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Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

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Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#111

Post by glangdale »

sokoloff wrote: post #99
glangdale wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's hard to hire senior people with experience in anything much. I strongly suspect that our industry has a self-inflicted injury where we make developers - even people who are meant to be doing deep algorithmic stuff - do web stuff and devops and 80 other ancillary things - then we jump up and down because we can't find people with experience at higher level things. Even at a very senior level, I've been as…

Isn’t much of the job/industry “web stuff” though?

I shouldn't have made it sound like I was sneering at "web stuff" - just that people I work with who are meant to be doing other things have been regularly dragged into fairly menial "web stuff" (i.e. they're not specialists at that, and they're meant to be spending their time on other things). If you are doing a bunch of random firefighting then you don't get good at what your chosen specialty is (it would be similar to having a bunch of web specialists and making them do sysadmin chores half the time).

Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#113

Post by bdavis__ »

legerdemain wrote: post #23
nsxwolf wrote: post #8

Why is it simultaneously so hard to hire software engineers and so hard for new ones to find a job?

It behooves a company to miss at least twenty good candidates if it means avoiding hiring one bad one. A bad hire can utterly destroy a company. See the fiasco with Timnit Gebru.

in the US, employment is at will. when you hire a problem, at the 90 day point you should see that it is a problem.

take action, give 2 weeks severance, move on. both sides.

now, someone that turns into a problem after 5 years, that's on you. they weren't bad when you hired them, you made them that way.

Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#114

Post by hhhhhrdcc »

ktpsns wrote: post #85
landont wrote: post #26

Google top venture capital firms and look at their portfolio companies. Find a few that are early (series a-c) to target. Pick ones that resonate with you. Venture capital firms do tons of due diligence, and if you join early enough, when an exit happens it could be a big payday. Write to them about why they resonate with you. Use LinkedIn to find out the right person to message. Your goal is to get into the intervie…

Cannot second this enough. I wonder why so many people want to go to FANGG where a well funded startup can be so much more exciting and little to no insecurity as an employee.

Because they don't want to get worked to death.

Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#115

Post by bdavis__ »

Aerospace.

If you have a degree that is ABET accredited, don't smoke pot and can thus get a security clearance, and can answer simple programming questions and operating system / data structures question, you have a job.

This industry is hiring every entry level software engineer that applies.

It's not going to be all Rust, and it isn't going to use Redis, but it has it's own technical challenges.

As a plus, you will move up quickly. Very high retirement rate for the next 2 decades.

New graduate pay = $80 - $100 K. Stock is very rare. Moving expenses and a small sign on are possible.

Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#116

Post by jgwil2 »

cgb223 wrote: post #9

Oh boy, welcome to the grind The most effective way to get a foot in the door, and the thing I wish I did when I was in college was go to all those different career fairs that your college likely hosts. Talk to the different representatives of each company, tell them what you like, what you're interested in and _ask them questions_. What interests you about their company? If you seem excited about it, they are more l…

> Talk to the different representatives of each company, tell them what you like, what you're interested in and _ask them questions_. What interests you about their company? If you seem excited about it, they are more likely to be excited about you.

Agreed, hiring is largely arbitrary when you're fresh out of school so if you can get someone on your side, they can go to bat for you when the decisions are being made. And if you have the opportunity to talk to the CTO or another big shot, make sure to take it. They can literally hire you with a word, bypassing or overriding any process the company may have in place.

Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#117

Post by jessepeterman »

I personally have had no success with online applications. So I’d recommend reaching out to smaller companies that just received an initial funding round and try to get the email of one of the engineers/managers (or even CEO), and offer to do anything, write helper scripts, frontend, whatever. Show an eagerness to be helpful and show your value and a passion to learn. Send them a sample of something you have done in their tech stack. They might just need someone to help build out frontend components for an new MVP etc and your work sample might be just the evidence they need.

Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#118

Post by Hermitian909 »

epicureanideal wrote: post #83
Hermitian909 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a note: With recent spike in salaries, many venture backed companies don't have the cash to pay the salaries of good seniors. Spoken with a dozen founders in SF facing this problem over the past two months.

This doesn’t seem possible. Startups are raising Series A rounds of 15-20 million routinely. A quarter of that would cover a reasonable number of senior engineers for a year or two. But just in case it is possible… Maybe they should try offering meaningful stock packages, rather than 0.1% and less? Meaningful as in 0.5 to 1% for a senior engineer, 4-6% for a manager, until salary improves. Also, try offering stock wi…

SF a good senior can run you 350k/year not including overhead, add on overhead and you can quickly be looking at costs of ~500k per senior per year.

Vesting cliff isn't the only problem with stocks either. Common stock holders can easily get screwed over when raising or during any liquidation event that isn't an IPO or direct listing. The disparity in treatment means as an engineer you need to value stock at 1/10th face value as a rule of thumb.

Re: Ask HN: Graduating CS soon, how do I find a job?

#119

Post by Hermitian909 »

sokoloff wrote: post #96
epicureanideal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t seem possible. Startups are raising Series A rounds of 15-20 million routinely. A quarter of that would cover a reasonable number of senior engineers for a year or two. But just in case it is possible… Maybe they should try offering meaningful stock packages, rather than 0.1% and less? Meaningful as in 0.5 to 1% for a senior engineer, 4-6% for a manager, until salary improves. Also, try offering stock wi…

You shouldn’t be giving managers 6-8x what you offer senior engineers at a startup, at least not in a startup where engineering matters. If smart candidates are rounding the grant value down to zero, smart companies will not seek to give grants that are multiples of the current size. (That’s giving away $100 bills to someone who values them at less than your cost.) When you’ve raised a $20M round and have an employee…

> When you’ve raised a $20M round and have an employee pool that is 10-20% in total, you don’t have many 1% grants to give…and you have exactly zero 6% grants to give.

This is true, but the percentages illustrate how silly many investors are being about the resources necessary to put together a good engineering team.

I've had offers from startups with well known VC backers who wanted me specifically. They'd tell me their upper bound on cash, and then assuming I thought they had a decent chance, I'd calculate how much stock I'd need to make for the expected value for working for them to be at least as good as at a big tech company. Generally the calculation came out to 4-6% of the company per year.

That number could be lowered if I had access to the cap table or were being issued some kind of preferred stock, but no one's willing to do those things either.

Cash is cheap and labor is expensive but investors still want a way better deal than any engineer could dream of.

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