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Comment by slunk | Hacker News Reader

I'm hoping this thread will be a good place to get some advice. I'm about to finish undergrad. I was thinking about going to grad school but I really wanted to take a break from academia to see if I would prefer working at a startup. I've found that it is a lot harder than I expected to get hired.

I have an extremely good academic record but I can't say I blame companies for not taking that too seriously. I only have one big non-class coding project to my name and it was for research. Sadly, I focused too much on school in the past 4 years and not enough on personal projects. I obviously can't just tell people I'm a good fucking programmer. There is no reason to believe me. Is the best solution to forget job applications for now and start working on a project of my own?

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"I have an extremely good academic record but I can't say I blame companies for not taking that too seriously."

Nonsense. Despite the conventional wisdom on HN, most companies highly value students with good grades. We just also want people who can code. If you can do both, you'll be fine. But...it takes a while to land the first gig. That's totally normal, and has very little to do with the status of your github account. Do not believe people who tell you otherwise, because they have serious problems with perspective.

The fact is, if you've just started hunting, you're looking for work late in the recruiting cycle. Most larger companies recruit at the beginning of the school year (autumn), with a smaller effort sometime after the holidays. So if you're starting now, you're going against the tide, and it will be tougher to get attention.

If you can code, and your grades are as good as you say they are, send me your resume (my HN user at yelp.com), and I'll put your application in at Yelp. We're always hiring smart people.

I know non-technical founders get a lot of flak on HN, but working with one, if you're looking to build a track record, can be a great learning experience.

If you limit your involvement to building prototypes (Android, iPhone, RoR) , you can get a good feel for the nature of working with requirements and deadlines, as well as picking up incidental knowledge specific to a platform that will make you a standout candidate.

Who cares...everyone has an API these days. Pick two of FB, Twitter, Twilio, 4sq and combine them into some dumb (or useful!) app.

Try a facebook puzzle.

Getting onto the BlackBerry PlayBook dev program is free right now. Register asap and make SOME app for it...who knows, you might even make some money. Though you should keep your initial 3-5 apps free

My best advice (not that it's valuable): Take a weekend to yourself and learn something new with a personal project. Build a Facebook game, make use of the Twitter API, learn some basics of functional programming. Anything you can do to show that you are motivated and interested will help you significantly.

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