njoubert

I just got into the CS Ph.D. program here!

Recommendations and research experience (published if possible) is absolutely the dealbreaker

Although it's a nice success story, you are marginalizing the majority of Americans and, in fact, the majority of people in the tech world, that has to spend a considerable amount of time and effort just to make ends meet. Paying your way through college and dealing with the current lack of jobs means that I can't necessarily just work on what I love and I have to make concessions. It has nothing to do with whether I want to contribute something of worth to society while doing something I love. Its about the hope of being able to do those things without having to wonder whether I'll make it to the end of the month.

I run my own SVN server on my personal website, and I use S3SYNC to back it up to amazon s3. the amazon backups costs me 10c a month, its great.

I've recently started using mercurial and git to get into the dvcs community, and mercurial is a good bet if you want eclipse integration. svn does this very well too.

One piece of advice - your tagline "LuckyCal predicts where you'll be to help you decide what to do." seems slightly creepy - you guys are going to tell me where i'll be and what i'll do there? Once I read your description it became much clearer, but I would change the tagline. Just my 2 cents

I try to read at least two books per month, and I force place into my schedule to read. I just finished "Circles in a Forest", a foreign book from South Africa, and I'm about half-way through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". (Lots of parallels to coding in this one). I've read and reread the Tolkien books as well as Ayn Rand's works multiple times, and they're on the top of my favorite list.

I can't think of any better activity to spend my time on than reading. Eloquence in writing and speaking is built partially from reading, reading can make great practice for formal reasoning, it helps me think of creative solutions. So much so that often, when I'm stuck, I will sit down and read a couple of pages, maybe a chapter, before going back to what I was working on.

woot, four!

your "burnt out at the office" speaks very closely to my experience - its my first serious job as a full-on C++ software developer, and frankly, it sucks the interest out of programming.

ah, i did not know that. If you want the cheapest of the cheap they're your friend but it would appear that there's a good reason for that! I've been using vpslink.com to run my own VPS with SVN and all the rest. I've heard lots of great things about slicehost too.

My suggestion is to get Dreamhost (500GB, 5TB transfer) and buy this for a 2-year time. Enter the promo code "5050" to get $50 bucks off, making this a $150 for 2 years hosting plan that runs svn and you'll never run out of diskspace.

Thanks to everyone that replied. My friend made a great comment today when he pointed out that, for the most part, people go to work at startups so that they can get in on the ground floor - pull those extra hours and accept less pay because hopefully you will be able to build the company out into a moneymaking venture. As an intern, those reasons are absent, since you're leaving shortly after you start with no stock or any other "i was there first"goodies anyways.

On the other hand, the web startup is probably more along the lines of what I would like to be doing long term, and one of the founders is already assuming a mentorship position - he called me a couple of times, and rather than trying to push his side, he's giving me some guidance and opinions on how to approach this kind of decision. This is, naturally, great for a student like me.

Still undecided, but i'll probably make up my mind throughout the night. Thank you for the candid discussion everyone!

I interned at Yahoo's research lab for 11 months last year, and it gave me some idea of a BIG high-tech company. Yes, I did experience quite a bit of the bureaucracy and sluggish speed of large corporations, but this was minimal compared to the fun I had, especially with the group of people I met and worked with.

I'm specifically thinking in terms of future opportunities. Would you, as a hiring manager, be more interested in a candidate with obvious experience at well known names in the industry, or at startups that, possibly, no longer exist when the person comes around to interview with you?

two responses, two opinions - probably very much in the gist of my question! good point on both of those though!

A little bit of background - I've already worked at Yahoo! for a year, so I have an idea of cubicle-land as kingnothing puts it. I do want to point out that the big company in question is not at all the typical big company. Without making it _too_ obvious, its one of Steve Jobs' previous ventures...