First, some exciting news: after a thorough (but enjoyable!) interview process, I’ve accepted a position at thoughtbot in Boston and will begin in a few weeks. I can’t wait to get started.
The interviews themselves will make great fodder for future posts, but I realized a startling fact the other day: I never once sent anyone at thoughtbot a resume.
Moreover, I was never asked about schools, degrees, nor much about my past experience. My “resume” took the form of links to this blog, some open source contributions, and access to a couple private github repos of Rails apps I’d built.
This experience confirms an idea that I’m glad to see gaining ground lately: resumes are deprecated. Code is king. Oh, and connections help a lot too.
A year ago I wrote that it was possible to land a Rails job with no experience, provided you had a portfolio application, some code on Github, and attended Ruby meetups to network. Some people were skeptical, but it was exactly those things that got me my first Rails job. Now, years later, the same set of things got me in the door at thoughtbot: code, more code, and the recommendation of thoughtbotter Dan Croak, who I got to know during the ’09 Rails Rumble (yet more coding!)
I’m starting to think this really is the secret sauce for professional programming success, regardless of experience level. Get some code out there for people to see, and get yourself out there to meet awesome programmers you might want to work with someday. Leave the bullshitty bullet points to the MBAs.