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Advertising in general can be a no-win proposition. Posting ads for a 2-5 years of experience programming gig garners a similarly flood-like number of responses

by azanar 18y ago

Advertising in general can be a no-win proposition. Posting ads for a 2-5 years of experience programming gig garners a similarly flood-like number of responses, and you get a near equal number of bad programmers. The key difference is now someone else has had to put up with them first. There are worthwhile places to look though, anyway. Imagine yourself in the same position as a fresh college graduate, and imagine where they go looking. Past the obvious answer of asking friends, they visit career fairs and university career centers. Those or something analogous might work well for you, too. As for garnering recommendations, I think they can be a very good source of leads. But, and I'm probably going to gain a lot of flak for saying this, I don't think they are a panacea. It'd be nice if people were impartial enough to only recommend colleagues they know are qualified and will work out well, and it would be equally nice if the people doing the recommending were clueful enough to know when someone isn't. Sadly, not everything is nice, and nepotism for social motives drives more of the recommending that I wish it did. Thus, I and some of the people I know have developed a slightly thicker skin toward people recommended to us; a smile and thumbs up from someone the hiring manager knows isn't enough, and that not having that doesn't preclude your being considered. Who you know might help you get past human relations, but once you get to someone like me, what you know, and more importantly, what you can learn, really start to matter. Oh, and mechanical_fish, I'm not trying to provoke you. Your two comments got me thinking the most of the one's I saw here, and so I decided to respond to them. :-)

mechanical_fish 18y ago
mechanical_fish, I'm not trying to provoke you. Your on-topic and thoughtful responses are so annoying! Why can't you write rude monosyllabic flames like everyone else on the web? ;) But, seriously, I overstated my case a bit. I didn't mean to imply that networking is some kind of miracle solution to the hiring problem -- for either the employer or the employee. AFAIK there is no miracle solution to the hiring problem. We're all forced to play it by ear. But because there is no one best practice for finding the right person for a given software job, people are using a bunch of different practices. Which is why you can't look at a single aspect of the job-search market (job ads posted to Monster.com; density of keywords on the resumes that are slid under your door; number of recruiter phone calls, whatever) and expect it to accurately represent the whole state of the field.

by azanar 18y ago

mechanical_fish 18y ago

mechanical_fish, I'm not trying to provoke you. Your on-topic and thoughtful responses are so annoying! Why can't you write rude monosyllabic flames like everyone else on the web? ;) But, seriously, I overstated my case a bit. I didn't mean to imply that networking is some kind of miracle solution to the hiring problem -- for either the employer or the employee. AFAIK there is no miracle solution to the hiring problem. We're all forced to play it by ear. But because there is no one best practice for finding the right person for a given software job, people are using a bunch of different practices. Which is why you can't look at a single aspect of the job-search market (job ads posted to Monster.com; density of keywords on the resumes that are slid under your door; number of recruiter phone calls, whatever) and expect it to accurately represent the whole state of the field.