10 ms·

Having no money is viciously hard to deal with, especially when you don't have any connections or a portfolio of work. When I graduated with my B.S.C.S in '06..

by pnathan 15y ago

Having no money is viciously hard to deal with, especially when you don't have any connections or a portfolio of work. When I graduated with my B.S.C.S in '06... - I had no money to move. Any company that wanted me would have had to pay relocation. - There are exactly 4 tech firms in the area, total employment of engineers is < 1000. - I had studied general CS, generally trying not to be tied to a given TLA technology. This meant that I could not claim "years of experience with tech X". - I had not had the time to do open-source work, I had been doing my studies. By the time I was aware enough to do interesting work, my studies were too intensive. - I had had a bad semester immediately prior to graduation, and my GPA was not near 4. (over 3 tho). - I had done academic summer research, not internships. I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. No. Luck. I janitored for 6 months and dug up some university jobs, then back to graduate school, where I cadged the internship -> full-time transition. I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways. To this day, I have a good deal of sympathy for people out of work. Based on my personal experience, I encourage hiring managers and recruiters to look past the keywords to the possibilities that the candidate has. A good candidate can move into anything they need to be, if you give them a chance.

count 15y ago
As a hiring manager, you've got to sell yourself. If you've got all these negatives and they're the only thing on your resume or in your cover letter, it's going to be difficult to give you some of my limited time to talk about how you really could be better. Do me the favor and sell yourself - WHY should I hire you, of all people, when you're competing against potentially dozens or hundreds of people (who, mostly, just fire and forget resumes at monster and career builder). Nearly anything you can do to stand out from the crowd will be in your best interests. Network your ass off. Go to user groups, meetups, anything at all. I've never hired someone cold, from Monster or whatever. Why should I risk it, when I've got some similar with a personal recommendation from a known-quantity?
kragen 15y ago
> I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways. That happened to me, too, when I was 18. I had grown up in a white-collar family, but it still didn't occur to me that I could, say, take a taxi to get to work on time when I missed the train. Until my boss yelled the suggestion at me over the phone. In the year before that, I'd been doing minimum-wage work and lazing about reading computer science textbooks and writing C++ in a local university computer lab.
patio11 15y ago
I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. We need to have a How The World Works discussion with college students so that they understand that resume spray-and-pray is not actually how people get white collar jobs. Honestly I think that a good deal of the persistent unemployment problem is that people are doing cargo cult job searching and this checks their mental box for "making a good effort", when they should instead be making directed efforts to meet people with the authority to hire them and convincing them to make it happen.
- Tichy 15y ago
  Fully agree. I have recommended "What Color Is Your Parachute" to job seekers several times, but they were so exhausted from sending out dozens of applications every day that they didn't even have time or interest to read it. Not that I have personally tried the strategies in that book (admittedly), but it sounded very plausible to me :-/ At the very least, what is there to lose. If 100 job applications didn't work, does it really hurt to try something else for a week?
  - patio11 15y ago
    they didn't even have time or interest to read it. So one thing that counterindicates working alone at home is having poor discipline with regards to use of time. This sometimes bites me on the hindquarters: if you do a little work in the morning, goof off on the Internet for a while, and do a little work in the afternoon, it often "feels like" you worked that day. And if on a Tuesday you miss your morning, well, nobody yells at you. And why do the afternoon, when you've already missed the morning? And then that happens on Wednesday. etc, etc Put it this way: let's say someone had voluntarily quit their day job as a result of, I don't know, achieving an exit. If they told me that, six months after quitting their day job, they were so busy with the three emails they wrote per week that they didn't have time to read a particular book, I would say that they merely have poor time accounting skills or that their revealed preference is that they have no intention of reading the book. I hate saying "unemployed people are lying" in so many words, so I won't. But 6 months times 40 hours a week is a thousand hours. More if you previously had a commute or worked overtime. If you don't have 1,000 hours worth of progress on whatever your #1 priority is at the moment, you have to ask yourself why not.
ahlatimer 15y ago
I've written about this before [1]. It's really not that hard to get a job as a developer. Companies are dying for smart, capable engineers, and it's just a matter of directing your efforts in the right way. Two points I'd like to address: - Experience beats GPA. I don't even include my GPA on my resume (not because it's bad, but because I don't think it's relevant), and, so far, no one has asked for it. Experience, on the other hand, has opened far more doors than college has. - Direct your efforts. It's amazing how many more responses I get when I specifically craft a cover letter/resume just for that position that I do when I just send out resumes blindly. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809107 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809107 Edit: To be clear, I just graduated from college in May, and accepted an offer in SF two weeks after graduation (without sending out any applications). I also had no money to move and the area I'm from has practically no tech industry. I'm not particularly smart or talented; I just happened to do a few things that built on top of one another.
- cageface 15y ago
  Right now it's very easy to find a job as developer but it hasn't always been that way. If you'd graduated in 1992 like I did or in 2001-2 you might have had a very different experience.

by pnathan 15y ago

count 15y ago

As a hiring manager, you've got to sell yourself. If you've got all these negatives and they're the only thing on your resume or in your cover letter, it's going to be difficult to give you some of my limited time to talk about how you really could be better. Do me the favor and sell yourself - WHY should I hire you, of all people, when you're competing against potentially dozens or hundreds of people (who, mostly, just fire and forget resumes at monster and career builder). Nearly anything you can do to stand out from the crowd will be in your best interests. Network your ass off. Go to user groups, meetups, anything at all. I've never hired someone cold, from Monster or whatever. Why should I risk it, when I've got some similar with a personal recommendation from a known-quantity?

kragen 15y ago

> I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways. That happened to me, too, when I was 18. I had grown up in a white-collar family, but it still didn't occur to me that I could, say, take a taxi to get to work on time when I missed the train. Until my boss yelled the suggestion at me over the phone. In the year before that, I'd been doing minimum-wage work and lazing about reading computer science textbooks and writing C++ in a local university computer lab.

patio11 15y ago

I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. We need to have a How The World Works discussion with college students so that they understand that resume spray-and-pray is not actually how people get white collar jobs. Honestly I think that a good deal of the persistent unemployment problem is that people are doing cargo cult job searching and this checks their mental box for "making a good effort", when they should instead be making directed efforts to meet people with the authority to hire them and convincing them to make it happen.

Tichy 15y ago
Fully agree. I have recommended "What Color Is Your Parachute" to job seekers several times, but they were so exhausted from sending out dozens of applications every day that they didn't even have time or interest to read it. Not that I have personally tried the strategies in that book (admittedly), but it sounded very plausible to me :-/ At the very least, what is there to lose. If 100 job applications didn't work, does it really hurt to try something else for a week?
- patio11 15y ago
  they didn't even have time or interest to read it. So one thing that counterindicates working alone at home is having poor discipline with regards to use of time. This sometimes bites me on the hindquarters: if you do a little work in the morning, goof off on the Internet for a while, and do a little work in the afternoon, it often "feels like" you worked that day. And if on a Tuesday you miss your morning, well, nobody yells at you. And why do the afternoon, when you've already missed the morning? And then that happens on Wednesday. etc, etc Put it this way: let's say someone had voluntarily quit their day job as a result of, I don't know, achieving an exit. If they told me that, six months after quitting their day job, they were so busy with the three emails they wrote per week that they didn't have time to read a particular book, I would say that they merely have poor time accounting skills or that their revealed preference is that they have no intention of reading the book. I hate saying "unemployed people are lying" in so many words, so I won't. But 6 months times 40 hours a week is a thousand hours. More if you previously had a commute or worked overtime. If you don't have 1,000 hours worth of progress on whatever your #1 priority is at the moment, you have to ask yourself why not.

ahlatimer 15y ago

I've written about this before [1]. It's really not that hard to get a job as a developer. Companies are dying for smart, capable engineers, and it's just a matter of directing your efforts in the right way. Two points I'd like to address: - Experience beats GPA. I don't even include my GPA on my resume (not because it's bad, but because I don't think it's relevant), and, so far, no one has asked for it. Experience, on the other hand, has opened far more doors than college has. - Direct your efforts. It's amazing how many more responses I get when I specifically craft a cover letter/resume just for that position that I do when I just send out resumes blindly. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809107 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809107 Edit: To be clear, I just graduated from college in May, and accepted an offer in SF two weeks after graduation (without sending out any applications). I also had no money to move and the area I'm from has practically no tech industry. I'm not particularly smart or talented; I just happened to do a few things that built on top of one another.

cageface 15y ago
Right now it's very easy to find a job as developer but it hasn't always been that way. If you'd graduated in 1992 like I did or in 2001-2 you might have had a very different experience.