
Wanna Impress an Engineer at a Career Fair? - cushychicken
http://cushychicken.github.io/career-fair/
======
kinkrtyavimoodh
Probably unpopular opinion but there is no point wasting so much effort at a
career fair. The people there will be talking to hundreds of students and
largely don't care unless you are really exemplary (which the vast majority of
students aren't). In big companies, these people don't even have any control
on hiring. Your resume is going to recruiters / HR who will apply their usual
biases and heuristics on it.

Career fairs have two purposes: For the company it's a way to establish /
further their brand, and for students it's a way to get their resumes to
companies and talk to employees.

As someone who has been to a lot of career fairs to represent my company, it's
really tedious to hear hundreds of students describe their course projects
with a lot of sincerity.

If you are interested in chatting with an employee, please do so and I will be
happy to talk about my experiences. This is the biggest value of a career fair
for students, coz they can submit resumes on online portals anyway.

Otherwise just submit your resume and get going. This whole facade of
pretending to care about the company and going on and on about having done
this project and that project is very very pointless.

~~~
bpodgursky
It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit -- maybe your
company needs to swap in someone who is still interested in actually talking
and listening to prospective hires. If you find talking to candidates "really
tedious", I don't know that you're the best face for your company anymore.

A lot of company representatives do in fact remember and note especially
promising hires. I'm sure that Boeing and LM and whoever just throw resumes
onto the stack, but younger and more dynamic startups definitely have room for
human impressions in the process.

~~~
BeetleB
>It sounds like you've been burned out by the career fair circuit

I've been burnt out by attending too many career fairs, and they are as he
describes. Most of the people you speak to will simply take your resume and
pass it on - they don't recommend any particular candidate, etc. Many
companies are quite open about it. In fact, some companies will tell you _not
to give them your resume during the career fair_. They just send you to their
web site.

~~~
filoleg
Just gotta know which companies to talk to at the fair. For example, line for
Google at my school was always long, but very quick, because they simply took
the resumes, had a 1min long convo that didnt really matter (as i was even
told by people working the booth there), and that’s it. For others, it
actually did matter. So you just gotta figure out which ones actually care
about the career fair and which ones do not.

While i find the generalization of “big corps waste your time at career fairs,
small companies actually do care” to be a good general heuristic for starting
out, this is not universally true. Off the top of my head, i remember Palantir
and Bloomberg specifically caring a lot about the career fair, with the former
especially known for giving quick on-the-spot interviews at the career fair
(note: i ended up working for neither of them, but i went through the full
interview loops with both, and both can be absolutely attributed to my
conversations with them at the fair).

It is difficult to know any of that the first time you attend a career fair,
but by the time your last career fair rolls out, you should already have a
good idea which companies are worth talking to at the fair and which ones are
not (thru your own previous experiences, friends, etc).

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esotericn
Don't take this the wrong way, but from one regular dude to another, both ~20
year old me and the current version of me emphatically do _not_ want to
impress someone who seemingly has such a high opinion of themselves.

Like, dude. It's a job. You have what seems like a bog standard middle class
existence - just like countless others.

You have a blog post about how you've gone on a single proper holiday in your
entire working career, for example.

It feels like you're holding other people to a standard higher than yourself,
albeit not in precisely the same categories. I've done it in the past too, and
I'm not proud of it.

The Stallman bashing is also completely unnecessary and I wonder if it's in
there as a sort of unclear "</sarcasm>" tag.

~~~
owyn
Yeah, I just found the post you are referring to [1] and wow it's depressing.
At the age of 30 the first real vacation he's ever had is an unpaid 10 week
vacation where he had to be prepared to quit-or-else AND pay his own health
insurance costs for the gap, and paying to stay on the company health care
plan evokes a "woohoo". This is where we've come to folks.

I've worked for a company with a remote development office in Poland, and they
get a mandatory 4 weeks plus another 3 weeks or so of paid holidays and a +1
week after 10 years of working (anywhere, including grad school)... so by the
time you're in your 30's that's 8 weeks. Every year! And you know what, those
guys worked really hard and were plenty productive and we in the US never
noticed it because they managed it just fine. [2]

And this is a guy at a presumably relatively well compensated and respected
engineering position. Everyone else has it even worse! We're doing great
folks, everyone just keep doing what you're doing, woohoo!

[1] [http://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-
absence/](http://cushychicken.github.io/leave-of-absence/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country)

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ummonk
This whole post really rubs me the wrong way.

College students don't have this privilege, but as an experienced software
engineer, if I get a vibe that someone is this judgmental and expects me to
sell myself to them more than they sell the opportunity to me, I'm going to
pass.

I also think this falls under the common pattern of posts that claim to offer
general advice ("wanna impress an engineer at a career fair") when they're
really only giving non-generalizable advice ("how to impress ME with my
particular criteria at a career fair").

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _...if I get a vibe that someone is this judgmental and expects me to sell
> myself to them more than they sell the opportunity to me, I 'm going to
> pass._

This guy is an EE talking to EE/Comp. E. students; the market isn't as
insanely hot for them as it is for software developers. In particular, it's
not easy to find an entry level job as an EE or Comp. E. from what I hear.

~~~
chillacy
It's true, when I was in school Nvidia gave out tests that people would do and
return to the engineers, and these weren't particularly easy questions either,
they probably took 20 mins. But they're one of the few hot hardware companies
so of course we did it (or tried).

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phugoid
The author seems very pleased to experience the power gradient of being
surrounded by hungry students looking to join the club.

"You’ve got a lot of learning to do - minimum nine months - before you even
get to working with me."

Such an unpleasant disposition. People who demand humility of others could use
a bit of more of it.

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opportune
The people who I knew who were most successful at internships and landing a
job right out of college, (not a huge target school like Berkeley or MIT)
didn’t waste much time with projects and stuff. Their MO was

1\. get any internship doing software after freshman year, even if it’s at a
noname place which hardly pays

2\. every summer leverage that into an internship at a place with more name
recognition and money

From my perspective the best way to stand out at a career fair was always to
have prior internships at good places. The people who did those crappy
internships after freshman year got the best internships later, then after
they graduated usually either went to Google/Facebook/Airbnb or whatever the
top startups were.

I don’t know what this guy is on about talking so much about confidence or
whatever, I get the impression from the article the author is on some weird
little power trip lording over these college students.

It’s my impression that the way big tech actually recruits at most colleges is
to just collect a shitton of resumes, set a target number of interviews, and
pick the top N resumes out of that (perhaps with certain demographic goals as
well). None of this weird confidence, impress me with an elevator pitch
bullshit

~~~
chillacy
I've found that confidence and candidate quality aren't correlated
particularly strongly. Confidence can be faked easier than programming
ability.

------
sxcurry
“Bitchin” “make that sucker twerk” Really? I think you are mostly letting me
know that I don’t want to work with your company.

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jacobsenscott
This is such bullshit. TL;DR: "Hey - the thousands of hours and thousands of
dollars you spent doing good real work and good real learning in university
level classes and labs are useless and don't demonstrate your commitment to to
engineering. Show me some shitty youtube video you did on a lark and you're
in!"

You're also filtering out people who aren't privileged enough to burn Mom and
Dad's money outside of class on their radio shack electrics hobbies. I can
only assume that is intentional.

I'll take the student who did well in class and has a life outside
engineering. I'll take that student every time.

~~~
mackey
I was thinking the same thing. I was definitely someone who had a lot of free
time to do extra stuff, so maybe this is just my guilt speaking, but I had a
lot of friends that had 0 free time between class, work, and/or family
obligations. If anything, they were way more dedicated than I was, because
going to college was already a major obstacle.

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ddavis
I think the write-up has some useful information, but it comes off as pretty
patronizing.

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sys_64738
Has anybody ever been hired via a career fair in tech? I did once but it was
purely luck as the manager was interested in a specific skillset attached to a
third party API. I worked with that API directly in a previous job so there
was instant connection. The hiring manager told me the majority of time they
get zero hits as they're just collecting resumes and binning them.

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humanrebar
Protip: Show off software engineering, collaboration, initiative, and problem
solving. Don't worry so much about computer science as such other than the
baseline expected of all graduates.

Exception, of course, if you're specifically applying to a role
(re)implementing bloom filters or something.

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bluedino
_Body odor or halitosis are a no go. I don’t care how smart you are - I don’t
want to enable future Stallmans. Though if you think you’re a future Stallman,
not showering is the least of your problems.)_

Is there some new trend of shitting on RMS this week?

I realize he might not be perfect but I don't being disrespectful to the man
who started GNU as the right thing to do.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
It just feels so pathetic. There was no need to mention him, the article was
not about him, but such is the magic of mob mentality. Even those who would
otherwise be on the sidelines feel compelled to join with their clubs and
spears.

It feels all the more pathetic when tom-dick-harries of the field do it. Like,
you probably owe the existence of your career path to giants like him. Have
some humility.

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ijiiijji1
This is solid advice.

When I was younger, I didn't have to do anything particularly special to get
job/intern interviews at IBM Almaden, MIT Lincoln Labs or Trimble Navigation.
Master your craft to an obsessional level, follow-up with any expressed
interest or requests for data/CV and show curiosity by asking good questions.

