What inspires you to make?

I voted for "I think the making experience will help my career"

It may not. But almost every post I submit is written with the premise that it will be relevant to industrial practice.

I think making has helped my career in many ways, including helping to land jobs.

A by-product of making is writing proposals on element14, which enable making.

This is a very useful business skill to have and element14 proposals help hone that skill.

I'm a prolific blogger and learner, doing formal training.

After doing many of these things in parallel for a decade now , I learned that:

• doing formal trainings
• volunteering in the company,
• taking professional risks
• changing company
• getting out of the comfort zone and
• getting certified

has helped in every step of my career.

Up till now, publishing and blogging did not do anything to progress my career. It has been a blocker at times because being a public person is a risk.

Blogging would not have helped me at work either although I did blog about the interesting locations where I was stationed at times. Upon retirement I became interested in electronics but was reluctant to blog about that because while electronics were critical in the work I did most of the technicalities were not my direct responsibility or background. Fortunately people who are more knowledgeable than me tolerate this and as an enthusiast I have benefited tremendously from the feedback my blogs sometimes get. I have also benefited from reading posts from you and others who do these things professionally. Please continue. :-)

That is interesting.

I have taken or been forced to take many on-the-job courses, which helped a bit, but not enough to get a promotion. (Most were not technical courses)

I tend to test things at home that I am interested in from work, (when there is no appetite at work to spend time investigating) so this often has a direct benefit at work and has even led to patents, which look good on a resume. I don't blog about work-related research I do.

I am not sure about whether blogging helps one's career - I guess it depends on the job requirements.

dougw  wrote:

 

I am not sure about whether blogging helps one's career - I guess it depends on the job requirements.

Promoting your (off-time) project works.

My experience is that when you show self-made projects when applying, they are a great asset.

Blogging on E14, RS Components and on the Ti community, and using that as an asset -  in my career - was a negative power that I had to defend in interviews.

One of the reasons is that almost all of my blogs on element14  have 3 out of 5 stars,

I showed an electronic load I built here and the hiring partner said that it was not relevant because 3 stars and "good effort'" comment on element14.

While I was in the e14 top member community I flagged this,.

My balance after being here for many years is that it hampered my career.

When I negotiate without mentioning my online persona, these things don't play a role.

That electronic load was a great project - way better than 3 stars.

I am surprised that anyone would judge it solely on star rating, when the whole blog is there.

The fact that you did that project on your own time is a better testament to your capabilities and attitude than any paper resume.

That's not how the world rolls, Douglas. 3 stars in the new millennium gives a fail.

I stopped posting things that matter here because of that. I only post flashing leds these days. Just like when this community started. My 3 star posts are a liability instead of an asset. I flagged i while I was a top member. I did not like the answer so I accepted it and left that area.

Things I use for my professional career, I post on other places. This community burned me.

Jan Cumps  wrote:

 

One of the reasons is that almost all of my blogs on element14  have 3 out of 5 stars,

I showed an electronic load I built here and the hiring partner said that it was not relevant because 3 stars and "good effort'" comment on element14.

That is awful.  I have never received benefit from the star rating system. The stars don’t correlate to the quality of the work, I always get 3 or 4 with no rationale, and so they have no useful purpose. Fortunately they don’t impact my retirement and I can ignore them.

Jan Cumps  wrote:

 

One of the reasons is that almost all of my blogs on element14  have 3 out of 5 stars,

I showed an electronic load I built here and the hiring partner said that it was not relevant because 3 stars and "good effort'" comment on element14.

That is awful.  I have never received benefit from the star rating system. The stars don’t correlate to the quality of the work, I always get 3 or 4 with no rationale, and so they have no useful purpose. Fortunately they don’t impact my retirement and I can ignore them.

I flagged it in the public and top member area. I believe that e14 has representation in both areas and replied to me in both areas.

I know that many people never give 5 stars just on principle and everyone has a different idea about what they correspond to.

I don't care at all what rating my blogs get because I have already formed my own opinion, but then I never would have thought the score would be used by a potential employer.

I am not sure how it could be fixed from the forum's side, but it would be interesting to see if there are good ideas out there.

From the employer's side, there is also clearly a pretty sad failing that could cause them to miss finding good employees.

It sad to hear that you were adversely affected. If you need a recommendation, let me know.

Maybe the forum could have a separate way of endorsing member's skill sets - the way that Linked-In does. I think it could carry more weight than the Linked-In system because you could link a blog that proves the endorsement.

I don't care at all what rating my blogs get because I have already formed my own opinion, but then I never would have thought the score would be used by a potential employer.

I am not sure how it could be fixed from the forum's side, but it would be interesting to see if there are good ideas out there.

When you are applying, it does not matter what this island thinks. You are not the hiring manager of a blogger trying to post good blogs, dougw.

Once you have a 3 star post, company sees it, and the battle is uphill - no matter if it's flagged by someone who posted something relevant in the last decade.

A single person can join this community and influence ratings. It's a big community but that power is in a few person's hand. No matter if they help this community.

All good if you're pensioned. But if you are active in the market this community becomes a liability. For Me.

I flagged this but to no avail. E14 knows it. You were in the conversation.

Element14 mentioned that the star rating is participation, and that members have to deal with it. My way of dealing with it is to avoid posting anything professional here. Because it will get a mediocre rating if I don't blink a LED.

Discuss.

I tried to discuss this before but at no avail. Latest I checked no one is reading my posts anymore. 3 readers on  my last 9 industrial posts.

When you are a top poster here and you receive mediocre acceptation, you have to take it. It's documented at top members.

For me, posting here has resulted in being flagged as a mediocre engineer. Because the (if I'm lucky) mediocrate rating and the "nice start" or "good explanation for a beginner"  comments. 3 stars, 2 stars if I annoyed him.

It's all documented here. Novel ideas, never done before projects.: "Nice Start Jan". Blink a LED in RTOS: 5 stars.

I flagged it to e14: "Eat it Jan - That's how we rule. Part of the participation model"

What next? I'm a professional electronic person, blogging here.

When I apply for a job, I post my projects elsewhere or send a word document summary. I just can't use my 400+ e14 posts anymore because the ratings and the non-industrial-relevant comments.

Let's discuss what blogging here means if you are In The Business.

From the blogger-in-the-industry perspective and element14 perspective: Bring it on. Discuss.

dang. I rarely use the star rating system here.

My criteria would be more along the lines of 5* for anything being useful or helpful, rather than the "5* is only for exceptional work" that some people might use as a standard, which rarely happens. I mean, you took the effort to share - that's worth a lot right there. You're making the world a better place by sharing. Lower ratings should only apply to vague, misleading, false, or dangerous posts.

I'll have to be quicker to rate, to balance out the difficult to please folks out there

e14 is for engineers and professionals. I have an easier conversation when applying by not showing what I do here.

Speaking as someone who hires technical staff, I have noticed a dramatic shift in the hiring process over the last 2 decades, and the shift has not been in a good direction. HR departments now either rely on 3rd party (head-hunter) service agencies or they rely on big on-line repositories like "Indeed" to generate candidates. Head hunters either do not have a very large stable of candidates or they are also relying on external Internet repositories. This makes sense since most candidates are scouring the big repositories for job postings.

In both situations, candidates seem to apply by filling out a form - basically a bunch of check-boxes, or at most, single phrase bullets indicating qualifications.

All candidates get filtered down by looking for keywords and the short list consequently have virtually identical resumes, which consist of a series of bullets.

This process tells me nothing except the candidate has a degree.

In the past 5 years, I reviewed scores of "resumes" and I can't recall a single resume that contained even one complete sentence. No letter of introduction, no paragraph about why they want the position, no description of any accomplishments, zip. Their communications abilities cannot be evaluated from such a resume. Prior to that, all applications included at least a cover letter.

In this era of distancing and Zoom interviews it places a lot of pressure on the interview to tease out who is good at what and it is not necessarily the best candidates who make it through the filter. All it takes is to miss one keyword in your application.

I can see how an HR department might screw up assessment of a blog, since they are usually not technical staff, but if I reviewed a resume that used a blog link as a reference, I would read the blog carefully and the initiative and interest to do projects at home would count significantly, and any star rating of the blog would have zero impact on my assessment. Our HR department would not be likely to look at the blog to see the star rating and wouldn't use it to disqualify an applicant if they did see it. In my case, blogs on element14 would be helpful and the star rating would not be detrimental.

Wow - that's a lot of content!! I do something similar in that I don't explicitly link my blog posts, but I will put a sentence in the resume along the lines of "written 200+ blog posts" when mentioning other documents/presentations etc. These large numbers on their own might be good enough to convey experience in 'simplifying technology' (that's what I call it anyway, it could be called anything else depending on what people want to convey in the resume  - could be good to convey 'rapid prototyping skills' or whatever, if that's what was desired for a particular job role).

I agree too, the stars is totally broken and I'm just continually amazed that Jive has never improved it.. it's a key motivational thing to encourage people to use Jive, and it's not very end-user-friendly when broken like this. It's the online equivalent of the out-of-touch management who might criticise a project or progress without realizing the complexity or how hard the developers are working. I'm sure there's one or two examples from 'The Office'.. Example fixes could have been to just toss out the few lowest-star reports when building that star-score, given there will always be the odd person whose star-calibration is completely different to others, or a dozen other reasons. At conferences for instance, we did this because there was guaranteed to be at least one person from a competitor, deliberately marking things down. But there are plenty of non-malicious reasons too, and dropping a few worst star reports would go a long way to fixing it.

The current star system will never allow it to get back to more deserving scores, if a single person ranks something low, unless perhaps hundreds/thousands of people ranked it, which is unlikely. It's not possible to get that many views for a lot of content anyway; some content will always be slow-burning until eventually people over time actively search certain topics and make use of it, and another key weakness of the current system is that freshly-produced content might not even be visible on the radar unless people use the 'recent activity' and log on regularly.

But people must be reading them eventually, otherwise it wouldn't explain how the ranking shoots up over time. For what it's worth, I rarely click to give star ratings due to the brokenness, and would rather just click Like. But if I see any of your posts have less than 5 stars, then I click on 5 stars because I can't conceive a situation where there's bad content from you, and I believe it's disrespectful to give less than 5 stars in that case. By digging into a topic, and writing about it, you're the expert on it, so it's incomprehensible to give a lower-star report as a result. But generally I don't use the star system. There's a few cases where a low-star is deserving for really wacky or lazy or bizarre blog posts from people, but there I just don't bother to like or give any star rating generally.. and very rarely I've been motivated to give the least stars (1 star) less than 5 times in as many years perhaps. Anyway this is just my perspective when using the star system.

Anyway it's rare that people can dig deeply and write about topics with such clarity as you, those who know you know that the star is meaningless to your content. That still doesn't help and could be negative for resumes as you say though.

I am not sure if this helps, but I feel that a high number of views and likes is a greater measure of the value of blog and that the stars are just an opinion.  Jan Cumps , I know that this does not change the response that you got from the interviewer, which really is a shame.

When I had started my own company many years ago, I signed up to blog on another site.  We received payment based on number of views, as this metric was tied to the goggle ads floated along side the content.  I never made much (if any) on this model, but it did allow me to promote some of my products and content, which did lead to inquiries and even some consulting gigs. Even all these years later, some of my blogs have the highest number of views and I wear that as a sort of badge of honor.

I do think that blogging can be an asset to ones career, but I must admit, that now that I am semi-retired, I enjoy blogging as a way to payback my debt to those that helped me to understand and improve my skills when I was learning.

It is interesting how different people use the system. I don't use the star system much but when I do I always give 5 stars.

When I don't like something I generally just shun it - no comment, no like or dislike, no stars, because even negative attention is still attention.

When a posting gets a negative comment, it makes it look like it was interesting enough to comment on.