A few weeks ago, I started a discussion at r/experienceddevs with the question, “Has a corporate engineering blog made you want to join the company?” I wanted to share some key findings:
The majority of experienced developers who responded to the thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it at a corporate engineering blog. Out of 47 people who wrote comments that answered the question, 32 people said yes or responded positively (68%). 15 said no or responded negatively (32%). On a related note: 58% of passive job candidates who responded to this survey by Veris Insights believe that it’s very important or essential to know a lot about a company before applying for a job. I’d wager these are the folks who would read an engineering blog, long before they consider working at a company.
Some people could highlight specific blog posts that convinced them to apply to a company (e.g., u/tadamhicks said that they applied to Honeycomb after reading this comment and digging further into the culture, u/12candycanes started writing an application after reading the Firefox blog, u/czv3 applied to RevenueCat because the posts and docs were so well written).
Some currently work at companies where they’ve read the blog posts and seen conference talks (e.g., u/teere, u/rwilcox, u/gnuban, u/SituationSoap, etc…).
Engineering blogs are a positive signal of good team culture and learning (e.g., u/ASteelyDan, u/nyki, u/dethswatch, with u/Creator347 mentioning not having an official blog was a dealbreaker when they considered joining a company).
u/improbablywronghere likened an experienced developer job candidate finding a blog post from a company to be similar to an interviewer at a company finding a public GitHub repo from a candidate. They write, “It gives you a chance to get some insight into an org with the caveat that this is how they want to present themselves to the public which may or may not be accurate.”
To that point, some people don’t trust engineering blogs because many of them are too promotional and serve business purpose, rather than sharing technical expertise and experiences (e.g., u/zombie_girraffe, u/duckforcealpha, u/BB611 writes, u/jpgr87, u/lordlod, and u/EggShellBuddyPal).
Naturally, if you want to see all the raw data, it’s at the Reddit thread here! If you have any questions, please feel free to comment here or to email me, herbert at wondershuttle.com.
Dan Luu also wrote a great piece on corporate engineering blogs here.