Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say. So we get this glut of self important "considered harmful" essays. And we're all guilty.
> Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say.
The advice needs to be updated slightly, then, to clarify the apparent confusion: you should, if you can, write essays for all those reasons, but step one of writing an essay for those purposes is find something meaningful to say.
> So only people with meaningful things to say or build should get noticed and hired?
...based on writing essays.
There are other ways to get noticed and hired. And, writing essays that reveal that you have nothing meaningful to say probably isn't a valuable use of time to get noticed and hired (if you are trying to get noticed and hired for a tech job, taking the same time to increase your portfolio of open source contributions you can point to is probably more valuable.)
> > So only people with meaningful things to say or build should get noticed and hired?
> ...based on writing essays.
> There are other ways to get noticed and hired.
Whenever hiring discussions come up, the three ways put forward to "get noticed" are personal blog, Github projects, and meetup attendance. None of those avenues work unless you have something meaningful to say or build outside of your day job. Having something meaningful to say or build in your day job seems to be deprecated in this market, because liars.
Perhaps we can help educate employers by bringing an X-Box with Guitar Hero to interviews. When the inevitable "why did you bring that to the interview?" comes up, we fire it up and reply with "well, your advert did mention wanting a rock star..."
