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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."
Exactly - I realised something the other day. Linux geeks aren't the hollywood-stereotypical geeks. Linux users tend to be social, gregarious folk, and a raucous LUG meet in a pub in Manchester contrasts sharply with the Rain Man Microsofties I encounter here in England, anyway. Linux folk are Social Geeks, a group that has yet to be widely recognised, but holds an amazing amount of latent potential - MBAs can control the Rain Man Geeks, but Social Geeks have the same networking skills as MBAs. Microsoft makes its money by acting as a bridge between the Rain Men and the MBAs. Social Geeks render them irrelevant, not just economically, but societally.
Register with your local temp or employment agencies and take whatever they have.
Once you're in the door start looking around for positions inside the company you're working at.
You're in, you can prove that you have the ability and not just the shiny new piece of paper that says you sat through 4 years of classes which probably taught you nothing that you didn't already know, and then you can see about moving up in the world.
I'm currently hiring about a dozen high level network security engineers. One of the biggest headaches I've had to deal with in the last month has been people who think "resume true" is what I care about.
.. take this guy's advice if you want to. But don't end up on my doorstep.
When I schedule a technical interview for a candidate, and they arrive, and two minutes into the interview session I realize that this candidate has never done half of the items on their resume (heck, some haven't even bothered to read their resume) I do three things.
1) I end the interview abruptly, inform the candidate that I'm sorry for wasting his time, and send them packing.
2) I throw out every resume I received from whatever source provided me with that resume, call that head-hunter, and let them know that they wasted my time, and the time of my team members who I pulled in for the interview. I not-so-politely let them know that they are black-listed from my group and that I really would appreciate them never contacting me again.
3) I let the other managers I work with in the international, 200k employee company I am part of know both the name of the recruiter and the name of the lying applicant so that they won't be bothered wasting their time in the near future either.
So
For real advice I'd do the following -- by your junior year, find a part-time job someplace doing anything related to your field. Work your ass off, get good grades, apply for a fellowship or research position and get it. Find local contractors who do short-term and part-time work for large companies. Get on a team and get some experience. It really doesn't matter what you do -- make connections with people of influence in your field. Those connections will be your lifeline to meaningful positions as you advance.
How is one expected to gain that kind of experience when no one will hire you without the experience?
Because companies don't want to hire people unless they absolutely have to. HR departments are in the business of disqualifying people, not hiring people.
Most of it is due to middle management's inability to understand the concept of hiring entry-level employees and then teaching them the business so they can become valuable members of the company.
Entry-level means:
NO EXPERIENCE.
ZIP.
ZILCH.
NADA.
NULL SET.
ZERO.
NONE.
SPELL IT:
N-O-N-E.
Advertising for an entry-level employee with five years experience is an exercise in flagrant cynicism. It is part of an overall goal of making the workplace a joyless shithole.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
But then you'd take my job.
Ha, I wish - I'd welcome the help - it seems impossible to find quality unix admins who know linux well - usually we get some joker in here who plasters his resume with buzzwords, but in reality never uses anything but windows - we quickly find out he's a phony and show him the door. There are some real linux savvy folks out there, but they are hard to find among all the posers...
I got my first job with my porn site... all database driven with some decent traffic handling abilities, stored procedures, etc. I agree completely that sometimes you have to do something on your own to set yourself apart.
Charity organizations or non-profits are always in need of people but don't have the funds. Volunteer as many hours a week you can offering your computer skills for free. Many of these organizations have in house networks that need occasional work.
If you are highly recommended by one of these organizations after a year or two of volunteering, you can bet that puts you up the ladder of resumes. It doesn't mean you worked 8 hours a day every day fo the week. While not working there, work wherever you can to make ends meet.
This is very solid advice.
If you are fresh out of college but walk into your interview with a couple years of active work in open source projects, you will make a good impression.
If I have to hire a guy right out of college I would love to find one that has helped run an open source project that is in wide distribution. This way at least I know the programmer has been exposed to real life situations like scope creep, managing user expectations, quality assurance, etc.
Internships don't hurt either, my own employer has hired people that started with us as interns.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Not to mention the 3Gb worth of e-books stashed on my harddrive . Anyway , i do think Microsoft is actually happy with you pirating MSSQL for learning it . It may not be that good for buissness , but it shure beats you using open-source db's . Cause in the long run , they'll still get their money . If not from you , from your employer .
God I love doing this - mostly because it lets me be a prick from behind the thinly veiled pretense of being helpful. I'm going to critique your online resume and I'm going to be honest. Someone did it for (to) me a dozen years ago and I cried during the process, but I took their advice to heart and about a month later had a job.
:
1. Lose the picture. Getting past the first HR screening means letting them be able to prove lack of prejudice, so being a 'while male in his early 20's', while putting you in the 'good' bucket, means that HR can't say that they picked your resume on its merits without regard to race, color, creed, age, or sex. If they know, what are the odds they skip over you because they couldn't show lack of preferential treatment?
2. Double ditto on the horse picture. How do you know that the interviewer isn't a big Christopher Reeve fan?
3. Lose the personal stats, Title (Mr.), Date of Birth, and Marital Status. If the reason isn't blatantly obvious, see #1 above.
4. The personal stuff at the bottom, specifically the bit about being an avid four-wheeler and gun freak wouldn't go over too well in the People's Democratic Republic of California or the Communist Federation Commonwealth of Massachusetts (where Boston is.) I'm a bigger gun freak than you are, but I don't admit it on my resume or during an interview.
The good stuff
MCSE, CCNA, CCDA, and BS/CS (cum laude, in three years - good job.) Oh wait, that's not a degree in software engineering, it's a degree in multimedia on the computer (also known as Flash / Macromedia.) Hmm. That one could go either way, depending on how well you interview. If you were seeking a spot in America I would drop the classes / certs on equine behavior and being a certified murderer (that's how some people view firearms in the two states that hire the most tech guys, CA and MA - but in Texas that might be ok.)
Last thing - if you are going to post your resume, do it on a domain that doesn't have anything else on it. Nothing like finding a resume in www.yourdomain.com/resume and when the HR folks go up a level and find a blog talking about sex with a different college chick every night. Your main page is pretty tame, but I didn't probe too deep.
That wasn't too harsh - but not for lack of trying. Good luck on the hunt.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
The key is once you get into these roles work yourself out of them and into better positions. If you try to whine, complain, or brag yourself out of them it won't work.
It's also important these be small companies or small departments -- large companies usually don't care if Junior Support Technician #2679 is performing in the 98th percentile this week.