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http://www.policyoverkill.com/Docs/ResumeGewn.pdf Different font, totally redid it. I think the formatting should be better. Formatting documents is not one of my strengths and I need to learn more about it. It's a general resume with probably more than I would hand to most jobs. Some would not care about how many art shows I've done but one thing I did get told by some people in art land is that some places will care a great deal. Primarily artsier places; like if I wanted an art residency they'll care a lot but not so much about technical skills. This can be pruned to a page easily. I figure I could leave off the art page for most tech jobs. Or just send it in anyway and assume they'll ignore it unless they care. This has been very helpful and I am quite grateful.
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Sep 19, 2015 06:33
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Here is my advice on the assumption that you want to submit that resume for some kind of software development role. I think you need to keep completely separate resume templates for tech and for art. I used to work from a single common template when I was applying to both public policy and computer programming jobs, but I don't think that that served me well. I made separate templates and had more success.
I really wish you the best of luck. You're going to get a lot of no-answers from applications, but once you get into a groove of sending out resumes, things will start to happen. I would recommend taking some time each day to apply to positions in remote metropolitan areas (in PA or beyond) regardless of how you feel about your financial situation right now. The worst that could happen is that you get an offer and you have to figure out how to accept it.
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Sep 19, 2015 13:21
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b0lt posted:Computer Modern Surely you mean Latin Modern.
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Sep 19, 2015 14:47
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I have a BSc in aerospace, a MSc in mechanical engineering, and about a year’s worth of a PhD also in mechanical engineering before I had a change of heart. My focus and research was in computational fluid dynamics. This involved a lot of programming and parallelization and gave me extensive experience with Linux and OS X and code development practices like with git and debugging tools, and high performance computing as well. I had access to and used and developed for one of the supercomputers in the top 10 of the Top 500 supercomputers. Our lab had our own house written flow solver and we used our own house written parallelization wrapper for MPI and OpenMP. I was more involved with designing and implementing a method/algorithm to solve a type of problem that our program wasn’t capable of solving at the time. I didn’t spend much time with the parallelization since that was another guy, but I did have to keep parallelization in mind when writing my algorithms. Our flow solver was written in Fortran, a lot of other things was written in C, scripting was done with Pyhton/Perl/etc, and in my classes I learned C++ for fun. Since then though I’ve been working in industry on the application side. I use someone else’s flow solver and take other people’s designs and set up the simulations and then pres butan. I hate this job because it’s so boring. I spend like 90% of my time setting up simulations which honestly require no thought and I think the only reason this part of the job hasn’t been outsourced is due to ITAR or whatever. The other 10% that actually requires my degree is analyzing the results and physics and what’s happening and then making pretty PowerPoint presentations to show it. I always liked programming and the problem solving part of. I’d like to get into a more programming oriented career (developer? computer engineer? programmer? honestly i don’t know what the differences are) but whenever I apply to jobs in this field I feel like I’m at a huge disadvantage and I probably am. I don’t have a flashy “computer science” degree under my name and if I were to put myself in HR’s shoes I’d probably not give a second thought to an applicant with a mechanical engineering degree either when the 30 other applicants are computer science. I also don’t really know anything about “computer science.” You could ask me basic programming questions and honestly I probably couldn’t tell you because I was never educated in that and/or it was never needed. What I could tell you and talk to you for days about is the maths part of it though, and if you said “we need you to implement this algorithm in the most efficient way possible” then I could do that too. I just can’t tell you too much about SCRUM or things like big o notation as it applies to programming (though I can tell you as it applies to e.g. truncation errors). I’ve tried applying to jobs that focused on people with experience with e.g. CUDA and so on, which I did have more luck with and had phone interviews, but never made it past that. So what do I have to do to “break in” to a programming career? I suppose my first step is to get more practice with C++ and write some poo poo up on github because  Fortran and C. Are there any jobs/type of jobs out there that need people like me?
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Sep 19, 2015 16:17
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Boris Galerkin posted:I have a BSc in aerospace, a MSc in mechanical engineering, and about a year’s worth of a PhD also in mechanical engineering before I had a change of heart. My focus and research was in computational fluid dynamics. This involved a lot of programming and parallelization and gave me extensive experience with Linux and OS X and code development practices like with git and debugging tools, and high performance computing as well. I had access to and used and developed for one of the supercomputers in the top 10 of the Top 500 supercomputers. Our lab had our own house written flow solver and we used our own house written parallelization wrapper for MPI and OpenMP. I was more involved with designing and implementing a method/algorithm to solve a type of problem that our program wasn’t capable of solving at the time. I didn’t spend much time with the parallelization since that was another guy, but I did have to keep parallelization in mind when writing my algorithms. Our flow solver was written in Fortran, a lot of other things was written in C, scripting was done with Pyhton/Perl/etc, and in my classes I learned C++ for fun. Why don't you automate your job so it is less boring?
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Sep 19, 2015 17:13
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Boris Galerkin posted:I’d probably not give a second thought to an applicant with a mechanical engineering degree either when the 30 other applicants are computer science. Boris Galerkin posted:So what do I have to do to “break in” to a programming career? There certainly are physics/engineering-related programming jobs out there for which knowledge of Fortran, C, MPI, are quite relevant. They also have a difficult time hiring because Fortran is no longer commonly taught. Perhaps that's not really what you want to do, but those jobs do exist. Boris Galerkin posted:I suppose my first step is to get more practice with C++ and write some poo poo up on github because
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Sep 19, 2015 19:26
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People tell me I should be applying for several positions per day, yet they also tell me I should thoroughly research each company and carefully custom-tailor each résumé for the position and write a thoughtful cover letter with each application that shows I "did my homework". With all the other poo poo I've got going on to make sure I don't starve as long as I'm unemployed, it feels like the day doesn't have enough hours to find a job. 
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Sep 19, 2015 21:38
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Siliziumleben posted:People tell me I should be applying for several positions per day, yet they also tell me I should thoroughly research each company and carefully custom-tailor each résumé for the position and write a thoughtful cover letter with each application that shows I "did my homework". With all the other poo poo I've got going on to make sure I don't starve as long as I'm unemployed, it feels like the day doesn't have enough hours to find a job. Well, don't get carried away on the research & tailoring. If a job sounds REALLY GOOD, spend an hour or two making things perfect. If it's just something you'd be ok with, maybe 20-30 minutes. And the cover letter probably doesn't matter much.
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Sep 19, 2015 21:42
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By your 10th or so cover letter you should have strings of one or two sentences you can plug together like legos. I'd say 40% of my cover letters are recycled from the previous one. Cover letters make a bigger difference when you've already got a foot in the door via a friend referral and you want to cement the job with their boss.
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Sep 19, 2015 23:46
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Boris Galerkin posted:So what do I have to do to “break in” to a programming career? I suppose my first step is to get more practice with C++ and write some poo poo up on github because Can you code? Definitely. But: The cynical perspective here is that, whether you're smart or not, all you've done is a bunch of scientific array programming, which is very easy and doesn't give you substantial experience from a programming industry perspective. Interviewing people from scientific-computing-type stuff, be it physics or even stuff "within CS" like image processing, they've always been awful -- can't do SQL, can't solve trivial programming exercises, doesn't have a clue. (Part of the reason might be that, if they're leaving the fields they're in, they probably weren't doing so well there, so that means they're more likely to be an idiot. We also had a legitimate demand for real CS ability.) However, you smell a lot different from this template. You're an engineer, not some idiot scientist. You've done Perl/Python scripting and you seem of the get-poo poo-done ilk. You taught yourself C++ for fun. The way you write and such, I don't expect major problems for you, but I could be fooled by your confident writing style, or biased by my past experience with aerospace engineers. But I think you're like an entry level CS graduate, only without some important CS background. quote:or things like big o notation as it applies to programming (though I can tell you as it applies to e.g. truncation errors). This is kind of essential. I mean, the difference is that O notation has an implicit limit subscript, and the limit's different. The syntax O(h^2) could be written O_{h->0}(h^2). In CS, O(n^2) means O_{n->+infinity}(n^2). There, now you understand the notation? It (and the directly affiliated knowledge of data structures and algorithms) is essential for being good at programming, but also, since many CS interviews are based around having this knowledge and experience as an idiot filter, it's very useful for getting jobs. So you should the data structures and algorithms stuff, etc, as recommended by ExcessBLargh. That's the difference between you and an entry level CS graduate of equal intelligence. quote:What I could tell you and talk to you for days about is the maths part of it though, and if you said “we need you to implement this algorithm in the most efficient way possible” then I could do that too. That's easy -- the hard part is figuring out which algorithm to use. Actually, that's usually easy too, but it would be hard for you, since you don't have the tools to describe the large-scale performance of algorithms. There's also questions of the small-scale performance of algorithms, like, I'm sure you wouldn't use a linked list and try to access the n'th element of it for some arbitrary value of n -- it would take at best O(min{n, length-n}) time! But do you know why traversing it from left-to-right would be slower than doing the same for an array? Basic real-cost performance instincts like that are often quite important too, especially when the cost isn't a pointer indirection, but rather, a network access, or a disk access.
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Sep 19, 2015 23:59
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Skandranon posted:Well, don't get carried away on the research & tailoring. If a job sounds REALLY GOOD, spend an hour or two making things perfect. If it's just something you'd be ok with, maybe 20-30 minutes. Yeah. My research generally consists of "go to a company's website, see what they do/what broad industry they're in (e.g. health care), find the name of a software product they make if at all possible." Relate my cover letter to them with specifics if at all possible (if I'm applying to a health care software provider I can say that I've designed <this piece of software that is also mentioned in my resume> for <this type of health care provider>). Otherwise every employer gets more or less the same information. I do .Net. My background is in desktop applications. I've done some web app design with ASP.NET MVC. I've worked solo and as part of small teams. I spent a lot of time constructing the generic part of my letter so that it still has my own voice and it's not too formal, but now that I have that work out of the way, it doesn't take me much time to plug in information and move the pieces around as appropriate. I also assume that the primary audience for my cover letter is going to be HR drones who don't know much about tech. The engineers conducting the technical interviews are probably not going to care about it much, if they see it at all. I know I wouldn't.
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Sep 20, 2015 01:08
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Hadlock posted:By your 10th or so cover letter you should have strings of one or two sentences you can plug together like legos. I'd say 40% of my cover letters are recycled from the previous one. Cover letters make a bigger difference when you've already got a foot in the door via a friend referral and you want to cement the job with their boss. My cover letters are literally templates I made for myself where the only thing I really change are what the company name is, why I'm interested in that position, and what specifically is applicable to them. I just found that there wasn't enough stuff to differentiate them where new ones were needed.
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Sep 20, 2015 05:24
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Is it a good idea to upload my résumé to sites like CareerBuilder and let the IT recruiting companies (CyberCoders, Robert Half etc.) contact me? From what I've read online, those companies' recruiting practices are shady at best, and I'm going to end up with a lot of irrelevant spam mail / calls. But I'm also desperate to find a job, so...
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Sep 20, 2015 18:14
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How do you refuse a job offer without saying the project sounds sucky as balls and I'd probably quit the first chance I'd get?
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Sep 20, 2015 18:18
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Honest Thief posted:How do you refuse a job offer without saying the project sounds sucky as balls and I'd probably quit the first chance I'd get?
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Sep 20, 2015 18:19
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Tunga posted:Ask for more money until they refuse.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:25
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Siliziumleben posted:Is it a good idea to upload my résumé to sites like CareerBuilder and let the IT recruiting companies (CyberCoders, Robert Half etc.) contact me? From what I've read online, those companies' recruiting practices are shady at best, and I'm going to end up with a lot of irrelevant spam mail / calls. But I'm also desperate to find a job, so... No.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:27
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Siliziumleben posted:Is it a good idea to upload my résumé to sites like CareerBuilder and let the IT recruiting companies (CyberCoders, Robert Half etc.) contact me? From what I've read online, those companies' recruiting practices are shady at best, and I'm going to end up with a lot of irrelevant spam mail / calls. But I'm also desperate to find a job, so... YMMV, but outside of Hired.com, I have never had a decent experience with an external recruiter.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:37
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Honest Thief posted:How do you refuse a job offer without saying the project sounds sucky as balls and I'd probably quit the first chance I'd get? "I don't think this would be a good next step for my career, so unfortunately, I can't accept your offer. Best of luck on your search!" That's my canned line for refusal.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:50
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Flaming June posted:YMMV, but outside of Hired.com, I have never had a decent experience with an external recruiter. I second this. Also, I had a fantastic experience with Hired.
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Sep 20, 2015 19:14
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Siliziumleben posted:Is it a good idea to upload my résumé to sites like CareerBuilder and let the IT recruiting companies (CyberCoders, Robert Half etc.) contact me? From what I've read online, those companies' recruiting practices are shady at best, and I'm going to end up with a lot of irrelevant spam mail / calls. But I'm also desperate to find a job, so... The biggest red flag is after sending a recruiter a PDF of your resume they'll request it in .doc form. That's when you stop communicating with them. Some recruiters can me really great though. Just be aware that 95% of them are bottom-barrel-scraping scumbags.
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Sep 20, 2015 19:15
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Man, Hired.com does look really sweet. Too bad I'm not in their target demographic — they explicitly state in their FAQ that they're not interested in people looking for their first software development job. Which I am. So barrel-bottom-scraping scumbags it is for me. Siliziumleben fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Sep 20, 2015 |
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Sep 20, 2015 19:40
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Siliziumleben posted:Man, Hired.com does look really sweet. Too bad I'm not in their target demographic — they explicitly state in their FAQ that they're not interested in people looking for their first software development job. Which I am. I tried the career builder and monster "post my resume and see what I get" thing when I was trying to get my first job, and I found that it doesn't work and was a huge waste of time - like, to the point where I drove across entire states for jobs that didn't actually end up existing. Recruiters were similarly useless for entry level. Linkedin is pretty good for passive job searching, and you can use craigslist and dice for active job searching entry level.
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Sep 20, 2015 20:50
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Some good advice in here both for data scientists and general developer interviews. http://treycausey.com/data_science_interviews.html (I am not a data scientist)
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Sep 20, 2015 20:59
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:I tried the career builder and monster "post my resume and see what I get" thing when I was trying to get my first job, and I found that it doesn't work and was a huge waste of time - like, to the point where I drove across entire states for jobs that didn't actually end up existing. Recruiters were similarly useless for entry level. Dice is loving horrible too, maybe even worse than Indeed/Career Builder and you'll end up getting spam for years that all end up looking like: GREETINGS OF THE DAY, IOS DEVELOPER CONTRACT IN KANSAS 6MO+. KINDLY SEND YOUR RESUME
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Sep 20, 2015 21:02
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Stack Overflow careers worked great for me.
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Sep 20, 2015 21:21
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Urit posted:"I don't think this would be a good next step for my career, so unfortunately, I can't accept your offer. Best of luck on your search!" I'm going with something like that. Thanks much. Honest Thief fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Sep 20, 2015 |
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Sep 20, 2015 21:37
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You can search company by technology and location on Stack Overflow even if they aren't currently paying for a listing there, and they seem to have a better ratio of decent companies.
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Sep 20, 2015 21:40
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Honest Thief posted:The part that bugs me is that the pay is more than what I'm currently making, although I'd have to move country, but the job itself...
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Sep 20, 2015 23:48
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Tunga posted:It's not like they know what you earn right now. Keep asking for more money until it's either worthwhile or they refuse. Pretty sure asking for even more money after they agree to a previous number is a way bigger dick move than just saying 'This work doesn't sound interesting'
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Sep 21, 2015 00:05
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Necc0 posted:Pretty sure asking for even more money after they agree to a previous number is a way bigger dick move than just saying 'This work doesn't sound interesting' You are negotiating with a company. There are no dick moves.
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Sep 21, 2015 00:09
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Necc0 posted:Pretty sure asking for even more money after they agree to a previous number is a way bigger dick move than just saying 'This work doesn't sound interesting'
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Sep 21, 2015 00:37
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Maybe I'm misreading what you wrote but I read that as just coming back to them with an even bigger number every time they say yes until they say no.
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Sep 21, 2015 01:15
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Necc0 posted:Maybe I'm misreading what you wrote but I read that as just coming back to them with an even bigger number every time they say yes until they say no. Couldn't a person just solve that problem by demanding a thoroughly outlandish salary in the first place? "Well I'm sure my time is worth at least $5,000,000 a year. I mean I'm like a good developer, you know? Seriously, just the best." Then if they say "yes" anyway take it because seriously. Why turn down a few million a year? But by the same token "we aren't interested in hiring you" is perfectly acceptable no matter the reason. "I am not interested in this job" is just fine. Just don't be a jerk about it. "I thought about it and this position isn't right for me." There you go!
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Sep 21, 2015 02:09
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After a long interview process, I nabbed a spot at App Academy (mostly Ruby and JavaScript bootcamp) in San Francisco. It's a 3-month program. For those of you who have been successful finding employment after bootcamps, what can I do before and during the camp to best benefit from the experience? I don't start until July 2016, so I have a lot of time to prepare.
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Sep 21, 2015 02:41
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Start a blog and write about something technical that you learned every week. Try to have something resembling a technical discussion with someone at least once a week. (Doing this over twitter or IRC or the forums or whatever is probably fine.) My reasoning behind this is that someone with hiring authority is probably going to google you at some point, and if you've got an established blog, even if it's filled with idiot newbie thoughts, it will show that you're interested and let a reader get a sense of you. If you're used to having technical type conversations about things you don't really understand, you'll have a leg up in interviews, which are awkward by nature, and also in working with a group as a junior developer. It might also teach you some Ruby and Markdown if you use something like Jekyll to host the blog. In terms of particular skills that are useful and you could pick up in nine months of non-focused effort, I'd suggest researching the basics of using the terminal, git (at least enough that you know how to pull some stuff, mess around with it, and save your work in a branch) and practicing salary negotiation. If App Academy doesn't teach you much in the way of how databases/SQL work, you could probably benefit from at least knowing how to fire up a database server, access it, and do some inserting, selecting without joins, selecting with joins, updating, etc.
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Sep 21, 2015 04:41
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I'd also keep a notebook and digital copy of what you do & resources provided, etc.
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Sep 21, 2015 09:14
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Should I even bother applying for a position where I meet all of the "minimum", but none of the "preferred" qualifications?
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Sep 21, 2015 14:02
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Siliziumleben posted:Should I even bother applying for a position where I meet all of the "minimum", but none of the "preferred" qualifications? Yes. Hell I've applied for (and received offers) positions where I don't even meet all of the "minimum" requirements.
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Sep 21, 2015 14:07
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aBagorn posted:Yes. Hell I've applied for (and received offers) positions where I don't even meet all of the "minimum" requirements. Same. If you have ~some~ experience and are personable, you have a good chance of getting hired, unless they get tons of qualified applicants. I was hired over a more qualified person because they felt the person wouldn't jive with the team.
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Sep 21, 2015 14:31
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