Ask HN: Tips for students before starting their first job

Another important thing to know, is that people's advice will be based on their personal life goals--which is likely different from your personal life goals. If you go ask wall street playboys advice, they are going to give you advice on how to make $X,000,000 (start a business on the side) and become a player. If you ask a preacher for advice they are going to tell you to do a mission trip abroad, find a wife and get involved in a church.

Can't really say much about landing a job. But I think the best advice I can give when getting a job is this:

Your job will most likely have nothing to do with what you were taught in school. It might have some superficial resemblance because you might use the same tools or in rare cases even apply something you learned but the the day to day work, the skills you need succeed and what you need to do to do something well are simply stuff you are never taught in school.

Higher education is used almost exclusively as a signal in hiring. Higher education teaches you how to be an academic (and if that's you career choice than forget what I said) it isn't a vocational school and neither the people who ran the institutions nor the people who will hire you expect Academia to actually teach you how to do the job.

This is true for almost all degrees to some extend, not just CS, but it is very evident in CS and many fresh graduates who land their first CS job have a hard time to adjust to the change in expectations.

For CS the shock usually revolves around understanding that most of what you are going to do is combining and interfacing with other people's code (whether colleagues, open source libraries or 3rd party services) and rarely if ever do algorithmic or data structure work.

Best life tip? Have a hobby or two that you love and that can occupy your body and mind for hours or days. Spend time wallowing in them. Be proud of enjoying them and share that enthusiasm with the people you meet. Mostly, these hobbies should not be what you do for work.

Regarding CS as a career: take classes in the humanities: art, history, political science, psychology, philosophy, etc. You’ll find you are better able to understand why you are doing what you are doing if your mindset for approaching problem solving is rooted in both technology and humanity.

Perception is reality. Your personal brand is insanely important. In a job, you are always assessed and your career progress will be based on how others perceive you (unless you are in a very metric focused career like sales). Anyone can say differently, but whatever other factors people mention, they all drive the final factor which is perception.

I always tell people two things when they start:

1) Impress everybody you meet. First impressions are very sticky. Impress people first, they will hold you to a higher standard, and then you aim to continue to impress. I’ve seen very few cases that people have shed their initial impressions.

2) Over-communicate. Make sure you ask questions, write thorough emails that explain rationale. It’s really important that you aggressively set and meet expectations. A major problem people have is expectation mismatch. Make sure both you and others are in sync and this usually happens via over-communication.

As someone who hires CS professionals, a few pointers. Be deliberate about the industry that you are working in. You won't know how long you'll be there and after a few years, your industry knowledge will comprise a larger body than your technical knowledge. This is a lever for amplifying your value, because that crossover is when you can start thinking in terms of the value in the products and services you're developing, in addition to their technical implementations. The flip side of this is that the longer you are steeped in that industry, the more difficult it will be to change to a different one. You'll want to be in an industry that challenges you. For example, 10 years as an embedded RF engineer is not the same as 10 years in back-end banking. If I were looking for the former, I would not interview someone from the latter.

CS pros have to be intelligent to get in the game. Once they are in, the primary success factors are a. Do you participate effectively in a team and b. do you work hard and pull your weight. Most universities today have coursework that includes extended, team projects. Do well in those programs, encourage your teammates to be competitive and committed and actually make something you can show off when you start interviewing. Be ready to go into detail, not just on the technical, but the team dynamics: What role you played, and here's a nugget: What were the different strengths of the team members and how did you deliberately take advantage of those strengths. A new grad who displays that type of insight will set themselves apart.

Many jobs are landed through networking. Establish relationships with upperclassmen and keep in touch after they graduate. When you're ready to start looking, some of them may be working at companies you target. When you do your summer internships, connect with everybody you can. You can reach out to them, and in many cases, they will have moved and seeded other companies that you could interview with.

Finally, just some out of the box thoughts for getting that first job: Cast a wide net. Submit a lot of resumes. Take a lot of interviews. Before each, research the company. Not just their technical products, but again, what market do they serve and do you believe you'd be challenged by that industry for the long term. Be good about following up. Don't be a pest, but don't let more than a week go by without checking in with your contacts on how it's going. Many companies are really bad at keeping candidates apprised of their status in the hiring, or where they are in the process. You don't want to just be left hanging when they've made a decision weeks ago.

Good Luck!