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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but how does a university student distinguish themselves as a good developer? I have projects I think are interesting on my GitHub and I've worked three internships while in Uni, but how can I make sure I stand out during the job hunt (currently in my last semester) while I'm competing against some of my classmates that didn't know the equality operator could be used outside of an if statement (a real example)?

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There is a bit of a marketing element to it as well. You have present yourself as the perfect candidate based on your experience.

Let the employer know how much you want the job. Know the details about the company. Practice answers to questions. Treat this like you’re training to win the US Open. You would be surprised how little effort most people out into preparing.

Also keep in mind that you won’t get every job you apply for and it might not even be your fault. When hiring managers are building a team they may be looking for a specific “personality or subtype” to fill out the team. Where If they had multiple head counts they would probably hire you but are holding out for the perfect fit.

What I did: Post on HN who wants to be hired, work at a small startup for a while, be a driving force between positive change.

My first job was 50k/year and I lost money just by getting to work (gas, fees, parking, etc). Told my boss and in 6 months I got a >50% raise to 80k/year + stocks + parking space.

Next job was 120k + stocks + remote for a company in the valley.

Each job hop will net you a pay increase similar to this. It'll also give you new perspective on software engineering.

My email is in my profile if you want to discuss in more detail!

"Game recognizes game."

People who are really good can recognize each other.

At some point in the interview process they'll sit you down in the room with a couple of their other really good people, you'll "grok" each other and be hired. (If that never happens, decline the offer, they have no one and no clue.)

No-one expects a fresh college grad to be a rockstar dev. The few places that do, probably have highly specialized recruitment pipelines, and look for people with the "correct" features and milestones, like monitoring people that have participated in math / informatics olympiads, that have gone to the "correct" schools, and have been mentored by important figures.

Those places are rare. But for the majority, my tip would be:

- Get comfortable with a couple of languages, learn good style, and get familiar with the toolkit.

- Learn the fundamentals of CS.

- Commit to some side projects.

- Seek out internships/work experience

- Do fairly well in school.

- Learn teamwork and soft skills.

I don't think any single/individual point above is enough to signal "awesome developer", but the sum of them will surely correlate with high potential.

I work for a much smaller company now than I did a few years ago, so I'm interviewing at a much lower rate. That said, if you have a single project on Github and can discusss it intelligently, you are already head and shoulders above the vast majority of people I've interviewed over the last 20 years.

You need to demonstrate that you understand and can modify code in real project. Many programmers are code illiterates, job interview is all about filtering them out.

Small trivial projects on github profile do not count for much. Contributions to some established OS project are great.

I stood out by taking part in my uni's Formula Student group and wrote safety-critical code for the car. This enabled me to find an interesting job straight out of uni where my code would be deployed to millions of cars around the world.

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