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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?

#131

Post by rcfaj7obqrkayhn »

ansy wrote: post #25

Bigger, name brand tech companies have way more applicants than they can accept so they have a crude recruiter funnel that is tossing out resumes for any reason they can find. They're literally trying to turn thousands of resumes from hundreds of schools into curated packets of dozens of candidates. But recruiters don't know a thing about software engineering. At best they can keyword match a few buzzwords they got f…

too bad a lot of smaller companies try to hire like they're big companies and hand out unrealistic assignments for the applicants

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

#132

Post by throwaway889900 »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #16

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…

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

Given how I have seen that pdf-to-text ATS systems sometimes generate a completely blank set of text out of a text-rich pdf, no. A docx is perfectly acceptable.

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

#133

Post by filoleg »

jjav wrote: post #130
filoleg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which may well be true, but conflicts with the narrative that there is a severe shortage of people. It might seem this way, because the narrative is almost intentionally simplified to the point of being vague enough to support almost any narrative. Shortage is real, but what often is omitted is the fact that it is the shortage at the senior level. At the entry level, shortage isn't really a thing. It isn't an insan…

> Shortage is real, but what often is omitted is the fact that it is the shortage at the senior level. There's more possibility of shortage at the senior level and in more specialized areas. Still, I'm not entirely sure how real it might be. Depends how it is measured. I'm in very senior and somewhat specialized roles, so that's my perspective. I see lots of companies opening reqs in my area and never filling them. T…

I 100% agree with you.

Just a generalist qualified senior engineer alone is something that is in shortage. If you dive into senior specializations, the shortage is even stronger.

My point was that the media and people tend to forget about the whole senior/entry distinction when it comes to shortages, and loudly proclaim "there is a shortage in tech" without specifying at which level, and then get a ton of entry level fresh grads yelling at them "no, there is no shortage, we struggle to get jobs".

>Should such phantom reqs even be counted towards stats of companies trying to hire?

If they are genuinely trying to hire someone for that position, but just have been unsuccessful to find a qualified candidate, then yeah, absolutely it should count. And I don't doubt they are trying to actually hire. Because why else would they spend tons of engineering time and money on interviewing people with zero intent to actually hire anyone.

Even where I work, we get tons of applications due to the company's high profile. And even when my team was desperate to hire a mid-senior level, we had to interview close to 50 people just to fill one position. It wasn't a competition for a single slot either, we were just looking for someone who was baseline qualified. If more than one emerged, we would have hired them all and just rerouted them to our sister teams who were looking to fill some positions as well, or to elsewhere in the company. But getting that one baseline competent person (we ain't talking about some 10x rockstar engineer type) was already a struggle.

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

#134

Post by jjav »

filoleg wrote: post #133
jjav wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shortage is real, but what often is omitted is the fact that it is the shortage at the senior level. There's more possibility of shortage at the senior level and in more specialized areas. Still, I'm not entirely sure how real it might be. Depends how it is measured. I'm in very senior and somewhat specialized roles, so that's my perspective. I see lots of companies opening reqs in my area and never filling them. T…

I 100% agree with you. Just a generalist qualified senior engineer alone is something that is in shortage. If you dive into senior specializations, the shortage is even stronger. My point was that the media and people tend to forget about the whole senior/entry distinction when it comes to shortages, and loudly proclaim "there is a shortage in tech" without specifying at which level, and then get a ton of entry level…

> Because why else would they spend tons of engineering time and money on interviewing people with zero intent to actually hire anyone.

Not so much zero intent, but I see groups who keep job postings open for ages just perpetually holding out for that perfect unicorn that doesn't actually exist and can't exist (you know, the person who has 20 years experience in low-level kernel development but is also a UI design god and a full-time devops guru on the side; I exagerate but only slightly).

So technically they can claim shortage of experts, can't hire anyone. But meanwhile the team continues operating just fine for years even though this magical person can never be found.

So to those job postings, I consider them essentially fake. They just inflate the count of positions that can't be filled by a position that never will be filled.

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

#135

Post by swman »

xyzzy21 wrote: post #124
sokoloff wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why I left Silicon Valley and founded my last company FAR, FAR from it. Silicon Valley is 100% OVER. It's jumped the shark. It's overdone and needs a fork stuck into it. I sold the company 3 years ago. My latest company is doing so much better than it could ever be possible if in Silicon Valley in terms of "R&D budget/Investor capital". It means we'll attain things that Silicon Valley startups with exactly th…

Where u based now?

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

#136

Post by seasily »

MattGaiser wrote: post #56
R0b0t1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a definite bias against people who are outside of a company's area. It might just be that they look at and hire from the local candidate pool first, or it might be something else. If you live in the middle of nowhere it is very hard to get a job. Per a (now very old) HN thread there also seems to be a bias against rural candidates.

Just remove any location information from your resume. Mine has none. No address, no office locations. All sorts of recruiters have called, assuming that I live in SFO or Seattle.

Name, email, and a local number procured through Skype or Google Voice is the way to go.

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

#137

Post by parentheses »

TL;DR: Work at a mid-size startup, then decide to move up or down in the size spectrum.

It's a great place to learn a greater breadth of what you'd otherwise specialize in at larger companies. Once you've done that for some time, decide if you want to go deep or broad.

For continued breadth, work at more startups - maybe earlier stage, maybe later. Go with your interests.

For depth, work at companies where the problems you want to go deep on are just becoming relevant. For example, if you're interested in scaling X, work at companies that are just beginning to tackle those problems; ideally these companies are spinning up teams with this type of work.

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

#139

Post by nextos »

bdavis__ wrote: post #115

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…

Are formal methods positions within aerospace more common these days?
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