You're wasting effort with this. It feels good to write. It feels good to hear when you're in that situation. It doesn't help you. It's not about money, it's about positive indicators. An Ivy League school is a positive indicator, starting a company is a positive indicator. Kicking Ass on your own personal or side projects is a positive indicator. Open Source contributions are a positive indicator. Previous work experience that you can explain well and brag about is a positive indicator. Build your positive indicators, and don't complain about others building theirs.
Some people have to work harder than others to get the same recognition or success. Don't measure against them, measure against you. Be better than you were the day before, don't pretend that it's about having money "laying around".
I came here to say that, but you said it better than I might have.
I would like to add that his/her post reeked of rationalization fueled by insecurity.
In real life, there are sometimes reasons we fail that are beyond our control. There are always excuses for failure that have some truth in them. There are always ways that we can look at the successful as lucky SOBs and the unsuccessful as victims of cruel fate.
While it's interesting to contemplate the roles of skill and luck in success on a Sunday afternoon -- I've never met a really successful person who didn't have a positive outlook on her ability to mold her opportunities, to watch for chances to make a move, and to sieze those moments that were right and ride them to success.
To glorify happenstance (the particular school you can afford to go to) and self-victimhood is a self-fulfilling prophecy and guaranteed way to minimize your own chances of ever being successful at anything.
Are we our knowledge and experiences? Are we our genetic potential? Are we our upbringing? Are we just products of random chance and our environment? The more I learn in life, the more I become convinced that we are our ATTITUDE. Attitude is the prime factor in success or failure. It is the leading indicator to me when I go to hire someone or decide whether or not I want to work with him.
I don't care what school you went to -- if success is your goal, then start with attitude. Adopt one that drives you to focus on yourself and your own improvement every day of your life. Good things will follow.
Attitude itself though is something that is molded by life experiences. It's very easy to say "Just adopt a positive attitude!" but this is something that is difficult to really do when you perceive the penalty of failure to be high and the odds of success to be low.
As an example of this, in the UK they have tried to combat unemployment by sending people on courses where they try to re-enforce a "you can do anything you want if you try hard enough" philosophy. This seems disingenuous however since you have to think about the person giving the message and ask whether their life ambition was really trying to herd unemployed people.
It's very easy to say "Just adopt a positive attitude!" but this is something that is difficult to really do when you perceive the penalty of failure to be high and the odds of success to be low.
I never said it was easy. It's very difficult, partly because it's hard to accomplish, partly because it's esoteric and hard to even understand for many people. If you have a bad attitude, then it's hard to appreciate the importance of even trying to have a good attitude.
This seems disingenuous however since you have to think about the person giving the message and ask whether their life ambition was really trying to herd unemployed people.
That kind of cynicism is a trap that keeps people from breaking free of their own attitude-based limitations. Maybe the message givers just want to help people and they're performing an extraordinarily important service? Maybe the job they're doing is just a step along the way to other ambitions and heights in their careers?
It's good to focus on what you can do. But that doesn't mean that your life circumstances aren't largely determined by factors beyond your control. That just boils down to social darwinism - anyone who is doing well obviously just worked harder. This just isn't true.
If you are sailing in high winds, all you can do is try to compensate for them. Sinking isn't an option. But neither is it an option to pretend that there aren't any winds applying to you. Only people who have no experience of winds will assume that people are only at risk because they are grossly negligent or lazy or stupid.
Huh. Impressive how much of my personality comes across that way. You're right, on pretty much everything. I am insecure, though I've never understood the difference between rationalization and circumstance. When you're betting more or less your future on you being excellent in your given field, that can really do a number on your self confidence.
Nevertheless, I appreciate the critique. Besides the list of projects I'm working on and my job, any advice for how to improve?
Rationalization = excusing your lack of success based on factors beyond your control, circumstance = accepting the factors beyond your control and playing the hell out of the factors that are in your control.
It's too bad that Marc Andreesen took his career advice blog post off the Internet, because he had some of the best advice I've seen. It was:
1. Build skills & relationships.
2. Take advantage of opportunities
Basically, all of the big leaps in your career will happen because some random big opportunity outside of your control will open up. When it does, jump on it. Immediately. Drop everything you're doing for it. Most people don't, and that is why most people slave away their lives in cubicles.
But to seize that opportunity, you need to be qualified, and you need to hear about it. So all the time that you're not actively seizing an opportunity, you should be building your skill base and getting to know other people. That's the important part: opportunities happen to everybody, but the vast majority of people aren't in a position to take advantage of them.
> I've never understood the difference between rationalization and circumstance.
Let's start there. Circumstance is a fact, rationalization is a story you tell yourself. Of course there is all types of rationalization and all types of stories. In this case though, your circumstance and your personal narrative are combining with a pessimistic quality. Pessimism is not always bad, it may be a good hedge against disappointment.
In this case you are taking it too far though. You could just as easily be telling yourself a positive story about your ability to execute on side projects while holding down a day job, or the fact that you are young and have low expenses, or that you are fortunate enough to be passionate about one of the few careers that's not shrinking these days, or even the fact that you won the birth lottery. It actually doesn't matter what you tell yourself though, as long as it helps maximize your potential. You could be the richest white kid in Beverly Hills or the poorest peasant in China, your attitude is the greatest thing you can control that can affect your circumstance. That doesn't mean the rich kid has much chance of being a billionaire or the peasant can reasonably hope to make $50k/year, but within their respective circumstances, attitude and action can make a world of difference.
"It feels good to write. It feels good to hear when you're in that situation. It doesn't help you."
I feel that there are many contrary-to-conventional-wisdom articles that can be characterized like this. All too often they get traction, especially on HN, despite their obliviousness of how reality even works. Kudos for a good critique of this story's tone and framing.
Beggars can't be choosers and the world is not just. So what is there to say about it?
If you were in demand and had a network of supporters, you could say all kinds of ridiculous things and get public applause. If you were hiring for a promising company with ample resources, you could take on more of a superior tone. And there would be others forced to tolerate it.
But you are in need. So even if you weren't insecure, you don't have the position to seem big. Therefore, you are a nice target: you take a beating on HN for being negative, and get to hear that you should pull yourself up by the bootstraps, etc. (things which people in a stronger bargaining position don't hear).
If you were not in such a poor position, people would be more inclined to kiss up to you and approve of what you said, even if it were basically stupid.
Larry Summers was recently quoted as saying that the best indicator of future success is not the school you graduated from but the best school you were accepted by.
I have every intention of doing just that, when it comes to both improving myself and those positive indicators. Perhaps my frustration stems from that work seeming worthless when compared to an Ivy League degree.
Would you say I'm wrong that not all positive indicators are created equal?
Truth be told, an Ivy League degree would not get you much by itself. There are a number of schools just as good as the Ivy League, and similar brand recognition in particular fields for schools that otherwise aren't highly regarded or well-known.
The Ivy League degree primarily buys you an opportunity to network with the powerful, get interesting internships and so forth. Not everyone does much with this. Those who don't might get +5 points or something but it's not a night and day difference.
(Except if you are looking at a specific school-to-company nexus like Stanford has with certain companies)
Those goods are not impossible to get from schools with somewhat less standing.
The problem is that in school, nobody is very aggressively counseling and seeking the interest of students who do not know what to do and might not even be aware there is anything they would have to do.
So the slack has to be taken up after you leave school in various ways and it can just be hard. One of the things you have to do is pretend to be happy with the status quo, not look negative and make people feel smart and awesome if they have something to hold over you.
No all positive indicators are not created equal and the which school did you go to is one of the smaller ones
- certainly for undergraduates. Good schools deliver three things
1. Higher self confidence than average. This is oftenentitlement not talent
2. Good networking - yes but these days so does LinkedIn
3. Better teaching. Top universities do shine here. But that is the point. And really at undergraduate level it barely matters.
In short, stop worrying about the college you are going to / went to. Feeling you missed out? Read SICP
but if you really want one piece of right now advice here it is - choose one, just one of those ideas you have. And find evenings, lunch hours weekends and get that one idea out the door. Just do it. Then post to Show HN
everything else follows from getting something out the door
Not all positive indicators are created equal. It's totally true. An Ivy league degree is recognizably hard, and it's an easy quantifier, if . If your work is equally hard, you need to figure out a way to show that. You may also have to work harder to find connections in small tight circles that are slightly more immediate if you went to an Ivy League school (that's part of what you're paying for to be totally frank). You can lament it privately, or you can keep learning and keep kicking ass. You could do great through your undergrad and get an Ivy-class education for post-graduate work if you really wanted. Do good work. Show it off to people that would be interested in it. If the people that you think you want to be around aren't interested in the work you're doing, you've got the wrong people, or your work isn't really that good. Figure out which it is, that isn't always easy.
I wrote one of these articles in 2009. Looking back it was stupid. I live in Palo Alto now. I'm working for another startup and learning very different things than I learned by starting a startup, or running a consultancy. I'm also better connected here. Try to take your assumptions and turn them totally on their head "what if pg is 100% correct about 'why to be in a startup hub'?" and try to prove to yourself that he is. It's good practice for all critical thinking.
I don't know what you work on. It's probably not worthless compared to an ivy league degree, but it depends what you want, and why you're comparing them. Learn to do the things that will get you what you want, and learn how to present those to other people, and you'll (hopefully) quit feeling like others got where they were just because they had more cash, you don't buy a degree in CS from Brown, you earn one.
I don't know where you are, or what you're working on, but feel free to reach out, I'm happy to have a conversation about it, in person or online.
1) Yield is a big issue. At larger companies, they track how many people they get from different universities, how long they last, how far they go, etc. Most recruiting efforts are then focused on the few schools that give the most graduates that are the best fit for the company. And yes, there are all sorts of long-term issues with this.
Speaking as a former hiring manger, it was just a lot of work to go some of the other schools (especially some of the large state schools with non-top-tier CS programs) because even though we would find 1-2 candidate, we would have to filter through a huge number of candidates to do so. For those schools, we generally relied on personal recommendations from faculty to recent alumni.
2) I went to and am now a PhD student at a very expensive private university. Many of the students, like myself, are middle class, getting very little aid (other than merit) while their parents are forced to share the living-on-ramen experience during college. But, those huge loans (I think I had somewhere between 60-80k when I graduated many years ago) are quickly paid off if you continue living on little money working for a top firm. Most of my peers' loans were all paid off in the first 2-3 years of working. It's a huge worry, but in practice turns out not to be a big deal for CS majors from top schools.
Certainly, it drives many job decisions, though. A low-pay startup job was not in the cards while I had all that debt hanging over my head, and I assume that's true for other middle class folks.
I think it's also worth mentioning that financial aid at most Ivy League schools ar incredible. Look at Princeton - the goal of their financial aid office is to make sure that everyone who needs financial aid (middle class or not), get financial aid. It's very common that graduates come out of school without any debt at all.
I also know from having worked at Harvard that most Harvard students these days graduate with little or no debt due to a generous financial aid system there.
I wish it had been like that when I went to MIT. (MIT did have plenty of financial aid, but not to the no-debt level.)
I understand the yield idea. You're 100% right, and I believe I acknowledged it somewhere in there. Since you're a former hiring manager, any advice on how to get around that impediment, beyond just submitting a resume and waiting?
Use your faculty and alumni network. In particular, scan the alumni network for people who work at a company where you want to work and contact them --- even if they're not in your role. Take advantage of the fact that most people are quite nostalgic for their college days. Almost all of them will be delighted to help you get your resume into a hiring manager's hands.
And some of your faculty should have contacts. If you ask early enough (e.g. at the start of the school year instead of middle/end), particularly from a faculty member that you've done some work for, they may be able to help you get in touch with someone. But the alumni are usually a better bet unless you have faculty who came from industry originally.
Both career services and blind job submission will have much lower acceptance rates. At least where I was, all resumes submitted through those mechanisms went into a sort of recruiting purgatory where they had to make it through non-technical screeners before I could even get a look at them.
The myth of a top-notch education costing six-figures is getting a little old. The price tag is over $200k. The actual cost is under $50k, with the price dropping as you go to school with bigger endowments/better financial aid. Many schools graduate students with less than $20k in debt. At current rates, students pay about $100-200 a month to pay off these loans on time. Just some facts.
I came from a upper-middle class family. We were wealthy enough that qualifying for financial aid at an ivy was basically impossible. We were poor enough (with 3 of us in college at once) that it wasn't possible.
This was particularly problematic because my dad (a military doctor) had only been out of the military for a couple of years. Meaning the salary he we were being pegged at for financial aid was something he had only been earning for 2 years or so. He mad significantly less in the military.
Point being: For some folks, in some situations.. the cost is well beyond reach.
I don't know when you graduated, but a few of the very top schools with huge endowments (e.g., Harvard) have started expanding the range of their financial aid program to cover more middle-class families, like (it sounds) yours. This is a pretty new phenomena though, in the past ~5 years.
The Ivys and liberal arts places I know take multiple children going to school at the same time well into account. I'm sorry for the trouble, but I'm not sure if you didn't look into it, or if you are talking about a situation well into the past. That's just not the case anymore.
EDIT: Hell, look at the comment below; the net price calculator (http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/) even has a drop-down for number of children in college.
The issue with CMU is that, essentially, they don't have much money. Their endowment is much smaller than most of the schools they compete with. In terms of the "top" CS schools, they're probably a bit of an outlier.
That's one of the reasons I ended up not going to CMU. Well, that and the fact that I didn't want to trade the Bay Area for Pittsburgh :P.
Yep, Ivy league undergrad here. I came from a lower middle class family, total cost of year about 45K with my family expected to pay about 10K per annum for the four years of college, with an additional 4.5K debt/year on top of that. Took me about 7 years after college to pay off my 18K in debt (I also locked in my interest rates at under 4%) -- I think that was a 137 dollar payment a month if I paid it off at the minimum rate.
I was in the same situation as an undergrad at an Ivy. It has only improved since then. A student starting at an Ivy today with a similar family situation will graduate owing nothing.
Harvard has a neat little "Net Price Calculator" which shows pretty clearly that middle class families can get quite a lot of aid: http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/
Harvard has substantially revamped its financial aid in recent years. Families with income below $60k pay no tuition. Even going as high as $150k-$180k, the expected family contribution is lowered to about 10% of income.
Yeah, came in here to post this. Yale is basically free for someone whose family makes the median household income in the US. Financial aid doesn't phase out until well over $250k household income.
Oh. Sure the rich and beautiful have it easier, but what does that have to do with you? You say you want to pursue your own ideas? Great - Then do that. What's the worst that could happen anyway? A bit of debt perhaps? A slightly less flashy car? Fewer money come time to retirement? It's not like you and your family would die from starvation if you fail - Unlike most of the rest of the world. You're already uniquely privileged.
Strange that a technically capable engineering student would be at UGA when GeorgiaTech is of similar cost (and both free to Georgia residents who maintain a 3.0 though the HOPE scholarship). Not saying that you won't find good people at UGA (biting my GT tongue!), but following his rationale and years of work experience in Atlanta (showing Georgia residency), his story seems a little thin.
Even more so when his examples of work turn up 404's, 403's, placeholders, and ads for premium versions of the wordpress theme he used. Not every rockstar went to Julliard, but they were good at what they did.
"Strange that a technically capable engineering student would be at UGA when GeorgiaTech is of similar cost (and both free to Georgia residents who maintain a 3.0 though the HOPE scholarship)."
UGA has a combined bachelors & masters program that I wanted to do, and I knew the security professor and adviser going in who have both been very supportive to me, while Tech's staff were absolutely horrendous.
"Even more so when his examples of work turn up 404's, 403's, placeholders"
I put the cart before the horse, so to speak. I made the links and banners & such as I was working on the projects, and then my circumstances changed and I had to find a job. I mentioned this in the post. Would you like me to send you some of my completed work?
"ads for premium versions of the wordpress theme he used"
Where were those? I'd love to go kill those links.
You chose UGA (a quiet state school) over GT (a world class research university) because GT was too abrasive and you know a friendly prof at UGA? To me, this undermines your position more than anything else. You have set yourself up to get by without learning or trying too hard. If true, you are only arguing against the Ivy League bias because you are on the losing side of it, not because it is misguided.
Where were those? I'd love to go kill those links.
Seriously? man grep and "to hell with (the University of) Georgia!"
This; I hope the OP reads this comment and understands it because there's a load of truth in those first two sentences.
If you legitimately could have gone to a better school than UGA and chose not to; you've given up your right to bitch about it. The opportunity to get that so-called leg up that you're so upset about others having and you passed on that opportunity.
FWIW, one of the great hallmarks of the real "rockstar" people is that they know how to capitalize on opportunities presented to them.
And to ynniv: you forgot "University[sic] of Georgia."
That, they have a fast track Bachelor's\Master's combined degree, and I was originally a Poli Sci double major when I got here.
Computer science and Poly Sci double major? Are you serious?! Perhaps my original comment that UGA < GT came off condescending, but honestly it could have been a lot more. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt.
But, you came to HN to talk about there are capable people who didn't go to Ivy League schools. And I agree with that. Given my experience thus far, I would go even farther and say that an Ivy League education makes you a worse engineer, but that's getting off topic.
So let's get down to how people really become rockstars: they are obsessively dedicated to being musicians because they don't know what else to do in life. Folks who went to GT to learn Computer Science were already at a disadvantage, because of those of us who had been doing this for a decade already. I graduated years ago, but I don't feel that I've ever stopped learning how to be better at what I do. I'm not saying that I'm a "rockstar", but when I look at people to work with (ie, hire), that's the kind of drive that I'm looking for.
I appreciate your condescension, thanks.
Any time, and there's plenty more where that came from.
But don't take it personally. I don't dislike you - I dislike what you're doing. If you want to do this for a living, then show us by working harder at it. Get rid of anything that isn't complete on your website. Don't be so lofty in your opinions, just do good work and keep doing it. You'll find more opportunities than you need.
Computer science and Poly Sci double major? Are you serious?!
Yeah? Does that say something I'm not aware of?
Get rid of anything that isn't complete on your website.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to just finish the projects?
So let's get down to how people really become rockstars: they are obsessively dedicated to being musicians because they don't know what else to do in life. Folks who went to GT to learn Computer Science were already at a disadvantage, because of those of us who had been doing this for a decade already.
Perhaps I'm not obsessive on the level of Kurt Cobain, but I'll have been doing this for a decade before I graduate. How would I go about better communicating that drive?
> "Wouldn't it be a better idea to just finish the projects?"
You can do both. Fix broken links, make your existing website complete. Then finish your projects and add them as you finish them.
Presentation is everything. You are living in a world with literally millions of engineers, and without knowing you personally, how you present yourself is the only indications we have of your competence.
And broken links does not speak well to that presentation.
If you want to be taken as a professional, you need to project professional.
Poly Sci doesn't strike me as the kind of person interested in getting their hands dirty. Chalk my reaction up to people I have met who are more interested in taking credit than doing work.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to just finish the projects?
Sure, but until they're worth talking about you're better off not talking about them.
I'll have been doing this for a decade before I graduate. How would I go about better communicating that drive?
My point was to convey how dedicated good people are, not to say that time connotes skill. The way to be a poet is to poeticize. I had a random stroke of awesome just after school from creating a python script that exported 3d objects from Blender into Google Earth. Someone in Boulder saw it and offered me the kind of startup role that I had wanted since high school.
The startup didn't pan out, but the idea that doing good work creates opportunities did. In fact, a bunch of my co-workers went on to create some very successful iPhone games that you've probably heard of. Find something that you are interested in and do it, even if you don't think that you can. Especially if you don't think that you can. Even if you fail, you'll have learned something and possibly created part of the solution in the process. Put that on your blog, and see where it takes you.
I'm not in the business of giving people jobs. If I was, being enough of an asshole to denigrate people for having different academic interests at age 18 would be more of a red flag to me than simply having different academic interests at age 18. Maybe that's why I'm not in the business of giving people jobs.
Good ol' Tech... IMO it's a terribly outdated approach, but there's a ton of "I got through it, so everyone else should have to deal with it too" momentum there.
I went there as an out-of-state student and wouldn't recommend it for other out-of-staters. There are quite a few other good public engineering schools.
Another GT alumni here; I totally get the "I got through it..." mentality of the above. However, Georgia Tech is generally seen as one of the absolute best values (especially for in-state students) available in Engineering schools. Even without the HOPE scholarship (which I lost after 3 semesters due to too much partying and never having learned to actually study after breezing through high school) it was insanely cheap when considering the quality of the programs and stature of the school.
I'm not sure what the costs are for out-of-state; so, the value proposition may not be there in that case.
A decade ago they were ~ $20k/year, which was below average at the time. http://colleges.findthebest.com/ says that it is $27k now, on par with other public schools and $13k less than "elite" schools. As I've been unimpressed with Comp Sci grads from more expensive schools, I recommend Tech to anyone who is primarily interested in a career developing software.
It may be hard to see it now, but the school you went to will be much less important in a few years. An Ivy League education surely gives you a leg up right out of college, but after that, it is all about the quality of work you do.
I went to UGA and had a friend who was a Comp Sci graduate, and he was a rockstar before he ever graduated because he had a large body of open source work, beating out Ivy Leaguers for desirable jobs at big companies. If anything, going to UGA was an advantage for him because the course load wasn't as demanding as a tougher school, leaving him time to focus on actually building things.
Seriously, it doesn't matter as much as you think.
Tech was ridiculously cheap as an in-state student in the late 80s. Pretty much everyone graduated with no debt even then.
MIT was $16,000 a year when I looked at it at the time, I believe. I'm having a hard time remembering the details of their financial aid, but they had some need-based assistance on a sliding scale. You'd end up owing several $10s of thousands, which everyone said you'd "easily" pay off once you got a job out of there, which is likely mostly true. Still, it was an intimidating amount to a lower-middle class kid. It's telling I didn't go there and still have the cost fixed in my head.
My high school counselors/teachers were sort of limited in their knowledge of the upper end of the scale. MIT was all I ever heard about in terms of out-of-state tech schools. All the rich kids went Ivy League, and all the other smart kids went to GT. The Naval Academy had a special aura for a few. A couple people in my class went to Harvard, but no one ever talked about it in terms of a technical education.
No one from my high school went to a school in California. I was aware of Caltech, not that I could have found Pasadena on a map. I knew the name Stanford, but only because of its physics department, and literally did not know what state it was in.
I've made sure my teenage niece is at least aware of what the top schools are.
Cheap, no holds barred, technical education is an invaluable resource! Without splitting hairs, an engineering degree has the lowest unemployment[1], and GT has the highest ROI[2].
Yes, getting out of the resume pile is harder without a name brand college degree but you shouldn't be going in the resume pile in the first place. Make connections, build your network, get referrals. Once you actually make it to the on-site interview, your performance in the interview will trump almost all else.
The resume pile is where good ideas go to die. Faced with the fact that resumes are 99% useless, hiring managers latch on to things that are cozy and familiar, keywords, GPAs, brand-name school. This sucks, but don't let others' mistakes keep you from demonstrating your potential.
There is no doubt that if someone's parents had the means to give them a computer, and that grade school student or high school students was able to start practicing the craft of programming early, they will have a huge leg up on someone who didn't have that opportunity. For better or worse, that's the world that we live in. Accept it, and move on.
OK, you weren't someone who had the opportunity to learn Cisco IOS at an early age, and was configuring core Internet backbone routers as a job and wearing a pager in high school, before you started at MIT as a freshman. OK, you're not someone who contributed so much to the Linux kernel in high school that you were invited to the annual Kernel Summit, which brings together the top 75 or so linux kernel developers, the summer before you started at MIT. These are two real people that I know. There's nothing I can do to change society to make things "fair"; and there's nothing you can do about either. So stop whining about it.
I've looked at LockeWatts's resume, and the problem as someone who has been a hiring manager, is there's absolutely no signal in his resume that he would actually be a someone who could "compete with the best of them". He's made that assertion, but lots of people have made that assertion. And while he might be really bright, unfortunately, I've met many people who claimed to be super bright, but then when I asked them to code up a simple function on the whiteboard, they couldn't do something incredibly basic.
Furthermore, although it will no doubt be painful for him to hear this, I very much doubt he is a rockstar. He might have the potential to be a rockstar, but takes a huge amount of practice to get there. It is rare, and no doubt requires privilege, for someone to have that status right out of college, or in the cases I detailed above, before they even started college.
The good news is that this is something that time and experience, and a lot of determination on Colin's part, can fix. You can't change your family circumstances; but you can control how much time you spend honing your art and your craft. Sure, you need to focus on bringing home your biweekly paycheck. But you can control whether you go to movies, or go out drinking with your buddies, or whether you spend that working on open source projects, or learning new computer languages, or taking time to read self-help books to do what Stevey Covey called "Sharpening the Saw" (cf 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).
Maybe it will take you an extra 2 or 3 or even 5 years. But you can give yourself rockstar-like skills and experience, if you are willing to make the appropriate choices and sacrifices.
I'm not sure the article is intended to be targeted towards people who want an excuse to blame for their lack of success. I guess it is aimed at employers to try and make them consider context and circumstances when viewing somebody's job application.
The problem with saying "Life is unfair. Deal with it." is that this argument could be used to justify many things that we regard as outright wrong. Born into slavery? Can't get a job because of your skin colour? Wrongly accused of a crime? "Life is unfair. Deal with it."
At some stage somebody has to say "life is unfair, how can I make it a little fairer?" or the problem will simply become self fulfilling.
Why should an employer consider context and circumstances? They want to hire a best programmer they can for the money available to them. A sob story about how someone hasn't had the luck to get the experience to achieve rockstar status before they graduated as an undergraduate doesn't change the fact that if I'm a founder of the startup, or a hiring manager I am trying to optimize the chances of success of my startup or my team. I'm not a social services agency.
Because if your startup is just another way for people to share pictures of cats, you can get things done perfectly well with a strong candidate from a state school instead of wasting months of time and thousands of dollars per month of burn rate on Stanford and MIT graduates.
I would guess the pragmatic answer would be that you could discard good candidates because of such reasons. However it may well be that there are enough good programmers who do meet your criteria that it is a benefit (in terms of time) to just ignore those that don't.
There is a broader issue though. If certain trends in hiring (that may be partly perpetrated by HN and the blogosphere) are preventing good people from getting jobs (to what extent this is true is up for debate) then what can be done by either individuals or society at large to somewhat reverse that?
Tech has always been proud to call itself a relative meritocracy compared to other more mature industries. As it matures how would we prevent the industry falling down similar pitfalls?
> "Why should an employer consider context and circumstances?"
Because we aspire to live in a world where we're not always entirely self-serving. Because a world where we operate strictly based on a hard cost/benefit ratio is really unpleasant.
> "I'm not a social services agency."
Neither am I, yet I still find ways to do a little bit of good in the world. The idea isn't "stop hiring from top schools", it's "take a look at people outside the top schools and give them a chance to prove themselves".
The articles you quoted about people being courted, as opposed to needing to find a job, apply to very few college Juniors. It doesn't matter whether you're at an Ivy League school or somewhat lower tier school.
You're going to have a much harder time getting hired at a startup, mainly because a founder can't afford to take any risks. And an unknown quantity (which is what most college Juniors are) is a risk, by definition. An Ivy League degree might make a difference, but at a startup, you're going to want to optimize for the very best people you can find, and that's in general going to be people with a lot of experience (not just in technical matters, which is why being interested in learning about business and legal issues on the side is no bad thing).
Also, while I wasn't at Google during the period when it was growing at an astonishingly fast rate, the stories that I hard was that they were taking busloads of candidates from schools such as Stanford (literally; they would bring them in buses for interviews in an essentially production-line fashion). I talked to someone who told me how hard it was interview a half-dozen people in one day, and then having to keep track of it all to write up the interview reports.
For companies going through a huge growth spurt, they are going to inevitably take some shortcuts to maximize yield, and lower the burden on an insufficiently staffed HR and interview-qualified engineers to do the bulk hiring. And stories about the hiring practices of companies who are going through that growth spurt might not be accurate when the companies' growth rate has slowed, and they can afford to be a bit more deliberate about their hiring process.
I've heard a large number of wildly inaccurate (at least from my perspective, only having worked at Google for 2.5 years) stories about how hiring works at Google, and I sometimes wonder if they are stories that reflected an era from a previous stage in Google's evolution as a company, and yet, because they are great stories, they keep on getting retold, even if in the end they are actually harmful for people who believe they are still true.
"I've looked at LockeWatts's resume, and the problem as someone who has been a hiring manager, is there's absolutely no signal in his resume that he would actually be a someone who could "compete with the best of them". "
It might surprise you to hear I'm happy to hear that. Tell me what it's lacking, I want to improve it.
"but then when I asked them to code up a simple function on the whiteboard, they couldn't do something incredibly basic."
What's your metric of incredibly basic?
"Furthermore, although it will no doubt be painful for him to hear this, I very much doubt he is a rockstar. He might have the potential to be a rockstar, but takes a huge amount of practice to get there. It is rare, and no doubt requires privilege, for someone to have that status right out of college, or in the cases I detailed above, before they even started college."
Okay. That doesn't really hurt, because I'm not asking for someone to just blindly accept that I'm amazing because I wrote a blog post. I want the opportunity to prove that I'm capable, that doesn't happen if you don't pay attention to my school.
"Maybe it will take you an extra 2 or 3 or even 5 years. But you can give yourself rockstar-like skills and experience, if you are willing to make the appropriate choices and sacrifices."
Besides working on my personal projects, working, getting an education, what else is on that list? Just more of the above? I ask that honestly, I want to know what you think will help.
"Tell me what it's lacking, I want to improve it."
What's missing is experience, or at least evidence of experience. That's OK; it's not your fault. There are design decisions I made in my first major large-scale programming project (and by major I mean requiring more than 10 person-years of effort) that I regret to this day. This is after graduating from MIT with a bachelor's degree and straight-A grades, including several graduate-level classes, and after working as a systems programmer part time during the school year, and full-time during the summer months for three years. I made mistakes which required the experience which only time and exposure could bring me, and I didn't have the opportunity to do large-scale systems work before I my college or high school career. (That's OK, most of us didn't; it's only the few lucky people who have.)
But that experience is necessary to be a "rockstar" who doesn't need to go look for a job, and who is courted. Very few people fall into that category right out of college, and when you say that you can compete with them, that's either arrogance or ignorance which is speaking.
So any job that you get is going to be an entry-level one. That's fine. We all have to start at the bottom at some point; it's only the incredibly lucky who are able to do this before or during the college years.
This brings me to the other thing I really want to say. In order to rise to the top of the heap, you need both opportunity (aka luck) as well as hard work. For some, the luck comes as an accident of birth; for others, it comes later in life. For me, the fact that I happened to be in the right place at the right time so I could become the first North American Linux Kernel Developer was definitely luck. But the fact that I was willing to pour all of my free time for several years into Linux was a vast amount of hard work was necessary or that opportunity would have completely passed me by.
The fact that I was able to get into MIT, and my parents were able to extend loans to me so I could attend, was certainly a matter of privilege. But the straight-A's came from averaging 4-5 hours a sleep a night, and going everything I could to learn everything I could, and work on as much as I could, during that time. The effort did come with some sacrifices; both socially, and from a health perspective (I became horribly obese due to the lack of sleep, lack of exercise, and vast amounts of non-diet Coke which I drank while honing my craft during all available free hours). I can't say that I would necessarily recommend the choices that I made to everyone. If you aren't sufficiently passionate about honing a piece of code to perfection, you're not going to stay up until 2am making that happen; and you won't be happy doing what you did after ten or twenty years. I'm fairly content with the choices that I made, even though they did come with drawbacks. (It's only now, 20+ years later, that I'm finally losing the weight so that shortly, I will no longer be obese, but merely overweight.)
So before you say that you want to be a rockstar, make sure you understand what the costs might be. If that really is your passion, then work really hard, so that when the opportunity comes your way, you can recognize it and take advantage of it. The fact that your opportunity didn't come as an accident of birth is just bad luck; but you never know when your incredibly great stroke of good luck will come your way, and the question is whether your skills will be ready to take full advantage of it when it does.
(I will note by the way, that my passions didn't extend to just technology; I also spent time listening to management and self-development books on tape when I commuted to work --- and I took advantage of a benefit from working at MIT as a staff member at the time to take a class every semester or two at the MIT Sloan School, where I learned took classes on negotiation, law and technology, etc. This was also on my spare time, while I was earning much less than my peers who had gone to work at big companies in the private world, since I was working for MIT that underpaid its technology staff by a factor of two or more at the time. So I was sharing an apartment with two other people, and driving the cheapest car I could find at the time. So I was certainly privileged, and I was lucky --- but at the same time, I very much paid my dues. I never graduated from MIT expecting that I would be recognized as a rockstar straight out of college!)
Internships are much more common than they were even 10 years ago, so it is no longer true that only a few people get entry-level experience before they are done with college.
"But that experience is necessary to be a "rockstar" who doesn't need to go look for a job, and who is courted. Very few people fall into that category right out of college, and when you say that you can compete with them, that's either arrogance or ignorance which is speaking."
I didn't define rockstar that way, and I've realized I had a complete misconception how people would perceive the term.
I didn't mean that I can compete with Google's senior architects, or you, or anything of that grandiose nature. I'm positive I can't.
I meant in comparison to all other college Juniors, I think I can compete with the best of them.
You should read the Joel on Software article you referenced very carefully, specifically, the bit which says:
"Astute readers, I expect, will point out that I’m leaving out the largest group yet, the solid, competent people. They’re on the market more than the great people, but less than the incompetent, and all in all they will show up in small numbers in your 1000 resume pile, but for the most part, almost every hiring manager in Palo Alto right now with 1000 resumes on their desk has the same exact set of 970 resumes from the same minority of 970 incompetent people that are applying for every job in Palo Alto, and probably will be for life, and only 30 resumes even worth considering, of which maybe, rarely, one is a great programmer. OK, maybe not even one."
Did you see what Joel did there? He's basically admitted that rockstar programmers are present in the population that he's interested in hiring at a rate of less than 30 to 1. So don't focus on the rockstars; it was probably a mistake for you to mention it in your blog post, because the reality is, you (or anybody else) has no idea whether you have what it takes to be a "rockstar programmer". Just settle on being a solid, competent developer, and then build on it from there.
The reality is that to achieve true greatness in almost any profession, you need to be lucky (either in the genes you received in the case of atheletics) or getting the right opportunity, but you also have to work really, REALLY, hard. People don't necessarily talk enough about how the Beatles were perfectionists, and how hard they worked on their craft and on their recordings; instead it's a lot more fun to talk about being a rock star, and all of the bene's that come from being a rock star.
So I'll repeat what I said --- work hard. Make a name for yourself (and not as a whiner). Contribute to the community. Be passionate about you chose to work on, so that you think it's wonderful to spend 60+ hours of your free time working on it. If you're not passionate about your day job, then start looking ASAP to find a new working situation for which you can be passionate.
Then be patient, and watchful for your specific opportunity to come by. And grab it when it does.
I don't understand what point he's trying to make.
For one, he starts off by talking about some specific school, but very few people have ever claimed that going to some specific ivy-league school makes you a great programmer. In fact, I often see people claim the opposite, especially in startups. You could certainly write an article about Google's bad hiring practices, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this article - he pulls up two examples, and then completely moves on from that point.
Second, he misses the point of looking for people who are self-led. It's not to get people who produce good code - it's to get people to can produce good code, but can also _think for themselves_. And what better way to get people to think for themselves, than by looking for people already doing it.
Anecdotal, but I often interact with people who went to elite schools. A large number of them are convinced that the world is run by their classmates. It's sometimes tiring to hear, especially as having that kind of network does help. Of course every company wants the "best", and credentials are a shortcut to satisfying that. False positives are more of a danger than false negatives.
There are plenty of exceptions to this elitism -- I recently found out that a long-time coworker not only went to a top school but is also a tenured professor. It doesn't show. :)
This post is by an undergrad at a state school, and I gather the main purpose is to get employers interested in him, and probably to vent some frustration against the very real blindspot that many recruiters and employers have. It's not intended to be an essay for the ages.
The world is run by their classmates. That's a real problem. If you went to a middle of the road state school (in my case in the south), then you face a lot of additional challenges that my Stanford buddies do not.
I have a real win on my resume. I can point to products that I've built and things that I've done. I'm even a published author. Yet when it comes to fund-raising or trying to find a leadership role there is a definite boys-club that is difficult for me to break into. For a great many investors they see my education and the rest just doesn't matter.
It means I've had to swim faster and work far harder than these top-tier grads. Even today, more than a decade out of college, it remains an issue. I'll continue to show through my work that I'm a top-tier talent, and hopefully one day that will be enough all on its own.
tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known that when I was 18.
"tldr; It was worth every penny if you went to Stanford, I wish I had known that when I was 18."
I wish I had known that when I was 14/15 and cruising through high school, buying the feel-good talk about "paying that much for a top-name education wouldn't be worth it anyway." So instead I got a very good education (you get out of it what you put into it, after all) that actually cost more in practice than a heavily-subsidized-by-the-school Ivy one and yet comes with a lower-value degree.
I'm happy where I am, so I'm not complaining. But the system is fairly screwy.
I think his point is that you have to have money to be a rock star because even if you are amazingly good at {music,programming} you still need food and shelter before you can practice your craft.
Perhaps we're talking to different people then. It's something I regularly observe: Good programmers went to Ivy Leagues, Stanford, etc. The rest are just mediocre.
Don't worry about the Ivy League stuff, and just keep working on your projects and learning. Most of the comments here about "signalling" are true but largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Sure, if you have your sights set on a job at one specific company (say, Google) then it's probably true that you're more likely to get in with a degree from an Ivy League school. But if you just want to have a great career, work on cool stuff, do well for yourself and maybe even be an entrepreneur one day, you can do all of that without ever sniffing an Ivy League campus.
The tech industry is, despite what some people may say, still fairly meritorious. If you have talent, and you work hard, your ability will - over time - dominate the signalling effect of your degree and what-not. OK, maybe it means your first job is writing CRUD applications in the IT department for a shoe manufacturing company in Bumfuckville, GA, and not doing machine learning stuff at Google. Big deal. Take the shoe manufacturing job, keep learning on your own time (don't get married or have kids too young though, if you have high aspirations career wise), start an open-source project and/or contribute to some well known projects. Blog, write a book, do screencasts, whatever you can do to demonstrate your ability. If you are truly talented, and have indomitable spirit, you'll make your way where you want to go.
Whether or not Ivy League or other top schools charge too much is basically irrelevant; the real hard part is getting accepted in the first place. These schools get so many applications in a year, and many of the applicants are so thinly differentiated, that acceptance is virtually indistinguishable from a lottery.
Saying graduates of these schools are the best of the best misses the mark a bit. A more accurate description would be they had access to generally superior education. This is an important distinction.
I understand the frustration, and there are a lot more unfair things waiting for you out in the business world. So opt out. Invent your own job and take no shit from anybody. Get a consultancy running and freelance. It's not complicated, just a lot of work to get started. Then transition off writing code for others into your own projects. You're young, it'll be fine. It won't be as sexy as doing yc and living the life in the valley, but you could probably move down and do it there if you were hungry enough. Fuck the student loans, if you can't eat and pay them it'll just fuck up your credit till you get square. Don't be more emotionally attached to your debt than the bank is to its own.
The upshot is, yeah, if you didn't go to an ivy, you're going to have a tougher road in some capacities. Some. And mostly if you're trying to convince somebody that you're going to do something cool someday. Do something and remove all doubt, or build something so that youre the guy deciding what's good enough or not.
Sorta, but all rockstars also have in common that they all have a band, practice a lot, tour a lot and make lots of decent songs...most rockstars played in 30 seat dive bars at one point or another. The Goo Goo Dolls dwelt in obscurity for about a decade before making it big. Radiohead has a similar story.
What did they do? They plugged on, practicing, writing, throwing stuff against the wall until it stuck.
It's the same for programmers, start building a body of work, learn from every line of code you write, take on hard and high profile tasks, don't fail often, and in the end, maybe after about 10 years of hard work, you'll make it big and people will recruit you rather than you having to hunt out jobs.
Some examples:
John Carmack went to boring State School and made decentish but not well known mail order games for underpowered computers before finally making it mainstream with Wolf 3d (seriously, anybody remember Hovertank 3d? didn't think so).
Tim Sweeny went to another boring state school and made such unknown shareware gems like Jill of the Jungle and Brix before hitting it big with Unreal.
Brendan Eich hammered together JavaScript with a small Jesuit school's undergrad education and a state school's Master's and did it in 10 days, before that he spent a decade writing network and dsp code and porting GCC in obscurity.
D. Richard Hipp went to his local state school next to where he grew up and after about 20 years of banging around at a phone company and going back to school, bouncing around a bit looking for work then doing software consulting for a bit, ended up writing the most popular relational database on the planet.
and on and on....Alan Kay, Phil Katz, Ken Thompson, etc. all didn't go Ivy League, and most even went to public, state schools. But they all produced and in the end that's all anybody cares about.
The truth is, rockstars didn't "look for jobs". They didn't submit their resume to some big rockstar company and hope to get a place as a cog in some corporate Googlish wheel. If you go to Julliard, it's a lot easier to get a job in music that is more like working at Google. You can join a symphony or something that you just could not do without a deep understanding of theory and a skill set that is very similar to the other musicians you are working with. But if you think you're hot shit, take the time you spend on whining about the privileged and make something great (for rockstars this often involves whining about privilege). Rockstars didn't get permission to make their art, and none of us have to either.
The subtext here is that those without elite credentials are at some disadvantage because they don't have a convenient signaling mechanism of quality to prospective employers. Stipulated. But if you have the talent to compete, this disadvantage is merely a speedbump. In 2012 you're just a git pull away from interacting with the decision makers at your next job. It's never been easier for programmers with top talent to convey their qualities to employers. One community that has always worked this way is the community surrounding the Linux kernel. Credentials are not even mentioned. It's all about the code and people routinely get hired on that basis alone.
>I read that a NASA subcontrator wanted someone to design high-efficiency power supplies for the Space Shuttle. So I wrote up a decent design and showed up. There were maybe 20 candidates at the office, all equipped with advanced degrees. But I didn't have a degree, I had a design. They hired me on the spot and sent all the degree holders away. True story.
More of those developers who made it before the dot com boom (in the 90's) seem to have "made their luck". In general, they seem to have taken leaps of faith, or gone out of their way to pursue something of significant risk not because of expectation of disproportionate reward, but because of drive to create.
After the dot com bust, in the aughts, certainly such cases still exist, but a larger share of success stories seem to trend more cynical, arising out of an almost inwardly focused ecosystem of investors and pursuers of investment, looking to systematize the replication of success.
User adoption remains the primary driver of ultimate success, but the opportunity to have a product in front of sizable number of users seems now less about first mover advantage or technical edge, and more about correctly (whether through luck or deliberate action) leveraging finance.
"An Ivy League education is almost certainly a 6 figure sum of some kind, depending on where you go. They have need based scholarships, but if you’re in the middle class those aren’t really applicable to you, and your parents can’t afford to send you to that expensive a school"
At nearly any of the ivies, you will graduate nearly debt-free if your parents make less than $100k-$120k. $100k household income puts a family in the top 15%, which is at least "upper middle class" if not "rich" (though clearly not "super rich"). There are precisely two ways to be unable to afford to attend one of the ivies: be an international student, or have wealthy parents who are unwilling to contribute to your educational expenses. This wasn't always true, but at this point, if the parents are willing it is essentially always affordable.
I was in a startlingly similar position a few years ago- I graduated from Georgia State. I went there not because it was the best school, but because tuition was paid (HOPE scholarship) and the classes were offered at flexible times so I could work while going to school. I had to turn down an acceptance from Tech because of that.
While it hurt my career initially, I think the value of education is drastically diminished in just a few short years. By the time I was 25 what I'd accomplished professionally mattered far more than where I went to school. Sure, I was still in debt from school so starting a company is difficult, but open source contributions and side projects are a signifcant part of my "resume" and far outweigh my schooling.
Say I've been at Obvious Company for a while. Maybe a long while. LinkedIn, Github, none of these things have anything on me. I can't talk about what I've done in the last couple of years because it's all still confidential (and I'm not ratting one employer in front of a prospective - I'd like them to think I can be trusted).
How do I convince you that I'm enough of a rockstar (and I am, for reals) to get a foot in the door? I can blow your socks off in an interview by fixing your product and your business model on a whiteboard, but until we talk I'm just another pasty white guy in an ironic shirt.
You aren't going to recognize the schools I went to, or care, because I was out before you were eating solid food. I don't even have the beard and suspenders. How do I sell me to you?
Perhaps you could contact the company you want to work for via a throwaway email so that they don't see you and prejudge you as an "old guy"? If you can fix someone's product and business model on a whiteboard, you should be able to use their product, find a flaw, and send them an incisive email about it.
At the crux of this issue is the question about correlation of intelligence and ambition with wealth. I would be surprised if there was no correlation at all, on the other hand it would be interesting to see what the relationship really is but I can't think of an experiment that could be done in a way which would be both accurate and ethical (for example switching poor and rich children at birth).
This seems to be one of the arguments around keeping taxes low for the rich (or "job creators") the implicit assumption seems to be "rich people are smart, therefor they should be put in charge of money distribution".
As an example, there was somebody I grew up with who is now running a ~$1 million turnover web design company at 27.
He is sometimes invited to speak at events as a successful entrepreneur and demonstrated as an example of how hard work can pay off etc.
Unfortunately if you know the real story it is somewhat less impressive. He graduated from university with a fairly average degree and was having trouble finding employment at any job that he was interested in working at. He comes from a wealthy background however, so had little time constraints on his job search. After some time he decided to give up looking for work and establish himself as a freelance designer, his family gave him a chunk of money with which to establish himself.
For the first few years his business was not too successful and was draining capital, he was having difficulty finding clients as his portfolio of work was not really comparable to other established companies who were charging similar rates.
After a few years his family sold one of the businesses they owned which freed up a bunch of extra capital, a chunk of this they gave to him. He was able to use this money to hire some talented designers who did excellent work and won him a bunch of awards and bigger contracts, this was really the catalyst that made him successful.
Of course if the guy was a complete idiot he would have squandered even that opportunity, he was intelligent enough to run a business day-to-day but there was no way he would have managed that without such a capital injection. Would be interesting to think about how many people in his position would have failed and how many would have been successful earlier.
Actually, I've noticed that a large fraction of my favorite (rock) musicians were classically trained, at least as children. Not all of them, but enough to surprise me. Self-teaching is overrated.
As a counter to one of his points I've seen developers who are completely oblivious to money management and are always working on their own projects despite having loans and having gone to an expensive school.
I'm like you though buddy I did undergrad and just finished a Master's degree from two schools that barely crack the top 50 in CS. I chose to go the less expensive route (read: basically free) as opposed to an Ivy-League education. It's too early to tell whether it will hinder my job prospects or not.
The reason people like people who went to Ivy league schools is largely that it's a proxy for having had good parents/values. The idea that you'd have a better network or education might be partly true, but it's mostly just a justification. Once you understand this, you should be able to work around it.
Going to Ivy League schools is a proxy for having good parents/values?
I went to Amherst (not an Ivy, but a top liberal arts college). I wouldn't use it as a proxy for good parents or values at all. Hell, one of my classmates stole an ambulance, drove it around the freshman quad, and crashed it into a tree. Another embezzled $13,000 from the school newspaper. The latter had a parent who was on the board of trustees. A third was the author of this infamous breakup letter:
In my experience, the people who really had good parents & values were the ones who came from lower-class or working-class backgrounds and managed to make it into Amherst despite them. Succeeding despite adversity says a lot about your character. Succeeding because daddy's a legacy and donated a few million dollars to the school doesn't say anything other than that your parents have money.
I don't understand in any way how you get from "Ivy League" to "good values." There are some real scumbags who went through Ivy League schools. That shouldn't even be surprising or contentious.
Nothing it stopping you from writing a great article, building great software, contributing something amazing to an open source project, etc.
Your time would be better spent focusing on doing good work and sharing it. Assuming you do do good work and learn how to share effectively, the rest will come.
I can say I understand where you're coming from, and if you carry that chip on your shoulder for the rest of your life, you'll do just fine.
I want to share my personal story, since I felt the same way you did when I was in college.
Coming out of school 2 years ago, I thought I was screwed. I had a shitty GPA, I had no work experience (not even internships), and I never took on a personal programming project. While my friends were getting offers months before graduation, I was still applying to companies (and not hearing back from any of them). Finally, a small .NET web shop gave me a call, and I royally screwed up the technical questions. The interviewer, with a disappointed sigh, asked me if I had any questions for him before we end the call. This was my opening, my chance to show him that indeed I did care about his company and, ultimately, programming. Prior to the call, I had done a lot of research on the company and who their big clients are, so I told him how cool that was and then asked what was the coolest project they've worked on. Impressed, the interviewer immediately changed his tone, and it was as if the interview restarted over. I pressed on, showing him my enthusiasm not only for the company, but for programming and how I wanted to become a better engineer tomorrow than the day before. The director, listening in on the call, pretty much gave me an offer. The offer was severely under market rate, and I was on a very short leash (3 month trial), but I was so happy, I cried. I knew that the next step was to impress the shit out of them.
So starting day 1, I'd gobble up everything about the tech stack and the domain. I'd subscribe to every .NET blog I could find. I bought and read books about design pattern and enterprise architecture. I listened to programming podcasts as I drove back and forth from work, and sometimes I'd listen to it as I tried to fall asleep. I'd constantly ask questions to my senior engineers about the .NET nuances, IoC containers, and good engineering practices. I questioned why we didn't do TDD, why we didn't switch from the Web Forms to MVC framework, why we're still using LinqToSQL instead of Entity Framework.
In three months, I got a raise, and within 6 months after that, I got another raise. My director called me the "rising star" in our company. I worked my ass off not because I wanted to prove to the world that I was good, but I wanted to prove to myself that I'm not a chump programming monkey.
A year after my first job, I got an offer to work at a friend's startup in SF, despite the fact it was on a Rails stack with WAY different architecture/requirement. Again, paid under market rate because of my lack of experience. Applied the same work ethic and dedication to the job. Learned how to scale, how to design web apps top to bottom, how to architect our systems topology, and how to get shit done.
On my personal time, I decided to build a website that would help the alumni members of my college fraternity keep in touch with each other for networking and inspirational purposes. Leveraging my knowledge from my job, built the entire damn thing, from the DB schemas, to the domain logic, to even the HTML/CSS. Initially it was built on ASP.NET MVC, then rebuilt the whole thing in Rails to improve our development speed. Now, I'm asking around other student orgs to see if they'd be interested in using our website.
Now, I guess I am that rockstar programmer, even though I don't really think that. Recruiters are constantly messaging me for job openings. I just got two offers from both a big, respectable company, and from another startup. It's surreal. I never thought I'd see this day, but I still have that chip on my shoulder to constantly improve. The point I'm trying to get is that it's not about where you start but it's the journey you're willing to take to get where you want to be. Earlier, tytso commented that you have to start at the bottom with an entry-level job, and it probably won't be the glamorous FB/Google/Apple/blahblahblah job that you so want. But that doesn't matter as long as you work in a place that you can get really fired up about. In my experience, a lot of managers would hire passionate, inexperienced guys over talented yet indifferent engineers because company culture is a big deal.
So what is it that you can do to prepare yourself right now? First, network the shit out of your school. Make as many friends as you can, regardless of their majors or background. I guarantee you you'll find other people who are smarter and more motivated than you are. Surrounding yourself with ambitious or A+ kids will a) in the short term inspire you to work harder and b) in the long term, they'll become valuable assets for your career. Then start a programming project. Right. Now. In my last year of college, I built a beer pong tournament website on LAMP. It wasn't the prettiest thing, visually/architecturally, but still proud of that thing. (For fun, I'm trying to rebuild it again with backbone, Rails, and MongoDB.)
Never forget this moment of frustration. In fact, embrace it. Use it as your motivating fuel. And then go do what makes you happy.
Erm, is CMU actually cheaper than an Ivy League university? I was under the impression that they are fairly expensive and do not provide nearly as much financial aid as at least the top Ivy League schools like Harvard or Princeton.
At the very least, CMU has a far smaller endowment (an order of magnitude smaller) than most of the universities it competes with. I imagine this has a real impact on how much financial aid it can offer.
Also, no love for Berkeley? We're public and have a pretty good CS department :). Admittedly being out of state makes it rather expensive and harder to get in, but I imagine that's the same at UIUC.
Yeah, Berkeley is great, I didn't mention them since when I graduated HS (a while ago) they were harder to get into from out-of-state than some of the Ivys
For better or worse, that's still true, at least for engineering. I think the acceptance rate over all (for both in- and out-of-state students) to the EECS major is actually below 10%.
However, getting into CMU CS is also similarly difficult.
Fundamentally, as someone who went to a Public State University, I feel your pain. Let me take a look (based on my experiences of reviewing resumes)...
Analysis of your "about me" section:
Your CV is "meh". Only interesting thing is the grad school class. Your GPA isn't listed.
Resume:
If I ask you in-depth, hard questions about any language or tech on your resume, I expect an answer. If you can't give me a deep answer, I will give you negative points in my mind. You listed those techs, so you better have something to show.
WRT Technologies. I am a bit idiosyncratic: I want to know your preferred OS and whether you can handle source control. Everything else is noise. You have too much noise.
Your internship this summer details don't tell me why you're awesome. It's too generic.
Your S12 research is ambiguous. what did you find? I don't know what you can do for me.
I don't really care about your in-progress work unless you have a github. You should highlight your leadership experience in tutoring. You should highlight your Honors courses.
In summary, you are an above-average candidate compared to most CS resumes I've seen. Probably in the 80th percentile of the last batch of resumes I looked through. However, you are not a must-hire in my opinion.
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In order to get to "must hire" state in my mind, you need something like the following:
* Mastery of written communication.
* Explanation of what you have done at each position, why you uniquely made it happen, and what you can do for me and my team.
* Public code repo with a long history and a decent amount of loc in it. You've developed at least a small system (1-10KLoC) and maintained it for years. You support users of it.
* You have studied a "far out" technology - one that may never be written on the job. The more depth is shown here, the more commitment to your craft is demonstrated. At a minimum, this would be, for instance, learning Perl 6 or Haskell. At the higher end, it might be something like writing a working simulator of the CM-2.
* You have extensive internships at well-known companies. While this is limited by location and funds somewhat, it demonstrates that you can play ball with the big boys.
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Understand that you can better your marketing quickly - set up a github and upload a project, wipe out the placeholder links, rewrite your resume to better express your capabilities. But then the slog starts. You need to commit to building your craft, constantly, in a visibly demonstrable way. Some of that might be expressed via open source, or it might be expressed by a portfolio of shipped software. That's up to you. And, further - express yourself in a more careful fashion. No one wants to take the risk of hiring someone who complains life is unfair.
While I am not a hiring manager, I do assist with technical hiring. I am always happy to look at your resume (or anybody else's) and provide feedback and critique. My contact email is in my HN profile.
The flaw in your thinking here is that there's some sort of "standard" template for a resume that will highlight your excellence. A resume is a sales letter designed to show how awesome you are. Include anything and everything that makes you look good.
As an example, with the research paper, highlight why it was impactful. Saying the paper was published in one of the most prestigious journals in its field is vastly more effective than telling us what your paper was about.
Your work experience tells me what you did, but it doesn't tell me why you're awesome. As an example-my resume highlights the fact that I saved my employer millions of dollars. It only glosses over how.
So write your resume in a way that would make someone say "this guy is awesome", rather than trying to write your resume in a way that describes your life.
No idea what a "official" CV is like. I know I like to see a GPA listed for a college student.
> How can I make those more specific? In my eyes they seemed like pretty specific details to me.
What, precisely, made your internship valuable? Why should I read it as anything more than "wrote some code in C#"?
> I don't know how to compress a research paper into a two sentence resume description. Even the abstract is longer than that by an order of magnitude.
Yup. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. More exactly: What did you do in this project? What results did you produce? Did a paper come from it?
> People care about either of those??
I do. Others might not. Tutoring & leadership indicates soft skills, which are, hmm, about 50% of my job... at least. Honors indicates drive & capability beyond the usual "Got Degree, Where's A Job" attitude of the average college student.
Interviewing, IMO, is idiosyncratic. Different people look for different things.
Some people have to work harder than others to get the same recognition or success. Don't measure against them, measure against you. Be better than you were the day before, don't pretend that it's about having money "laying around".