisions enough times and you'll see why.
I don't care (that much) about your projects because they don't tell me if you'll drop into my team and kill it with your ego. I can't fully understand the context in which you developed those projects. I don't want to search around and see if it's just a clone of someone else's work you're trying to pass off as your own, or if the community you've mentioned in your CV really exists.
I'm more concerned if you'll be able to consistently make it to our stand-ups. I will take a mediocre but steady, agreeable, and trustworthy developer I don't ever have to think about over a "rockstar" who is making life hell for the team every time.
I’ve seen similar, and the engineer not only had thousands of GitHub stars and forked projects, but they were an excellent team player, natural leader, and terrific developer. What I did see, even then, was sentiment similar to yours, coming from managerial levels above them. Where does the insecurity start, and where does it end?
Can you work with your team? Can you get management what they need to do their job effectively? Can you get what other teams need from you effectively? Can you do the technical work?
All of them are part of the job. If you're great at working with your team but management hates working with you, that means you're only doing part of the job.
(And sometimes, that's management's fault too, don't get me wrong!)
I don’t know how to articulate properly it but the comment in the parent is a response does not address the specific essay. Maybe the writer had another, related essay in mind but nothing they respond to is present in the essay I just read
Agreed. There a lot of skills you only learn by being in a team environment that make you much more valuable in that environment than l33t coding skills.
> I will take a mediocre but steady, agreeable, and trustworthy developer I don't ever have to think about over a "rockstar" who is making life hell for the team every time.
It seems to me from experience interviewing that every hiring process wants the candidates to be both. Humility, agreeableness, trustworthyness does not get you a job.
By my estimation, it goes like this:
Being 70th percentile of leetcode test takers + all of those traits gets you a job.
Being 80th percentile of leetcode test takers + 2/3rd of those traits gets you a job.
Being 90th percentile of leetcode test takers + 1/3rd of those traits gets you a job.
The difference between being 70th and 90th percentile of leetcode test takers is practically nothing compared to what it takes to get up to 70th percentile. Within the hiring process, the whole point is to root out mediocre leetcode test takers, as they are seen and derided as "fakers" who can't code, regardless of their professional experience, shipped projects, number of code commits, or references from people who manage coders. The industry and hiring process hates "fakers". Other programmers hate "fakers". Especially the ones who are the "rockstar" developers hate "fakers" the most - everyone knows about that group of socially problematic (ie: borderline sociopathic) but powerful developers who will reject almost every candidate. This is seen as a good thing - a "bad hire" is seen as the worst possible outcome of any hiring process.
If we stopped running software engineering interviews like a game of werewolf, we might accidentally start valuing the type of people you would rather work with - and maybe it might actually make software a more pleasant place to be.
I don't care (that much) about your projects because they don't tell me if you'll drop into my team and kill it with your ego. I can't fully understand the context in which you developed those projects. I don't want to search around and see if it's just a clone of someone else's work you're trying to pass off as your own, or if the community you've mentioned in your CV really exists.
I'm more concerned if you'll be able to consistently make it to our stand-ups. I will take a mediocre but steady, agreeable, and trustworthy developer I don't ever have to think about over a "rockstar" who is making life hell for the team every time.