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

I can understand the resistance to do this given that juniors are demanding well over six figures and the widespread recommendation to skip town every two years. Paying $400,000 to spend a year eating up a senior engineer's mentorship time and then getting a year of work taking tickets off the wall is not a great trade. I don't know how to square this circle.

Well this gets to the question and assumptions about the broken hiring systems so many companies have.

This link was posted here recently. It has perfect examples of why "resumes" are Epic Fail and why companies are primarily stupid about how they hire. See: "Nurse AND Programming" idiocy example!

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/hiring-resume-screening...

HR is primarily populated by unthinking NPCs of uselessness. Not saying some aren't "nice" sometimes but most of them are useless wastes of skin even with the automation they supervise or use.

> How can I stand out to recruiters and employers?

I'm not sure how to teach this: it's similar to how you stand up to ANY situation that isn't in your favor in life. You "grow a spine" and learn to say "No".

When it comes to negotiation in ANY FORM, the side that can say "No" has the power. And conversely, you CAN NOT say "No", you have ZERO power in the negotiation. But think very carefully why YOU THINK you can not say "No"! Often it involved un-examined life choices and life expectations that are actually very stupid! Think about WHY you think you can't say "No" and why you think that way.

FWIW, I do NOT use resumes to find people I want to hire; I use word-of-mouth and trustworthy-authorities who will PERSONALLY vouch for someone. I.e. I use networking to hires, and conversely IMNSHO, people seeking jobs should always do the same. Note that I was born moderately introverted so that's NOT an excuse - even introverts can "talk shop" about what they know well or like well.

That said, I haven't "applied" for jobs with a resume in decades. I've always avoided HR and their processes - or tried to "play them" and negate their processes.

I do research on where I'd like to work, figure out how to connect with people at the company, communicate directly with them, and the "resume" has always been merely the "paperwork to finish HR's nonsense rules and procedures"; it was ALREADY hired long before that in the minds of managers I talked to.

The mathematics of hiring by network rather than random catch on the internet is very clear: linear search time to a good to great fit vs. exponential search time or worse.

So my criteria for hiring programmers:

• Good enough technical skills: +25%

• Enthusiasm and willingness to learn: +50%

• Enthusiasm and willingness to work with others: +50%

• Some form of endorsement or vouching: +50%

• Anti-social, value-signaling without value delivery, etc.: -100%

• Emphasis and entitlement based on alma mater: -100%

• Any politics or mental pathology over technical skill and merit: -200%

The fundamental reality: upon graduation, There are rare unicorn grads but they are too rare to bank on. Better to find someone who can be grown into a valuable employee. It minimally takes 6-18 months to go from newbie hire to being useful. That's simply the price an employer needs to swallow if they are any good and/or have intentions of delivery customer value. And most employers are only looking for unicorns which is Epic Fail.

Now I'm sure people will say: "No company will allow that!" Yeah, there are a lot of companies and specifically managers who are useless at their job and too spineless to force the issue. That's probably most of them. For me, if I'm committed enough to a product to spend ANY time at it, I'm committed enough to make sure we hire correctly and to the best result. I'm not most managers to be sure. I'm old-school which isn't popular these days.

Realizing this complexity and that it's not YOU who are lacking, is part of the process of figuring out the hiring game (if you choose to do that). Just as there are useless employees and job candidates, there are also useless companies and hiring managers. With time you come to realize there are two sides to this coin.

Tufte compared PowerPoint presentations to having the information density of Soviet-era propaganda posters (i.e. nearly zero).

You can validly claim similar comparisons with resumes!!

It’s about getting your foot in the door somewhere, gaining valuable fundamental tech skills and networking/nix/troubleshooting skills and experience, and then you leverage that experience those learned skills by moving on and up to a higher paying something_engineer role, most likely at a different and bigger/better org etc.

Obviously neither of our particular adhoc experiences can be used as a template for success, as of course it’s a combination of luck/right time right place/experience/competence/each person’s motivation/drive etc, but I’m not understanding how what you described was disadvantageous to your career.

Are you saying the skills you learned and experience you gained was not valuable? Do you believe that NOC Technician looked “bad” on your resume to potential employers? Because that is totally fine as a first or second tech job—- in fact in Engineering and Operations groups it’s almost assumed that this is the sort of first entry level job that many will have.

Any technical hiring manager is happy to see that type of experience, and knows that this sort of experience is miles better than “fill in cloud name” certs that everyone gets these days. You learn fundamentals with these jobs that you’ll never obtain from studying or labcramming for these cloud certs.