Hey,
Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed reading what you've done and your advice.
But you certainly spent a lot of time meeting this 50 people ! Can you measured this amount of time ?
For someone who is not on site (like me) It’s very hard to go your way. Any advice ?
I'm not sure the total number of hours spent. I spent between 20 mins and an hour and 20 with these people.
I usually said I could meet for coffee or lunch and let them pick the place. The location usually signaled to me how long the meeting would be - coffee at starbucks is the shortest and nice lunch restaurant is longest.
If you are going to be in the US for a week, you could try to fill that week with meetings. You can probably get two or three a day if you play your cards right.
If not, you can try to chat by phone. It's harder - but still doable.
BUT... because you are a technical guy (I read your website) - the process could be different for you...
I would start the same way: ask around to figure out what you really want to do - this is universal. Then, with this information, I would craft a short email (describing what you want, and your technical skills) that is easy for people to forward - and send it around.
Good luck. And reach out with any questions. Happy to help. - lrandolph (at) middlebury.edu
I understand what you want to say but you can't judge based on how much time I spent at university.
I starting learning computer programming while being in middle school, to give you an hint I successfully coded my first lines using the beginning of PHP 5.2 in 2007.
I am sorry if "I wasted your time", I didn't say that I master all this languages but I am pretty confident with most of them. I will not list all my skills and experiences but to give you a brief example:
C/C++: I wrote tens of thousands lines while writing UNIX and video games team projects.
PHP: Thousands lines for various projects, personal website, URL shortener engine, blog engine for friends...
Objective-c: During my first year internship I wrote and published 2 iOS app on the Apple Store. While I had no previous experience with such a language, this may show you that I am a quick learner.
Maybe you are too much used to regular student taking standard classes at university, but my university is way different from any classical university. It is a software engineering school. With its unique pedagogical approach, we (students) have dozens of projects (about 60 technical projects just for the 2 first years). This is a type of participatory learning that allows us to unleash our creativity through project-based learning. It's an atypical university, instead of regular lectures we have technical/practical projects to work on, all along the years to learn by ourselves.
A few links to your projects would be very helpful here - are any of your projects opensource? Can you put some of your personal projects on Github? You said you published two iOS apps - could you post the links?
____________________________
A few notes on your CV:
1) "Personal portefolio" - it's "portfolio" in English.
2) I wouldn't list McD job there.
3) "conception and realization" - "planning and implementation" sound a bit better to me.
All right, this calls for an interleaved response.
> you can't judge based on how much time I spent at university
I was judging based on your age, assuming you're an average-aged student. You're right that if you were a career developer who went back to school then I would be out of line. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.
> I starting learning computer programming while being in middle school
You, me, and half of the other CS students with whom I attended college. Unless you're a Peter Deutsch-class wunderkind it probably doesn't make much of a difference. When I look at some of the horrifying trial-and-error code (https://gist.github.com/briangordon/8569048) I wrote back then, it's hard to imagine how that experience helped me the slightest bit- and I've heard other people say the exact same thing. I too wrote a lot of PHP 5(.0) and did some basic CRUD stuff with MySQL - and made some cool things happen - but realistically I don't think that experience would be much of an advantage if I were to do that kind of thing today. It's really easy to pick up a new imperative language like PHP. Any developer with the same knowledge of fundamentals could just work off the documentation and do approximately as well as me. And no interviewer looking for PHP expertise is going to be impressed if I get called in for a PHP developer interview because I had it on my resume and all I can do is mumble something about superglobals and variables start with a dollar sign and how mysql_escape_string is deprecated. Sure there are many employers who don't care if you know their codebase's language coming in, but then those people don't care that you have that particular language on your resume in the first place.
> I am sorry if "I wasted your time"
That's not what I meant; I meant that you'd be wasting interviewers' time. I've performed screening interviews a couple of times and I was consistently frustrated over and over again by candidates who put some technology on their resume but couldn't answer basic questions when put on the spot. The whole point of having something on your resume is to show that you can bring expertise to the table, not as some kind of trophy case of tech that you've used in the past. The bottom line is that if your level of experience on some subject can be acquired in a 40-hour week, then there is no material reason for the employer to hire you over someone with no experience on that subject.
> C/C++: I wrote tens of thousands lines while writing UNIX and video games team projects. PHP: Thousands lines for various projects, personal website, URL shortener engine, blog engine for friends... Objective-c: During my first year internship I wrote and published 2 iOS app on the Apple Store. While I had no previous experience with such a language, this may show you that I am a quick learner.
I've written maybe ten thousand of lines of C++ but I wouldn't put it on my resume at the same level as my primary experience. Expertise is something different from being able to cobble together a working program. When integrating with other people's code it's super important to read and write idiomatic code for the language. I do not have that level of expertise in C++- in fact, I have a copy of the C++ standard and it terrifies me. Even cdecls scare me a little sometimes.
But whereas I'm drowning in Stroustrup, I'm swimming like a happy fish in the JLS. In that domain, I'm eager to attack any question you can throw at me. That's the meaning of putting something on your resume, in my opinion. If you're resorting to the argument of:
> this may show you that I am a quick learner
then that stuff is better relegated to an "other experience" footnote which is just a link to your dazzling GitHub page.
> Maybe you are too much used to regular student taking standard classes at university, but my university EPITECH is way different from any classical university. EPITECH is a software engineering school. With its unique pedagogical approach, we (students) have dozens of projects (about 60 technical projects just for the 2 first years). This is a type of participatory learning that allows us to unleash our creativity through project-based learning. It's an atypical university, instead of regular lectures we have technical/practical projects to work on, all along the years to learn by ourselves.
That sounds really cool, and an interesting counterweight to the traditional math-heavy computer science curriculum. With that many projects I advise you against putting every tech you've ever worked with in a list on your resume. You could make a really impressive portfolio with all of those projects, and link to that. I had success getting my current job by putting a big link to a "portfolio" of undergrad side projects at the bottom of my resume under my actual experience. Feel free to steal my layout/ideas:
Send me your contact information, CV and a little something about you (by email, see my profile). I'll redirect you to a startup which is looking for interns.
You should add some share button to your site, I'll tweet about intercoolerjs but with a twitter button it will be easier for people to spread the word :)
With my friends (we are french) we always say: "Tester c'est douter" meaning something like: "If you test it's because you are not sure, you doubt"
Or "Si ca compile, ca marche !" = "If this code compile, it works!"
In addition to contacternst I would say that you maybe that thinking freelancing to small organization and some other thing like that. Feel free to share your personal portfolio I'll go visit it and give you my opinion ;)
Do you know the job description ? On what subject will you work ?
I would suggest to be fluent in C#, C++ and the .NET framwork.
Btw: How did MS make you an offer ? You applied or they came for you ?
swah > What do you think about HNW ?