I think this is the part of the article that lands poorly with me. It lacks perspective. Why couldn't the people who evaluated those skills, demonstrated through those projects, pay the author? There are a myriad of possible reasons but some of them are in the category of "the result has marginal value".
I am fine hiring a junior developer that just does what is asked of them at a high level of quality. That is the baseline.
By the time you are a senior developer, I expect you to actively push back if you are asked to spend your time wastefully on marginally valuable things. Product managers should be able to explain to a reasonable person why a feature has value. A senior dev should be able to explain to project management why refactoring to reduce tech-debt pays off over time.
Is it possible that looking at the authors open source projects conveys the message:
"I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
I hire talent like that... when I have the organizational capacity to see if they grow out of it.
I am fine hiring a junior developer that just does what is asked of them at a high level of quality. That is the baseline.
By the time you are a senior developer, I expect you to actively push back if you are asked to spend your time wastefully on marginally valuable things. Product managers should be able to explain to a reasonable person why a feature has value. A senior dev should be able to explain to project management why refactoring to reduce tech-debt pays off over time.
Is it possible that looking at the authors open source projects conveys the message:
"I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."
I hire talent like that... when I have the organizational capacity to see if they grow out of it.