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Recent Grads and Experience Beyond the Desktop?
over_exposed asks: "I'm a recent college grad (B.S. in C.S.) and have been on the job hunt for about 6 months. I've been playing around with tech toys as long as I can remember, but it all focuses around the desktop environment. Desktop-grade routers, switches and wireless as well as any/all desktop PC (and some Mac) hardware is what I could get my hands on with my limited budget. After looking through hundreds if not thousands of job postings, everyone is looking for 3+ years of network admin experience or 5+ years of C++ experience even for an entry level position. How is one expected to gain that kind of experience when no one will hire you without the experience? What kind of (part-time) work can you get as a college student to gain experience (Cisco, Exchange, SQL, etc) that will be marketable in the real world? Any suggestions from the Slashdot community will be of great benefit to myself and thousands of others who will enter the 'real world' in the next few years."
The best way to do it is an internship. The best way to get a job is NETWORK, NETWORK, and NETWORK. All the jobs I've gotten has always been through someone I knew, who knew someone. So work your friends, friend of friends, and socialize more. Best advice.
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
Seriously. Many of those requirements are written by people who have no idea what they're talking about. Now, in many companies, your resume will just get thrown out because you don't match some HR monkey's checklist -- but with luck, at a few places, your resume will get to someone with some technical knowledge who is willing to at least give you a chance in an interview.
I mean, apply everywhere. Any job you think you might possibly be able to do. If you get one nibble for every hundred resumes -- well, these days, in the post-.bomb world, that's not bad.
Also, I don't know if you're still eligible for this since you've graduated, but most schools' CS departments do have lists of available interniships. The money usually isn't great, but it's real experience, and can lead to a full-time position. (Mine did, though I didn't get it through the school.) They may have some formal job placement services for grads, too.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My answer was, I took a job with a smaller company where they understood my position but gave me responsibility and room to grow. Of course.. less salary, but it is a good starting position. I once met the "first CIO" in the United States, Duwayne Peterson - his advice was simply to "get your foot in the door" somewhere!
Good luck to you! -6d
You should either be a GOD in CS with a PhD or too many impressive qualifications to find a 'good job' in CS these days.
If you have only minimum quals, you might end up as a sysadmin somewhere for a small network.
If you're not a GOD, and want a good job, then try not to be a pure CS guy. Take up a minor that you like while you're still in school and try to think about how your CS skills can be used in that minor. Eg Civil engineering needs lot of programmers who know some civil engineering. There is a surfiet of programmers in the market who know nothing other than programming lanugages.
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
The father of my freshman year roommate was a professor at the University I went to. He was a mathmatician and he had written a C program to do mathmatical modeling. My roommate told me he was looking for someome to make some modifications to the program. I worked on modifying the program to run under both UNIX and windows. I got some good experience from it, and I was able to help the professor. I also got paid some for the work, so it worked out pretty well for everyone.
If I hadn't ended up traveling the China to study abroad, the professor was also planning to give me a system admin job for the department he managed.
The main thing is to keep your eyes open and talk to people. Talk to some professors you know and like, ask them if they could hire you to do some work (paid work looks better than volunteer on a resume I think, because it shows that the work you were doing was really valuable to someone.) Or if they don't have the money or need, ask them if any of their coworkers do. Don't just ask the comp. sci. department either, talk to all of your professors.
If no one you know needs help, go talk to your schools job search assistance center. They can help you look for something on campus that will help you fill out your resume before you graduate.
And of course, look for something that you will like, that is really important. If you are interested in the work, you will do better work, and then when your first post-graduation employer calls for a reference you will be remembered as a happy active employee.
--David
Get a crappy help desk job and work your way up.
While not unrealistic in the current IT market, "crappy help desk job" has nothing to do with becoming a software or network engineer.
For an analogy, a helpdesk job at an IT firm compares well to a secretary at a law firm. The secretary does not "climb the ladder" to full fledged lawyer, and the helpdesk guy does not eventually become a real engineer (not to say it never happens, but it when it does, it will involve some circumstances beyond "working up the corporate ladder"). Totally different jobs, one geared toward MCSEs and assorted other college dropouts, the other to people with a 4-year degree and good coding skills (which do not automatically come with any degree... You have to get those skills on your own through years of practice, which fortunately can start long before college).
No, a recent college grad shouldn't expect a six-figure salary. But they shouldn't take a $7.50/hr helpdesk job thinking it gives them any sort of "skills" beyond "new ways to insult users without them noticing".
Now, I did mention that the current market may require such work... Not because it has any relevance to the desired "real" job, but rather, because of what so many others have pointed out - You don't get a job by sending out resumes, you get a job because you know Bill, and Bill knows Fred, and Fred's sister works in HR at BlobCo, where they need a new entry-level code-monkey. From that position (which, if you tried to get it from a job posting, would still mention 5+ years of a dozen languages, as well as intimate familiarity with every type of networking hardware ever created, even though they just want someone to do VB scripting to access their customer mailing list running on Oracle 7 on an ancient Sparc with a fully redundant backup - Which you can later call "3.5 years of experience with Oracle in a mission-critical clustered environment" for the HR drones), you can work your way up to a real engineer. But the work at a helpdesk in the interim just kept you fed until you met the people needed to actually get a real job.
Now, the above may sound a tad elitist, but I don't mean it as such - I really do appreciate those who can work a helpdesk. But don't delude yourselves into considering that as any sort of entry-level position for a software engineering job.
I've graduated a year ago, and I hope my experience can help you and other recent graduates, even a little bit, in this tough market.
I got my Bachelor's in CS in May 2003. I didn't graduate a Top 10 Ivy League school, or have a particularly good GPA, so I knew it was going to be very hard. I looked around for jobs for a while, went on a few interviews, but I had no clue on how to pass interviews, or how to write a resume. So, money was very scarce and I needed some kind of job.
So I got a job - I don't even want to say what it was, it wasn't programming for sure. I worked there for 8 hours a day, and then I went to my friend's office to help him set up his business - both software and hardware, and then I came home, practiced programming and sent out resumes. I read programming books on the train everywhere, as well.
After a while, I got really lucky - a family friend agreed to help me with my resume, and I realized how much it sucked. There's way too little space here and I don't have the time to say everything I want to say about the resume, but here's a few basic pointers.
Make it absolutely clear what kind of job you are looking for. Don't put there things that would indicate that basically, you would agree to any job in an IT field.
Put concrete things on your resume, that show that you know what the hell you're talking about. So instead of 'Programmed a Java', write 'Used Java to design and develop an inventory management application, utilizing Swing for front-end and JDBC to interact with Sybase database.' People that search through resumes on Monster.com or Dice.com don't look for 'Java', they look for Swing, JSP, JDBC - etc.
Don't lie. At least, don't flat out lie - everyone expects your resume to paint a little better picture than you actually are, but don't put blatant lies like 4 years of Unix experience while your Unix experience has been limited to checking your college mail at campus network (guilty).
Keep track of where you send your resume, what position, and what version of your resume. Nothing fancy, simple Notepad file will do. But it saves you a lot of valuale time while searching for a job.
Interviews - again, there are tomes written on this subject, but basic pointers again: SHOW YOUR ENTHUSIASM. Ask questions that show that you understend and are genuinely interested in the subject. The word "no" should NOT come out of your mouth. Of course, again, you shouldn't flat out lie - but if someone ask's you if you know skill X, instead of 'No', you should say "I've heard about it, but didn't have the opportunity to work with it professionally.. however, I'm a very fast learner and will pick up very fast"
The money question. The correct response to 'How much money do you want?' is "Money is really not that important to me, if the job is interesting and challenging, I would be happy with any reasonable offer." If they ask you to name a number, name a range. DON'T UNDERVALUE YOURSELF. If the job pays $40K and you say you'll be willing to do it for $25K, the alarm bell immediately rings in your interviewer's head - if this guy is so desperate to do this job for $25K, he must be a loser. Next!
So, in conclusion, looking for a job is a VERY HARD job in itself. You have to pay attention to every small detail and work very hard to succeed. In my case, after 10 months it finally paid off - I was offered a full time position and now happily working for a major financial company, with a salary almost twice as large as an average entry-level CS graduate.
You'd be surprised how much that doesn't work.
I recently filled 3 of 4 open positions in my section and will be interviewing people for the fourth one next week. When I go through a stack of resumes, I triage them like this:
- Yes, contact these people. They get a first interview.
- Maybe. If the best people in the Yes group have already taken jobs or othewise don't work out, this is the stand-by group. So far, we have never had to call anyone in the Maybe group.
- No. People in this group are one or more of: way over-qualified, way under-qualified, totally unqualified, way too expensive, are in some other way unqualified (sometimes we relocate people, other times we want to make a local hire, for example), or they were caught in some lie on their resumes.
Among the members of the No group for this round of hiring is a person who was pretty well qualified (possibly over-qualified, but I would have put him in the Yes group) but was caught with BS on his resume. He is in the No group not just because that one part was a lie, but because at that point I instantly lost all confidence in all of his claims of experience. Anyone who has been looking at resumes for a while can recognize the BS pretty easily. If I see BS on your resume, you go into the No group. Do us both a favor and be honest. If you're honest, the worst thing that can happen is you won't get that position, but if your resume seems OK but just wasn't right for that position, I'll hang onto it. You never know what might come up in six months. If I catch you lying, your resume goes into a file of people who will never be contacted for a job with us.
Also, we do background checks before extending job offers. If you succeeded in BS on the resume and again at the interview, but get caught in the background check, not only will you not get the offer, you will never interview with us again. If you get by all that and get an offer and get hired and it becomes obvious the you just lied really well and got hired anyway, you will be fired. So far, no one has gotten past us.
I look at all the resumes I receive. It's true, triage takes out most of them. That's just a hard fact of life that comes from the fact that there are far more applicants than there are positions. I usually wind up with two (and sometimes three) resumes in the Yes pile for each open position. We interviewed six people for the three positions filled so far, and on of the other three was referred to another section where we knew they had an opening and her skillset matched what they needed a lot better than it matched what we needed. We still interviewed her, but we invited that section's manager to the interview and that manager asked most of the questions. The applicant is now a finalist for that position. If she had given us BS on her resume or in the interview, that would never have happened.
Bottom line: honesty on your resume and throughout the interview process is really the best policy, even if it sometimes looks like BS could be a good shortcut. The best people to work with and for, at the best places to work (and I think we are pretty good in both of those respects) will hire you as much for honesty and personality fit with the team as for technical ability. So much of effective management and team-building comes from recognizing people who don't *need* to be managed and who fit in well with each other and easily form a cohesive team, that if you don't meet those criteria then we don't care about your technical skills. I want people on my team who are honest, self-motivated, get along well together, and have no "issues" that I need to deal with. If you don't meet those criteria, I have no use for you. So don't lie on your resume or in the interview.
Be honest. It won't always get you the job, sometimes it might cost you the job, but if you sling BS either on your resume or in person, I guarantee it will cost you the best jobs out there.
It was an obvious lie involving an impossible number of years of experience for the technology in question. Even if he had invented it , he couldn't have had that many years.
You think you can't be caught? Fine, just go on thinking that. I'll never have to compete with you for a job.
Keep thinking that about background checks, too. There are agencies that specialize in getting exactly that kind of information, and it's a lot easier than you think.
Screwing over entry-level workers? Who? When? Where? You obviously have no idea what being screwed over even is.
When, exactly, did all these nameless companies tell people that if they got CS degrees they would get jobs? No one ever told me that. If you said a lot of people assumed that if they got a CS degree they would practically have lifetime employment, you'd be right. But that is very far from companies telling them that. No company every tells anyone anything like that. Sure, the jobs dried up. That isn't the fault of any of the companies who are hiring (or not) CS graduates today. Indeed, the companies that are hiring (or not) today are the ones that survived. If you want to find someone to blame for the jobs that dried up, you have to look first to the people that ran all the companies that *didn't* make it. The ones who burned through huge piles of VC cash on luxurious parties, foosball tables, video games, any sort of corporate extravagance you could name, astonishing salaries even for people with no experience and less skill, the whole dot-bomb nine yards.
I remained gainfully employed through the burst of the dot-com bubble. The only period I was unemployed was from June to September of last years, and that could be termed voluntary, since I relocated and resigned from my old job to do so. Now, of course, I'm working again. Those three positions I wrote about were newly created. The one I still have to fill is an existing one to replace someone who got an offer he couldn't refuse. I hated to see him leave, but it's a great opportunity and I'm glad it went to a deserving person. If he ever wants to come back here, the door is wide open.
Do you know why I remained gainfully employed through the jobs massacre that was the aftermath of the dot-com era despite the fact that I don't even have a CS degree? Contributing reasons are that I'm careful about choosing who I work for, and also probably a bit of plain old luck.
Another is that while I did not do my degree in CS, I do have a brain and skill, and I use both. But the capstone of all that is that I never misrepresented myself in any way to any employer, so what they saw was what they got, and I could fully deliver on everything I claimed.
If you talk the talk, but don't walk the walk, you'll be the first to go if there is belt-tightening.
Also, please keep this in mind: pretty much every employer has a clause in their personnel policy which says that if they ever discover that you lied about anything on your resume or application, references, anything at all, you can be fired. Now, read this very carefully and be sure it sinks in: there is no one in my section who is so good that, if I found that they had lied to me on their resume and been hired on that basis, he or she could expect to have me not want them fired. No one.
Now, I'm not looking for skeletons in their closets, because they all have been checked out, they all are honest people, and they are walking the walk. But just imagine a situation where someone takes a dislike to you and *does* want to find a skeleton in your closet. There had better not be one on your resume, because that resume is still on file and they could go through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for problems. If they find out you never worked at company XYZ, or you never really took course ABC, that's all they need to fire you with cause.
You seem very young, possibly even an unemployed CS graduate yourself, with very little experience in the working world, and not much in th