Nestor Florez wrote:
I hear what your saying. I was withouth a job for 10 month back in 2002 and
I had a bachelor's degree and I put myself thru UCSD's Java Fastrack program
and with over 10 years of Software Engineer experience, I would not get the jobs
because I did not have the Java working experience.
<stuff snipped>
From: Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The point being: there is **way** too much emphasis placed on
experience, in my experience. I saw a job listing for Linspire help
desk that wanted a bachelor's degree in computer science!! If I had a
bachelor's degree in computer science I would *not* be manning the
phones, thank you very much.
As someone who is often on the other side of the interview desk, there
is and there isn't too much emphasis placed on experience.
The problems from my side are as follows:
1) Unless your BSCS is from a *very* top school, it doesn't tell me
much. Experience helps level that.
Reason: CS doesn't have an accreditation standard like engineering. I
can be sure that anybody who graduates from an ABET-accredited
engineering school has the basics; there is no equivalent in CS.
2) Corporate America (sadly) includes a standard suite of political
bullshit that some people cannot handle. Only experience shakes out
those who cannot cope with corporate culture.
3) I need someone who can work with others on open-ended tasks toward a
defined (often vaguely) goal. School does not tend to teach this (it is
one of my primary complaints about college). It tends to teach small,
individual working with clear, small goals.
4) In my experience, a new grad is negative effort for about 4 months if
they have no experience. This comes from dealing with legions of
cooperative engineering students. Their first term they tend to be
useless. The second term you get useful work out of them. Their third
term they often become better than some of your junior engineers.
That having been said, open-source has been a *boon* for inexperienced
people (and smart hiring managers).
1) Anyone who can afford any form of post-secondary education can get a
computer, Linux, and an internet connection and get basic familiarity.
If you want a computer job and don't have at least user level
familiarity with Linux, your resume goes in the trash. Also, if you hit
the interview and don't have at least basic familiarity with Unix (even
for a Windows position), you probably don't make it past the first
interviewer.
2) If you are applying for a programming position and your resume
crosses my desk, you had better have at least one open source project
CVS (Subversion, darcs, etc) commit entry to your name that I can verify
(and it should ideally be on your resume).
Several companies I know of demand that you send them 1000 lines of code
in the requested languange. I consider that a bit daunting for new
folks, but it's not a bad filter, either.
I choose to ask about commit logs because it actually tells me more
about the person. What project did you choose to contribute to? Why?
What kind of job did you do? Did you only choose something fun? Did
you fix something grubby and complicated. Did you file a bug report?
Did you choose to fix some really annoying bug because it got in your
way? How complicated was the fix? What did you think about their style
guidelines?
Surprisingly, someone who files a good open-source bug report scores
higher on my list than someone who writes open-source code. Someone who
files a bug report is generally willing to wade through the crap work to
get to the fun work. They also probably don't suffer from Not Invented
Here(tm) as much.
For example, if I was applying for a software position (I'm actually a
VLSI designer, so I normally apply for EE hardware positions), you can
verify that I did a major overhaul on the rpc.lockd for FreeBSD, wrote
video BIOS initialization code for MILO on Linux for Alpha, filed bug
reports against a slew of Python projects and code, and wrote the bulk
of 2 tutorials for OpenMCL on how to call external code. I can also
present 1000 lines of code in C, C++, Python, Java, or Common Lisp to
anyone who asks.
3) Almost every open-source project needs people. You can gain
experience and responsibility very quickly.
Even while hunting for a job, you can actually gain experience. You
don't have to waste 8 hours a day commuting to an actual office and
working in an office building in order to get experience. You can do
that after you have spent 8 hours searching for your job.
So, that having been said, I *do* filter on experience. However,
experience is not as hard to get as it used to be in software (don't get
me started about hardware).
Good luck with your job search.
-a
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