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

Be careful about applying for internships. Many of them stipulate that the intern must be a current student for the entire length of the internship and they are not for recent graduates. These internships are explicitly a hiring funnel to try and get the brightest students to commit early to the company where they had their internship. If you're going to have already graduated by the time the internship would happen, it simply isn't relevant to you in most companies.

Cram leetcode (aka interview skills) and keep applying to large companies through their websites. Your university's job board will help mostly with finding local companies near the university, but they are not the sum total of your opportunities, not by far. Furthermore, companies that post on university job boards get flooded with applications from that school, so they'll stick with the school's cream of the crop. Start with FAANG and then work your way down the Fortune 500. Small companies / startups need people with established track records because they need to produce results quickly; large companies have built the internal processes over time that protect the company from the inexperience of junior engineers and will therefore prefer to hire junior engineers in order to save money.

The industry is in dire need of labor so it shouldn't really matter what you put on your resume, as long as you put down that you have a CS degree and you're applying for junior engineering positions at large-enough companies, quite frankly that should be enough to at least get you a phone call for initial HR screening. If you're not progressing to other interviews or offers, that's a different question, and barring any personality complications that could come up ("interview skills") it probably goes back to you needing to cram leetcode ("technical skills").

If your resume isn't getting you phone calls, find someone in your career center and ask them to help you with your résumé. You don't need it to stand out - not in this jobs climate. You just need to make sure you're not making stupid mistakes with it.

Agree on the jobs board, disagree on the network.

The network consists of the actual alumni of the school, not the career counselor who probably didn't go there. Get a LinkedIn premium subscription and go ask people who attended your school to put your resume in the referrals pile. Just random alumni.

Many will do it. I have done it for people. Many have done it for me. Random people, because you share a school, will refer you.

It's difficult to stand out without internship experience.

Are any of your projects visible on the web? The best projects are ones where I as a reviewer can click a link and start instantly interacting with your software. Projects like this are directly responsible for at least 3 people I know who graduated last year getting their jobs (based on feedback from interviewers who reviewed their resumes, they did not have referrals).

It's hard to critique your resume without seeing it but in general:

- Your resume should be submitted as a .pdf file, nothing else is acceptable

- Your resume should contain your name and contact info as well as links to github/linked in at the top

- Your resume should contain a skills section with a list of technologies you know, this will get you past keyword filters

- Your experience section should be broken up by project, and each project should have bullet points outlining the task you accomplished and any technologies you used to to accomplish it.

I do technical interviews for my current company. Without internship experience, it's difficult for me to assess your technical prowess. I don't do algorithmic questions. My advice is fill the lack of internship experience with a few open source contributions to real projects. It'll put you through the motions of collaboration, architectural decisions, trade-offs, etc. Then you'll be able to talk shop.

An addendum: hiring isn't a meritocracy, even in engineering. Make your interviewer(s) feel good. Be conversational.

It’s hard to hire good engineers.