Having no money is viciously hard to deal with, especially when you don't have any connections or a portfolio of work. When I graduated with my B.S.C.S in '06...
- I had no money to move. Any company that wanted me would have had to pay relocation.
- There are exactly 4 tech firms in the area, total employment of engineers is < 1000.
- I had studied general CS, generally trying not to be tied to a given TLA technology. This meant that I could not claim "years of experience with tech X".
- I had not had the time to do open-source work, I had been doing my studies. By the time I was aware enough to do interesting work, my studies were too intensive.
- I had had a bad semester immediately prior to graduation, and my GPA was not near 4. (over 3 tho).
- I had done academic summer research, not internships.
I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. No. Luck.
I janitored for 6 months and dug up some university jobs, then back to graduate school, where I cadged the internship -> full-time transition.
I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.
To this day, I have a good deal of sympathy for people out of work.
Based on my personal experience, I encourage hiring managers and recruiters to look past the keywords to the possibilities that the candidate has. A good candidate can move into anything they need to be, if you give them a chance.
- I had no money to move. Any company that wanted me would have had to pay relocation.
- There are exactly 4 tech firms in the area, total employment of engineers is < 1000.
- I had studied general CS, generally trying not to be tied to a given TLA technology. This meant that I could not claim "years of experience with tech X".
- I had not had the time to do open-source work, I had been doing my studies. By the time I was aware enough to do interesting work, my studies were too intensive.
- I had had a bad semester immediately prior to graduation, and my GPA was not near 4. (over 3 tho).
- I had done academic summer research, not internships.
I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. No. Luck.
I janitored for 6 months and dug up some university jobs, then back to graduate school, where I cadged the internship -> full-time transition.
I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.
To this day, I have a good deal of sympathy for people out of work.
Based on my personal experience, I encourage hiring managers and recruiters to look past the keywords to the possibilities that the candidate has. A good candidate can move into anything they need to be, if you give them a chance.