111–120 of 125 posts
A hugely important factors behind getting a job are: being likeable, looking good, not being weird, having a good sense of humor, etc. If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
A hugely important factors behind getting a job are: being likeable, looking good, not being weird, having a good sense of humor, etc. If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
Sadly this is true. I've had conversations with very smart people who can't find a job. They often attribute it to some hiring shortcoming or bias, and sometimes that's the case. But for a couple of these people the reason was obvious: they were not "presentable" and didn't have a personality that would enable them to function well in a team, i.e. they didn't dress properly, didn't look after their personal hygiene,…
While I have not (thankfully) been in a hiring role for some time now, I can confirm that these three factors dq’d a ton of candidates when I was. Here is the reality…there are not a lot of roles in medium-corporate companies where a single interview with a single person gets you hired. So if you don’t tick that presentable box, even if you are technically skilled, I have to have a conversation with the next interviewer that goes like this: “I know this candidate comes off as a pompous ass with rumpled cloths and smells like feet, but…”
You better be beyond brilliant for me to sell you despite shortcomings that I have to caveat to the next interviewer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of my wife. :) After her PhD, she was writing cover letters that were screaming "I hate the recruitment process". One day, something clicked. Her next cover letter read like the first chapter in her bibliography. And one month later, she had too much work. :)
I for one, will never kiss the corporate ring
Who taught this man that college was The Great Equalizer? I was taught (for better or worse), by STEM grad parents no less, that the only college to strive for is an elite liberal arts education, and the purpose was to broaden my horizons and make connections. It explicitly wasn't to decide on a career and learn hard job skills.
This can be good advice, unless you ultimately think you will really want a STEM career. You will ultimately spend an extra couple of years playing class catch up.
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The mood landing is pretty bad example. It is useless except for propaganda and good feeling. It is organizational and technological achievement, but not particularly needed by society that produced it. People don't go to college to moorland nor to facilitate next war. They go to college to get corporate jobs.
Looking at the moon landing and the Manhattan project, you hear about the very few PhDs on the program. They were outnumbered at least 100:1 by skilled tradespeople who manufactured components of those programs. None of those manufacturing jobs need a college degree, just time and focus, which a college degree detracts from by taking 4 more years of your life. You should look at the LHC for a modern example. Even the…
But, qork in manufacture sux. Also very related, those job were either replaced by machines or moved abroad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the moon landing and the Manhattan project, you hear about the very few PhDs on the program. They were outnumbered at least 100:1 by skilled tradespeople who manufactured components of those programs. None of those manufacturing jobs need a college degree, just time and focus, which a college degree detracts from by taking 4 more years of your life. You should look at the LHC for a modern example. Even the…
Manufacturing still don't require college. But, qork in manufacture sux. Also very related, those job were either replaced by machines or moved abroad.
Manufacturing moved abroad seems one explicit failure of Western post-war economic system for me. And here I'm from the third world myself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be right, but then shouldn't the standard route for most developers be vocational rather than academic? How many developers do we need in the workforce with this academic background?
Given how many different technologies/languages/frameworks an average developer has to learn over his career isn‘t a solid background in the fundamentals worth more than 3 years intense focus on one such set? That‘s not to say that going through uni without having heard of git is the sign of a good program, I don‘t consider my program to be all that great but at least I had to go through two labs that required us to…
Maybe this is a US problem… I graduated (Master Degree) at the 1st university of my country (Italy) for engineering 10 years ago. By graduation day I was already employed… and had the luxury of choosing the offer that inspired me the most (had more than 10 offers… basically every company I interview with made an offer). After graduation my phone kept ringing at least twice a day with companies reaching out to try to…
Could you say that for all engineering graduates at the majority of universities (even the bottom 50%)? I know plenty of people who had internships and were effectively employed a year before graduating, but I can't say the majority of people are in that position. If education is just 2k euros rather than the 15k (public) or 60k (private) in the US, I agree it's much less of an issue for sure because much less is at…
Yeah, there’s a big difference between “kid with a CS degree” and “kid who interned at Microsoft for 3 summers and knows industry dev practices well”. This is why internships matter; it doesn’t even have to be a well-known company as long as it teaches you how to work on a dev team (git, agile workflow, DevOps, cloud, etc). In my experience it’s the tools and tech around working as more than a singleton. That’s the j…
I was the "kid with a CS degree". My experience interning was "There actually aren't many tech companies in your city and it's 2008 so no one is hiring" I was a broke student so I couldn't exactly afford to relocate for a summer internship, lose my apartment, store all of my belongings and such. I started my career with basically no experience, spent my last money on a deposit and first months rent to relocate to a n…
Luck plays into career success to an incredible degree. I was just in the right place, right time to build a long career. I’m certainly not very talented or hard-working.
This thread (the HN comments) is quite interesting, as opposed to the article which says pretty much nothing and is an email harvesting exercise.. If you're going make a statement such as the title (particularly prefixed with I) then you better say something about your own experience and why you believe your 'title proposition' is true.. if not, and you're not just 'fishing' (for hits and/or email addresses), why bot…
thanks for the valid feedback -- I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my blog and definitely got carried away with SEO/Growth Marketing tips I've incorporated towards the end of the article. I'm not sure whether to go down mtlynch.io 's path of being a solopreneur or Daniel Vasello's deconstructing his career in SWE or a more pure scott aaronson or star slate codex blog.
I'll change it to something less 'fishing' and rather more open if people want be notified of posts. In retrospect, I'd rather just share my stories, guiding principles, and tacit knowledge I've developed than try to sell a course or a guide at the moment
With regards to the title, I hope the story I shared about the uber driver and my experience with the mismatch between my degree and what I had to learn on my own to become employable speaks to why I believe the title is true. I'll consider changing my essay's point of view from 3rd person-ish -- but again I'm still trying to find my voice so it's a work in progress
thanks for reading! I thought the discussion here was pretty cool too