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Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

At our university, University of Manchester, we had a careers service drone telling us to list your experience working as a waiter and highlight skills you learned there ('communicating in stressful environment' and what not).

Dear young readers. Seriously, don't do that. Waste of space at best. Looks just stupid at worst. It doesn't tell me anything about your ability as a programmer at all. Description about a weekend project is much more useful. And no, clarifying whether someone wants latte with regular or soy milk is not a 'communication skill'.

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Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have advice for current college students looking for internships or their first full time job?

Unfortunately, I don't have the breadth of experience detailed in the slideshow to even justify a multi-page CV. In my environment, we work with a 1 page resume and <2 minutes of interaction with a recruiter at a career fair (~30% chance they're technical).

I have a variety of side projects I've hacked on, but it's very hit and miss -- some recruiters care a lot, others care more about my GPA and what classes I have taken.

What can students like myself do to best position ourselves in these situations, especially when we can't have multiple resumes for every company there is (and are forced to generalize)?

Yes, here's what you do:

(this was not my case because my first ever internship was through word of mouth)

- Basic info (of course)

- Courses/Certificates

- Voluntary experience

- Personal projects

- Conferences/seminars attended

- Skills (programming languages, etc)

Don't worry if it's half a page, but you may want to increase spacing/font size

I graduated during the peak of the recent recession. I ran into this a lot. What worked best for me was to stop fine tuning my resume and do my best to skip HR. I got a few interviews by calling friends already in the field (some of those parents of friends) and asking to be put it contact directly with a technical hiring manager.

Of course, none of those panned out either. A few took hires with more experience and one offered me a job at an embarrassingly low salary (i.e., less than I made as a summer lifeguard).

Ultimately, what worked for me was getting in with a good company doing low level tech work (help desk) which got my recommendations for an internal position. This was my first lesson in corporate hiring: the most effective way to find a job is knowing someone.

can't have multiple resumes for every company there is

But you can target 3-5 companies which you reckon you stand the best chance of getting in.

Research up the wazoo on your selected handful. The best is if you can network into present employees and probe into what's actually going on in there. What technologies do they really use, what's griefing them, and most important of all, why's this req open.

By working backward from why THEY need that extra pair of hands, YOU stand out as the best person for the job.

>> Do you (or anyone else reading this thread) have advice for current college students looking for internships or their first full time job?

Do something and write it down. Most coursework is not relevant here, but classes that involve a large project - put down the what you did for it. Did you design something? Build something? Discover something? Win something? Lead something? I'm not talking about regular lab projects here, I mean big things that take at least half a semester.

This has been my approach, YMMV. People can appreciate if you demonstrate an ability to DO stuff.

I can't speak for everyone, but we get it (that you don't have experience to show). You are a student at the beginning of your career. Just be honest and enthusiastic. As the parent says, blathering about your experience selling coffee is pretty pointless. Hey, if you started a coffee cart, that could be interesting to tout.

If you don't have anything for your resume, all you can be is smart and engaging.

If you still have time in school, picking up an interesting project is very worthwhile. We could do side projects for credit. I don't really care if you wrote it in Javascript, if it is web enabled, or you did math with matlab; just give me something to talk to you about, and I can figure out if the several fairly well defined projects I have in mind could be tackled by you.

In other words, I don't look for a college grad with no work experience to be able to lead a team, design a product, and so on. I have a bunch of 'turn the crank' work, and a few challenges to throw out as well. I don't want to babysit you, but I also want you to ask questions and learn. Part of interning is giving back to the community, but part of it is I have work I need done. So, when I read your CV and/or talk to you, I just want to figure out if you can perform at that capacity.

If there is nothing left to talk about I resort to asking about your coursework. 'What courses are you taking'. 'Blah, and foodle, and a compiler course.' Okay, can you tell me what a recursive descent parser is? uhh...I've never heard of that" That is an actual conversation I had with somebody recently. I blame the school more than the person, but no offer was made. I wasn't going to have the candidate code a parser for me, either for the interview or the job, but I just wanted to have a conversation about anything where I could probe knowledge (less important) and ability (more important). Find an area that know something about, find the limit, inject a new piece of information, and see if they can assimilate it. If they can, that's an offer. If not, probably not.

To be fair, you'll probably get a lot of "code 'delete_node' for a binary tree type questions, so like it or not brush up on that crap.

Beyond that, for me at least, the CV isn't very important. If everything you list is about networking and databases, and I am looking for graphics programming, I scratch my head as to why you are applying and probably move to the next resume. A fit in interests is important, after all.

I do, I do. https://github.com/andreis/interview

You're being harsh - graduate CVs are tough because almost no-one has done anything useful. Yes it all looks rubbish but I'd rather someone who had made an effort to sell themselves and had shown they had the ability to pitch up to a job on a regular basis.

But in our industry, it's easy to stand out. Spend a weekend or two, make some web app, Android app, or whatever. Maybe make a commit to some open source project, if you are struggling with ideas (in that case, you are capable to work with code written by other people, amazing!). And you are ahead of majority because you demonstrated that you can make something practical, real world.

Absolutely do this. Having interviewed 50+ candidates for various positions myself, it's amazing how much you can stand out just by upping your online profile a little bit. Some examples:

- one guy I interviewed for a junior position had put his CV and projects online on his own website. It wasn't loads but he was the only one out of that bunch of grad inverviewees to do it. I had a look through it before his interview, and when he came in I said, "that HTML looks remarkably clean! Did you tidy all that up just before you posted for the job?" We both laughed because it was obvious he had. Rest of the interview was nice and easy after establishing the "we are developer friends" bit.

- one guy had no degree, no A levels to speak of, but his contribution to open source was immense. We got him in for interview and he could speak clearly and with authority on each of the huge projects he was involved in. We offered him the job but he refused us to go somewhere bigger.

So go get yourself a GitHub account, buy a domain name for very little/year, point it at a GitHub Page and put anything you can think of on there. Congrats, you are now better than 90% of candidates out there.

That may be true but almost no-one does it.

I don't think that's true.

In my experience, development experience is relatively easy for students to obtain while in school. Internships are abundant (obviously not everyone is going to come out of school having worked for Google or Microsoft but most people who want to get development experience during college can find it). Personal projects are another way of doing something "useful" that have effectively zero barrier to entry.

It isn't too hard to do something "useful" as developer in college, if one has the motivation...

I'm not saying it's hard to do, I'm saying people don't do it.

You'd have to ask them why.

I beg to differ. For a graduate position, any professional experience is a big plus. I am prepared to teach people programming. I dread to teach people professionalism.

I guess if you have no other experience, then you put what you've got.

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