5 ms·

Wanna Impress an Engineer at a Career Fair?

49 points by cushychicken 7y ago

bluedino 7y ago
Body odor or halitosis are a no go. I don’t care how smart you are - I don’t want to enable future Stallmans. Though if you think you’re a future Stallman, not showering is the least of your problems.) Is there some new trend of shitting on RMS this week? I realize he might not be perfect but I don't being disrespectful to the man who started GNU as the right thing to do.
- aklemm 7y ago
  I suppose there is a lesson in there that one should think hard before violating mores, but I agree jumping on a bandwagon to shit all over what's been an important legacy is pathetic.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Don't you know that now it's not enough to disagree with someone, but to try and destroy them at any possible chance? Then again, RMS ate his own toe cheese on camera, so I guess it's hard not to use him as the archetypical computer genius with poor hygeine.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  It just feels so pathetic. There was no need to mention him, the article was not about him, but such is the magic of mob mentality. Even those who would otherwise be on the sidelines feel compelled to join with their clubs and spears. It feels all the more pathetic when tom-dick-harries of the field do it. Like, you probably owe the existence of your career path to giants like him. Have some humility.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  Could be that he's simply not a fan of RMS's philosophy on free software? There are plenty of people who don't object to working on proprietary software and systems. Either way though, the ding on RMS doesn't exactly impress.
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  Some people don't think that wanting to punish people for using a non-FSF blessed license is something that should be supported. "If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs." RMS
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- simlevesque 7y ago
  I don't like that he kicks him while he's down but it's also not false. I saw RMS twice and it's not a rumor that he smells bad. He's just pointing at a problem and showing an example of that problem to prove it exists. I've learned recently that this is a huge issue in the Smash Bros community, some people are proud of never taking showers or using deodorant. It's become a very real problem for this community: https://youtu.be/QkZB6YxtWKI https://youtu.be/QkZB6YxtWKI
kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
Probably unpopular opinion but there is no point wasting so much effort at a career fair. The people there will be talking to hundreds of students and largely don't care unless you are really exemplary (which the vast majority of students aren't). In big companies, these people don't even have any control on hiring. Your resume is going to recruiters / HR who will apply their usual biases and heuristics on it. Career fairs have two purposes: For the company it's a way to establish / further their brand, and for students it's a way to get their resumes to companies and talk to employees. As someone who has been to a lot of career fairs to represent my company, it's really tedious to hear hundreds of students describe their course projects with a lot of sincerity. If you are interested in chatting with an employee, please do so and I will be happy to talk about my experiences. This is the biggest value of a career fair for students, coz they can submit resumes on online portals anyway. Otherwise just submit your resume and get going. This whole facade of pretending to care about the company and going on and on about having done this project and that project is very very pointless.
- bpodgursky 7y ago
  It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit -- maybe your company needs to swap in someone who is still interested in actually talking and listening to prospective hires. If you find talking to candidates "really tedious", I don't know that you're the best face for your company anymore. A lot of company representatives do in fact remember and note especially promising hires. I'm sure that Boeing and LM and whoever just throw resumes onto the stack, but younger and more dynamic startups definitely have room for human impressions in the process.
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    >It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit I've been burnt out by attending too many career fairs, and they are as he describes. Most of the people you speak to will simply take your resume and pass it on - they don't recommend any particular candidate, etc. Many companies are quite open about it. In fact, some companies will tell you not to give them your resume during the career fair. They just send you to their web site.
ummonk 7y ago
This whole post really rubs me the wrong way. College students don't have this privilege, but as an experienced software engineer, if I get a vibe that someone is this judgmental and expects me to sell myself to them more than they sell the opportunity to me, I'm going to pass. I also think this falls under the common pattern of posts that claim to offer general advice ("wanna impress an engineer at a career fair") when they're really only giving non-generalizable advice ("how to impress ME with my particular criteria at a career fair").
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  > ...if I get a vibe that someone is this judgmental and expects me to sell myself to them more than they sell the opportunity to me, I'm going to pass. This guy is an EE talking to EE/Comp. E. students; the market isn't as insanely hot for them as it is for software developers. In particular, it's not easy to find an entry level job as an EE or Comp. E. from what I hear.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    It's true, when I was in school Nvidia gave out tests that people would do and return to the engineers, and these weren't particularly easy questions either, they probably took 20 mins. But they're one of the few hot hardware companies so of course we did it (or tried).
jacobsenscott 7y ago
This is such bullshit. TL;DR: "Hey - the thousands of hours and thousands of dollars you spent doing good real work and good real learning in university level classes and labs are useless and don't demonstrate your commitment to to engineering. Show me some shitty youtube video you did on a lark and you're in!" You're also filtering out people who aren't privileged enough to burn Mom and Dad's money outside of class on their radio shack electrics hobbies. I can only assume that is intentional. I'll take the student who did well in class and has a life outside engineering. I'll take that student every time.
- mackey 7y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. I was definitely someone who had a lot of free time to do extra stuff, so maybe this is just my guilt speaking, but I had a lot of friends that had 0 free time between class, work, and/or family obligations. If anything, they were way more dedicated than I was, because going to college was already a major obstacle.
humanrebar 7y ago
Protip: Show off software engineering, collaboration, initiative, and problem solving. Don't worry so much about computer science as such other than the baseline expected of all graduates. Exception, of course, if you're specifically applying to a role (re)implementing bloom filters or something.
ddavis 7y ago
I think the write-up has some useful information, but it comes off as pretty patronizing.
esotericn 7y ago
Don't take this the wrong way, but from one regular dude to another, both ~20 year old me and the current version of me emphatically do _not_ want to impress someone who seemingly has such a high opinion of themselves. Like, dude. It's a job. You have what seems like a bog standard middle class existence - just like countless others. You have a blog post about how you've gone on a single proper holiday in your entire working career, for example. It feels like you're holding other people to a standard higher than yourself, albeit not in precisely the same categories. I've done it in the past too, and I'm not proud of it. The Stallman bashing is also completely unnecessary and I wonder if it's in there as a sort of unclear "</sarcasm>" tag.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  >Like, dude. It's a job. You have what seems like a bog standard middle class existence - just like countless others. Yes - the post seems to be ignorant of market forces. My cool project you want to see? Likely more interesting and sophisticated than what most entry level jobs will have me do.[0] I don't want to show you my "brilliance" and end up with a job full of tedium - but that's how most entry jobs are. Yes, there are always a few companies who will allow you to do interesting work. And 80% of them are small/tiny companies who can't pay much even though they genuinely do interesting work. They are not startups - they are simply niche businesses who have reached their steady state size. [0] I solved more challenging HW problems as an undergrad at an average university than in my first 8 years in industry. As is the case for most engineering undergrads.
- owyn 7y ago
  Yeah, I just found the post you are referring to [1] and wow it's depressing. At the age of 30 the first real vacation he's ever had is an unpaid 10 week vacation where he had to be prepared to quit-or-else AND pay his own health insurance costs for the gap, and paying to stay on the company health care plan evokes a "woohoo". This is where we've come to folks. I've worked for a company with a remote development office in Poland, and they get a mandatory 4 weeks plus another 3 weeks or so of paid holidays and a +1 week after 10 years of working (anywhere, including grad school)... so by the time you're in your 30's that's 8 weeks. Every year! And you know what, those guys worked really hard and were plenty productive and we in the US never noticed it because they managed it just fine. [2] And this is a guy at a presumably relatively well compensated and respected engineering position. Everyone else has it even worse! We're doing great folks, everyone just keep doing what you're doing, woohoo! [1] http://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/ http://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sxcurry 7y ago
“Bitchin” “make that sucker twerk” Really? I think you are mostly letting me know that I don’t want to work with your company.
phugoid 7y ago
The author seems very pleased to experience the power gradient of being surrounded by hungry students looking to join the club. "You’ve got a lot of learning to do - minimum nine months - before you even get to working with me." Such an unpleasant disposition. People who demand humility of others could use a bit of more of it.
sys_64738 7y ago
Has anybody ever been hired via a career fair in tech? I did once but it was purely luck as the manager was interested in a specific skillset attached to a third party API. I worked with that API directly in a previous job so there was instant connection. The hiring manager told me the majority of time they get zero hits as they're just collecting resumes and binning them.
opportune 7y ago
The people who I knew who were most successful at internships and landing a job right out of college, (not a huge target school like Berkeley or MIT) didn’t waste much time with projects and stuff. Their MO was 1. get any internship doing software after freshman year, even if it’s at a noname place which hardly pays 2. every summer leverage that into an internship at a place with more name recognition and money From my perspective the best way to stand out at a career fair was always to have prior internships at good places. The people who did those crappy internships after freshman year got the best internships later, then after they graduated usually either went to Google/Facebook/Airbnb or whatever the top startups were. I don’t know what this guy is on about talking so much about confidence or whatever, I get the impression from the article the author is on some weird little power trip lording over these college students. It’s my impression that the way big tech actually recruits at most colleges is to just collect a shitton of resumes, set a target number of interviews, and pick the top N resumes out of that (perhaps with certain demographic goals as well). None of this weird confidence, impress me with an elevator pitch bullshit
- chillacy 7y ago
  I've found that confidence and candidate quality aren't correlated particularly strongly. Confidence can be faked easier than programming ability.
ijiiijji1 7y ago
This is solid advice. When I was younger, I didn't have to do anything particularly special to get job/intern interviews at IBM Almaden, MIT Lincoln Labs or Trimble Navigation. Master your craft to an obsessional level, follow-up with any expressed interest or requests for data/CV and show curiosity by asking good questions.

49 points by cushychicken 7y ago

Body odor or halitosis are a no go. I don’t care how smart you are - I don’t want to enable future Stallmans. Though if you think you’re a future Stallman, not showering is the least of your problems.) Is there some new trend of shitting on RMS this week? I realize he might not be perfect but I don't being disrespectful to the man who started GNU as the right thing to do.

aklemm 7y ago
I suppose there is a lesson in there that one should think hard before violating mores, but I agree jumping on a bandwagon to shit all over what's been an important legacy is pathetic.
ravenstine 7y ago
Don't you know that now it's not enough to disagree with someone, but to try and destroy them at any possible chance? Then again, RMS ate his own toe cheese on camera, so I guess it's hard not to use him as the archetypical computer genius with poor hygeine.
kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
It just feels so pathetic. There was no need to mention him, the article was not about him, but such is the magic of mob mentality. Even those who would otherwise be on the sidelines feel compelled to join with their clubs and spears. It feels all the more pathetic when tom-dick-harries of the field do it. Like, you probably owe the existence of your career path to giants like him. Have some humility.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
Could be that he's simply not a fan of RMS's philosophy on free software? There are plenty of people who don't object to working on proprietary software and systems. Either way though, the ding on RMS doesn't exactly impress.
JaimeThompson 7y ago
Some people don't think that wanting to punish people for using a non-FSF blessed license is something that should be supported. "If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs." RMS
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
simlevesque 7y ago
I don't like that he kicks him while he's down but it's also not false. I saw RMS twice and it's not a rumor that he smells bad. He's just pointing at a problem and showing an example of that problem to prove it exists. I've learned recently that this is a huge issue in the Smash Bros community, some people are proud of never taking showers or using deodorant. It's become a very real problem for this community: https://youtu.be/QkZB6YxtWKI https://youtu.be/QkZB6YxtWKI

kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago

Probably unpopular opinion but there is no point wasting so much effort at a career fair. The people there will be talking to hundreds of students and largely don't care unless you are really exemplary (which the vast majority of students aren't). In big companies, these people don't even have any control on hiring. Your resume is going to recruiters / HR who will apply their usual biases and heuristics on it. Career fairs have two purposes: For the company it's a way to establish / further their brand, and for students it's a way to get their resumes to companies and talk to employees. As someone who has been to a lot of career fairs to represent my company, it's really tedious to hear hundreds of students describe their course projects with a lot of sincerity. If you are interested in chatting with an employee, please do so and I will be happy to talk about my experiences. This is the biggest value of a career fair for students, coz they can submit resumes on online portals anyway. Otherwise just submit your resume and get going. This whole facade of pretending to care about the company and going on and on about having done this project and that project is very very pointless.

bpodgursky 7y ago
It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit -- maybe your company needs to swap in someone who is still interested in actually talking and listening to prospective hires. If you find talking to candidates "really tedious", I don't know that you're the best face for your company anymore. A lot of company representatives do in fact remember and note especially promising hires. I'm sure that Boeing and LM and whoever just throw resumes onto the stack, but younger and more dynamic startups definitely have room for human impressions in the process.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  >It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit I've been burnt out by attending too many career fairs, and they are as he describes. Most of the people you speak to will simply take your resume and pass it on - they don't recommend any particular candidate, etc. Many companies are quite open about it. In fact, some companies will tell you not to give them your resume during the career fair. They just send you to their web site.

ummonk 7y ago

This whole post really rubs me the wrong way. College students don't have this privilege, but as an experienced software engineer, if I get a vibe that someone is this judgmental and expects me to sell myself to them more than they sell the opportunity to me, I'm going to pass. I also think this falls under the common pattern of posts that claim to offer general advice ("wanna impress an engineer at a career fair") when they're really only giving non-generalizable advice ("how to impress ME with my particular criteria at a career fair").

ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> ...if I get a vibe that someone is this judgmental and expects me to sell myself to them more than they sell the opportunity to me, I'm going to pass. This guy is an EE talking to EE/Comp. E. students; the market isn't as insanely hot for them as it is for software developers. In particular, it's not easy to find an entry level job as an EE or Comp. E. from what I hear.
- chillacy 7y ago
  It's true, when I was in school Nvidia gave out tests that people would do and return to the engineers, and these weren't particularly easy questions either, they probably took 20 mins. But they're one of the few hot hardware companies so of course we did it (or tried).

jacobsenscott 7y ago

This is such bullshit. TL;DR: "Hey - the thousands of hours and thousands of dollars you spent doing good real work and good real learning in university level classes and labs are useless and don't demonstrate your commitment to to engineering. Show me some shitty youtube video you did on a lark and you're in!" You're also filtering out people who aren't privileged enough to burn Mom and Dad's money outside of class on their radio shack electrics hobbies. I can only assume that is intentional. I'll take the student who did well in class and has a life outside engineering. I'll take that student every time.

mackey 7y ago
I was thinking the same thing. I was definitely someone who had a lot of free time to do extra stuff, so maybe this is just my guilt speaking, but I had a lot of friends that had 0 free time between class, work, and/or family obligations. If anything, they were way more dedicated than I was, because going to college was already a major obstacle.

humanrebar 7y ago

Protip: Show off software engineering, collaboration, initiative, and problem solving. Don't worry so much about computer science as such other than the baseline expected of all graduates. Exception, of course, if you're specifically applying to a role (re)implementing bloom filters or something.

ddavis 7y ago

I think the write-up has some useful information, but it comes off as pretty patronizing.

esotericn 7y ago

Don't take this the wrong way, but from one regular dude to another, both ~20 year old me and the current version of me emphatically do _not_ want to impress someone who seemingly has such a high opinion of themselves. Like, dude. It's a job. You have what seems like a bog standard middle class existence - just like countless others. You have a blog post about how you've gone on a single proper holiday in your entire working career, for example. It feels like you're holding other people to a standard higher than yourself, albeit not in precisely the same categories. I've done it in the past too, and I'm not proud of it. The Stallman bashing is also completely unnecessary and I wonder if it's in there as a sort of unclear "</sarcasm>" tag.

BeetleB 7y ago
>Like, dude. It's a job. You have what seems like a bog standard middle class existence - just like countless others. Yes - the post seems to be ignorant of market forces. My cool project you want to see? Likely more interesting and sophisticated than what most entry level jobs will have me do.[0] I don't want to show you my "brilliance" and end up with a job full of tedium - but that's how most entry jobs are. Yes, there are always a few companies who will allow you to do interesting work. And 80% of them are small/tiny companies who can't pay much even though they genuinely do interesting work. They are not startups - they are simply niche businesses who have reached their steady state size. [0] I solved more challenging HW problems as an undergrad at an average university than in my first 8 years in industry. As is the case for most engineering undergrads.
owyn 7y ago
Yeah, I just found the post you are referring to [1] and wow it's depressing. At the age of 30 the first real vacation he's ever had is an unpaid 10 week vacation where he had to be prepared to quit-or-else AND pay his own health insurance costs for the gap, and paying to stay on the company health care plan evokes a "woohoo". This is where we've come to folks. I've worked for a company with a remote development office in Poland, and they get a mandatory 4 weeks plus another 3 weeks or so of paid holidays and a +1 week after 10 years of working (anywhere, including grad school)... so by the time you're in your 30's that's 8 weeks. Every year! And you know what, those guys worked really hard and were plenty productive and we in the US never noticed it because they managed it just fine. [2] And this is a guy at a presumably relatively well compensated and respected engineering position. Everyone else has it even worse! We're doing great folks, everyone just keep doing what you're doing, woohoo! [1] http://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/ http://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sxcurry 7y ago

“Bitchin” “make that sucker twerk” Really? I think you are mostly letting me know that I don’t want to work with your company.

phugoid 7y ago

The author seems very pleased to experience the power gradient of being surrounded by hungry students looking to join the club. "You’ve got a lot of learning to do - minimum nine months - before you even get to working with me." Such an unpleasant disposition. People who demand humility of others could use a bit of more of it.

sys_64738 7y ago

Has anybody ever been hired via a career fair in tech? I did once but it was purely luck as the manager was interested in a specific skillset attached to a third party API. I worked with that API directly in a previous job so there was instant connection. The hiring manager told me the majority of time they get zero hits as they're just collecting resumes and binning them.

opportune 7y ago

The people who I knew who were most successful at internships and landing a job right out of college, (not a huge target school like Berkeley or MIT) didn’t waste much time with projects and stuff. Their MO was 1. get any internship doing software after freshman year, even if it’s at a noname place which hardly pays 2. every summer leverage that into an internship at a place with more name recognition and money From my perspective the best way to stand out at a career fair was always to have prior internships at good places. The people who did those crappy internships after freshman year got the best internships later, then after they graduated usually either went to Google/Facebook/Airbnb or whatever the top startups were. I don’t know what this guy is on about talking so much about confidence or whatever, I get the impression from the article the author is on some weird little power trip lording over these college students. It’s my impression that the way big tech actually recruits at most colleges is to just collect a shitton of resumes, set a target number of interviews, and pick the top N resumes out of that (perhaps with certain demographic goals as well). None of this weird confidence, impress me with an elevator pitch bullshit

chillacy 7y ago
I've found that confidence and candidate quality aren't correlated particularly strongly. Confidence can be faked easier than programming ability.

ijiiijji1 7y ago

This is solid advice. When I was younger, I didn't have to do anything particularly special to get job/intern interviews at IBM Almaden, MIT Lincoln Labs or Trimble Navigation. Master your craft to an obsessional level, follow-up with any expressed interest or requests for data/CV and show curiosity by asking good questions.