I would actually not apply to this company.

All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some of the best engineers in I’ve met.

>Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year,

well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos

> open source contributions, or stackoverflow answers

Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years)

> show measurable impact

Well too bad, whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you.

How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it, instead of expecting me to cure cancer for a job position that has me change colors of a button every few days?

Edit: to be clear, I do agree with some of the things said like “look for a reason to say yes”. This is generally good advice outside of hiring. It brings new opportunities and when it goes wrong, lessons.

> well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos

Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.