He wants to work for a summer in finance (sounds like a trading floor rather than the investment bank), is mastering in accounting and taking the LSAT to go to law school... Sounds focused. I can think of more direct paths into corporate law...
Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
51–60 of 93 posts
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#52One of the comments: "It's funny that all these guys loved the letter, yet didn't realize it's their fault that the letter even had to be written. If only they hadn't been falling for trumped up resumes and bogus cover letters for years."
I think in this and many other industries, people that are otherwise talented and intelligent individuals write these types of "trumped up" resumes only because they know that everyone else is doing it. If they don't also exaggerate the truth and try to talk up their strengths, then they fear being overlooked. It's not necessarily that anyone is being "fooled" by the exaggerated resumes, it just means that everyone sounds the same and it's just a game that both parties are forced to play. It's hard to distinguish on a cover letter whether "led a team of..." means one other person or twenty other people, for instance.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#53Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#54I was expecting something more blunt. Pretty boring if you ask me.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#55I am not surprised that a cover letter full of humility and honest self-appraisal has shocked Wall Street HR teams to the point of becoming a featured article on Yahoo.
Yeah, I'm confused as to why this was so shocking to the point where it was circulated and warranted a blog post. I've written equally as innocent "just looking to be around talented folks even if it means.." cover letters to companies I respected. In fact, that's what a lot of the design agencies I've worked for got the most of.
I am even more confused why this is on top of HN receiving so many votes in the past hour.
Is the email really that unique? It seems pretty standard to me and even looks like boilerplate from one of those "how to write a cover letter for internships" articles out there.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#56I wouldn't say it's a great cover letter - it's pretty generic and could easily be tweaked slightly for any job/industry. Also it's sort of sad that he has to debase his university and himself for the lords of finance to consider him.
"could easily be tweaked slightly for any job/industry." I disagree. This can work well for an intern position because whatever this guy wrote in the email, is a greaet pitch to be an intern. But if I am looking for a specialist in a particular niche/industry, at best I would be impressed by such email but will not hire him just because he talks straight.
In my opinion, the best thing this guy shows is competent business writing skills, which is a strong predictor of the ability to learn whatever field an intern will be joining.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#57>I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets at least a call from every bank out there I think that's funny. My brother works in finance, and I work in engineering. We both interview candidates and we were discussing our approaches recently. What struck us is how different our approaches are. A few key differences: * In general, his approach is based more on intuition, whereas mine is very objective. We both spend a lot…
I'm interested in what you say about extracurricular activities. I can certainly agree that in most cases they are a waste of space "I like music, movies and videogames". Surely though there would be some extracurriculars that might impress you? Contributions to a high profile open source projects , doing something that requires good organisation/people skills or just something that might tell you a bit about the per…
I am in the process of hiring engineers and the last candidate that caught my eye, listed some pretty cool side projects outside of his core area of expertise.
Learning of this made me consider: breadth of knowledge, interdisciplinary team structures, and understanding other aspects to design and review, overall - an interesting nerd/geek.
Going to movies, exercising, travel - those should be left off of resumes coming to me. Building electric cars, embedded firmware design, realtime control - those hobbies get me to notice you - especially when they are outside your discipline.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm confused as to why this was so shocking to the point where it was circulated and warranted a blog post. I've written equally as innocent "just looking to be around talented folks even if it means.." cover letters to companies I respected. In fact, that's what a lot of the design agencies I've worked for got the most of.
I am even more confused why this is on top of HN receiving so many votes in the past hour. Is the email really that unique? It seems pretty standard to me and even looks like boilerplate from one of those "how to write a cover letter for internships" articles out there.
I suspect that a large chunk of HN's lurkers are thwarted engineers, who got recruited out of college by IBs and are trapped in the world of finance by their bloated compensation packages, now living the carefree life of the programmer vicariously by hanging around here.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no privacy statement involved. It's an email. Emails get forwarded. It's polite to ask first.
Forwarding emails is a copyright violation.
Always amazes me how HN is full of incredibly intelligent people yet some are so spectacularly void of common sense. Only on HN would the discussion turn to whether or not the kid would be annoyed at an email that's forwarded without someone asking him. Course he wouldn't - they are all lauding him. His email has achieved exactly what it set out to do - it's got him a gig at an investment bank.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#60After reading the responses, I'm really glad I'm not in finance. "Hilarious but bold"? "Best cover letter I've ever received"? It's good, but it's not exactly groundbreaking. For tech startups, I feel like this kind of thing is almost required if you want to get anywhere. If I'm reading cover letters, I want to see some personality, and yes, I want you to be honest. Have some fun with it, even. Is that really such a…
Agreed! I've been on the receiving end of cover letters like this and while I appreciated the honesty, it wasn't exactly intriguing.