

From College To Silicon Valley: Tips From A Veteran - cwan
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/18/from-college-to-silicon-valley/

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saryant
I'm in this position right now though I have yet to get any offers. Flew to
Seattle last week for Amazon but was turned down and that's just one in a long
line.

Do I feel like these have been unfair? _No._ In each case I can perfectly well
understand why I was passed over: I screwed something up, whether an algorithm
on the whiteboard or incorrectly describing a certain data structure. While
it's a bit depressing to read stories like this about SV firms competing to
hire college students, I've come to realize that I'm just not _good enough_ to
get those positions.

Right now my plan is to stay where I am for a year (I do have an offer from a
local firm, it's just not that exciting) and build up a portfolio of work.
I've got products shipped out there in the wild but nothing I'm that proud of.
However, a year of weekend projects will give me a portfolio of _working
products_ and (hopefully) make me more attractive to companies in Silicon
Valley.

I'll be releasing my senior thesis project into the wild soon and the
corresponding paper has already been accepted for publication. I've started
submitting pull requests for open source projects on Github with bug fixes.

Right now I'm not good enough. A year from now, I will be.

~~~
apsurd
Just want to say I support your willingness to work and improve yourself. On
the part of "a year's worth of weekend projects" might I suggest going for
quality rather than quantity.

Back when I had a developer position, when it came time for hiring, my boss
would hand-select his "top picks" from the resume pool and ask us (the
developers) to give a general audit of their work.

For me, looking through all the apps, there was never anything robust. The
codebases proved nothing more to me than the candidates ability to follow a
ruby on rails "setting up a todo list" tutorial.

I got accused of being _overly harsh_ but I think you need top standards when
hiring.

Anyway the point is its very rare that a candidate will have production
quality apps running in the wild. And its even more rare that those apps have
any more substance than you'd get following a paint-by-numbers rails tutorial.

Don't be one of those guys.

Best of luck!

~~~
saryant
Thanks! By 'weekend projects' I really meant two or three projects drawn out
over several months. I've started working on one but it's at the bottom of my
priority list right now, that'll change in a few months when I'm done with my
thesis.

I've also come to realize how skewed your perspective is based on who you're
surrounded by. I'm one of the best in my CS department which made me _think_
that job searching would be easy, but now I see that I'm the best of a small
group that isn't that spectacular to begin with. Really wish I'd taken the
harder path four years ago and gone for a better/larger school.

------
mahyarm
One thing that might not obvious to people moving here is most of silicon
valley is very suburban, and if you work in the south bay, most of your
coworkers are going to be married with families in their 30s at the very
least. Even in the startups. If your single, try to live and work in SF
proper. Far more of your coworkers will be in your age range and the gender
ratio will be somewhat more balanced. The commute from SF to the South Bay is
a frustrating hour minimum.

Rent wise, SF and Palo Alto have about the same rent, even though half of Palo
Alto and Mountain View is 1930s craftsman track houses.

~~~
natesm
This is one of the reasons I decided to move to New York instead, after having
lived in the suburbs for my entire life, I just couldn't take it anymore.
There are so many more things to do in Williamsburg (where I live now) and the
easily accessible areas of Manhattan (East Village, SoHo, Union Square, even
Midtown if you _really_ feel like that) than there were even in college.

~~~
mahyarm
Oh god, I just looked up the rent in mountain view and Manhattan and it's the
same.

------
ganjianwei
If you're joining a startup or a company where you're offered equity as part
of your compensation package, spend some time to understand what it means. You
don't have to be an expert at it, but a couple of hours of learning here could
go a long way, plus that knowledge is likely to be useful again.

There's a pretty good write up at <http://infochachkie.com/options/>

Compensation is not everything, and for most startups the expected value of
your options == $0, but you should still understand what you're getting or
giving up so you can make a sound decision.

