Re: (OT) Programmer Job Search How-to

[adrianh]

My son graduated from a good university with a degree in computer programming. He learned to usual number of real and professor invented programming languages. He has a good GPA.

Unfortunately while it'll give your son a whole bunch of useful information, degrees aren't that much help to employers when it comes to picking out recruits. I'm sure your son knows several people who graduated with him that got vaguely decent GPAs and yet everybody knows are incompetent a--holes. Unfortunately employees know this too ;-)

Don't get me wrong - degrees are great. I'm glad I did mine many moons ago. It provided me with a whole bunch of useful stuff that I still use today. It just wasn't a whole lot of use in getting me a job :-)

The university taught him to create a resume that looks like a single slide from a PowerPoint

That sounds better than many resume's that cross my desk. One page of relevant material is way more likely to catch my attention than four pages of irrelevant guff. He'll also get bonus points for knowing how to communicate well.

Are there things he can do post-graduation to make himself a better prospect?

++ for all who suggested getting some evidence that you can actually code. Whether that is through OSS work, volunteer work, internship or whatever.

Pointers in the resume to work-topic related blogs, technical mailing lists you contribute too, etc. also all win points.

The other thing is to network like buggery. Unfortunately the best time to do this is before you graduate :-) Universities are full of clever folk who go into industry.

Hopefully he'll have friends he graduated with who have got jobs. Talk to them. Offer some free work to get some experience. The two biggest things that will get you work are personal recommendations and proof of work in the "real world". He should make those his priorities.

[bioMan]

I knew things would be different for my son, which is why I asked for advice. My experience in biology was that the more education you got the better. Of course post-graduate education is more a matter of being slave labor and teaching yourself how to use the library to find relevant information. Post-graduate work also meant that you were expected to have a resume that looked like a small book to prove you were working your a** off.

Everyone's comments and advice have been most useful. I wish I had done this earlier so I could have begun preparing my son for what he needed to do while he was still in school.

Unfortunately his last big project was with a professor collaborating with a government agency to create an interface to databases and applications relevant to their needs. He was working with two other students, one of whom was the requirements expert. That person quit after a couple of weeks and the other programmer quit a little later leaving my son as the only person responsible for the project. He also had to deal with about two years of legacy code and needed to back translate the code to determine what it was doing. In other words a cluster ... The professor wasn't of much help either. So I guess he really needs to start doing some coding to prove what he can do.

Thanks again for all the advice.

Mike

[Anonymous Monk]

The other thing is to network...

I'm really glad the next word in that sentence was "like" and not "with" or "by", because that's still illegal in some of the more primitive jurisdictions these days. :-)