"Apply for jobs you’re a bit under qualified for. Most job descriptions describe the perfect candidate. Those features are a wish list not a must have. This applies even more in start-ups where genuine passion for the company gets you a long way."
Yeah exactly, hiring managers have this list in their head, and what they're basically doing is crossing off items that dont apply for each candidate. essentially the ones with the least things crossed out will likely be top of the pile...
In my experience it's a weighted list though, and things like having a compatible personality and a personal drive for wanting "this" job, often counts a great deal more than the technical skills on the job description.
Unless we're talking contracts of course, then you'll simply want the best technical candidate because you need someone who can deliver good quality on time.
No. In major market cities (SF, Boston, NYC), chances are they're already moving forward with a candidate who does fit the qualifications. Tjey're not hard to fund in those markets.
If you're a unicorn-grade developer (God-tier school, significant time solving Major Problems), maybe. My job search experience has been that it's pretty much "perfect match or gtfo". If I had a nickel for every time I heard "While we were impressed with your qualifications, we decided to go ahead with another candidate with more experience in the tech stack we're using. Best of luck in your job search" I could pay my internet bill at least.
> If you're a unicorn-grade developer (God-tier school, significant time solving Major Problems), maybe.
I'm not from a God-tier school, but I've been on teams solving non-trivial problems. And I was flown across the country before I had experience like that.
> My job search experience has been that it's pretty much "perfect match or gtfo".
I've seen a lot of that, too. Maybe their own nth degree persnicketiness is why they have problems filling positions and are willing to fly people in from far away. I was once flown halfway across the country by a medium-small webdev company just north of the golden gate bridge.
As a currently unemployed developer I take this advice everyday but it really hasn't generated any results (and it really shouldn't be at my current experience level).
I've heard countless times from other developers that they would be happy to hire a competent programmer with no familiarity with their stack because it's better than waiting 6 months to find a dev with the preferred experience. I've never seen or heard about this in practice.
Chutzpah goes very far. Ask for what you want, and explain why you deserve to get it -- then offer to demonstrate your fitness. It's an excellent approach!
I need to work on my chutzpah. I overspecialized in moxie and spunk (the personality trait, that is).
Chutzpah's critical though- you're usually not going to get what you want if you never ask for it. You can wait a really long time for people to just give you what you want, especially if you never express an interest by asking for it.
It sounds like common sense, but it feels like it took about 20 years too long for that to really sink in with me. I always assumed people understood me a lot more than they actually did.
Where are you looking? OP's idea of talking to people in coffee shops obviously only works in certain cities. If you're not in such a location, you need to look online.
> talk to people around you, they’re surprisingly willing to be involved in what you’re doing if it’s interesting and not too onerous for them. Counters the general assumption that if you talk to strangers they’ll think you’re crazy.
Maybe if you're a young woman (as the author is) approaching someone at a coffee shop, then sure.
Reverse the genders and watch the interaction take on a dramatically different character.
And yet two guys were able to ask everyone in an entire coffee shop what they were working on with a 95% "super friendly" rate. Perhaps some problems are perceived rather than real.
I suspect that in a coffee shop in a good area, it really is this easy, male or female. People are generally pretty social if everyone is on equal footing, not obviously busy, and not creating discomfort.
Anyone who's tried to get petitions can attest that doing this on a street corner is a much different beast, but I think hallway testing (or lead finding, or whatever else) is more viable than most people think.
I'm also reminded of the study about asking people for their seat on a subway - it's almost impossible to ask, but surprisingly easy to succeed.
Petitions are a different animal. When asking what people are working on you are taking interest in them. When you want them to sign a petition you are asking something of them, and making them take interest in what you care about.
Doesn't seem to matter whether the author already knew that she had a knack for talking to strangers without appearing crazy, or held with the "general assumption" and was genuinely surprised when the experiment turned out well. The important thing is that it worked!
Now, perhaps it will not work so well for every person. Perhaps in the general case people will instead recoil in horror at being approached nicely for small interesting favours. Perhaps a more universal lesson to take away from this is that success is more likely if you play to your strengths, and push every advantage at your disposal. The author is a Cambridge Law graduate, so one might safely presume reasonably skilled at speaking - I'm not exactly sure how surprised she was that she could engage strangers in professional conversation at a coffee shop - but the experiment is available for others to replicate! I'm not sure what parameters would have to be changed for the interaction to take on a "dramatically different character" though, maybe don't get drunk beforehand.
> Reverse the genders and watch the interaction take on a dramatically different character.
I dunno, give it a shot. I generally don't have much interest in just randomly starting up conversation, but when I talk to a stranger about something it rarely goes poorly.
this is true, in business, at conferences and such i am typically kind of shy. One day my fiance pointed out that everywhere i go i end up meeting and talking to people(gas stations, bars, national parks). Then i started applying the same approach to business, and its netted a number of new and interesting contacts.
few things grind my gears like hipsters telling me how much THEY care about products being usable LIKE IT'S SOME SORT OF NEW IDEA, like they are the ONLY ONES WHO CARE.
beards and winter hats in summer seem, counter intuitively, to incubate a lot of unique little snowflakes.
So my use of the word hipster (and the title of the post) is a reference to this quote which I think is the original source.
"At SXSW, Rei Inamoto, the chief creative officer for AKQA, shared a nugget of wisdom that I’ve observed to be true: “To run an efficient team, you only need three people: a Hipster, a Hacker, and a Hustler.” - http://www.forbes.com/sites/andyellwood/2012/08/22/the-dream...
It was a colloquial way to get across the point that I couldn't code or design at the point I was looking for a role at a start-up.
Tired of entitled white girls giving us advice as if any of it applies to us. No doub the next elizabeth holmes. be a young attractive white girl who went to cambridge and you can get a startup job? okay that helps.
I think it's a fair characterization of some sort of minimum commitment as an employee. Especially if you're new to the industry sticking around for 5+ years is going to be a waste of time, rarely will the company match your market value.
Keep in mind what was written in the article regarding the author's job at the time was:
The job was technically sales ...
And:
Yesterday was my last day there as I’m
now moving on to something new — planning
to develop my currently non-existent
technical skills full time.
So categorizing the author as being new "to the industry" at that point in time (2015/07/30) is nonsensical unless peripheral exposure counts. Not to say this remains the case, mind you, just that the perspective you describe is not applicable to the person the author was at that time.
I will add that a person actually in the industry would be wise to "stick around" their first job or two for at least a year. Failing to do so is a red flag for many companies as bouncing around early in the CV is often interpreted as leaving before being fired.
Sorry, I have little idea what your point is. She's was/is a recent graduate, she's new to any industry. If you "stick around" long without increase in salary, equity or experience (preferable all fo them) you're doing it wrong. How it can be interpreted only matter for people who hasn't manged to get the right experience to be in demand. In my opinion of course.
At the time this blog entry was written, she was working in a sales/marketing capacity and not as a coder (her words, not mine). IMHO, this means she was exposed to tech start-ups. She then goes on to say that she had "non-existent technical skills."
My point was that anyone entering into the dev/tech world would be wise to spend a year at their first job in order to:
* Learn about what is involved
* Have time to refine their skills
* Be able to show to other companies that they can survive
"My point was that anyone entering into the dev/tech world would be wise to spend a year"
Yes, but that was what she was looking for when she said "find one start-up I wanted to devote the next year or so to building" and what I agreed with as "some sort of minimum commitment as an employee"?
I wrote the post, as some people have picked up in the comments, the one year is a reference to the minimum time I wanted to spend working for someone at a start-up. I used the word build as when you're an early employee that's the dynamic.
My plan wasn't to leave after the year, just to re-evaluate if I was learning what I wanted to be in the role. As it turned out, I did leave as I wanted to develop my technical skills instead of carrying along the VC/Biz-dev career path.
I agree that if you're starting your own thing then 7-10 years is a good minimum time frame.
What cracks me up is this proclamation made by said author[0]:
Over the 200 waking hours, I managed to
hit the standard needed. It felt like
multiple lucky answers and lots of Googling
that got me there, but that’s how learning
works. I learnt enough Javascript to
get accepted onto the course and I spent
another 3 months, with 15 others,
Googling things together and creating
a new app each week.
Now I’m being paid to build early
MVP’s (minimum viable products) for
start-ups. So I can code.
I mean, really? This certainly cannot be modus operandi for start-ups can it? Three months of "Javascript Googling" allows someone to brag about:
being paid to build early
MVP’s (minimum viable products) for
start-ups.
And leveraging that incredibly weak argument into a summary of:
So I can code.
Wow. If that's all it takes for someone to be hired into a start-up, then the whole "funding is drying up" meme prevalent recently is really making sense.
200 hours self-taught followed by 3 months at, say, 80 hours a week is 1160 hours in total. I imagine there are people who spend less time learning to code during a 3 year university course. Plus her learning would be very specifically focused on startup-oriented JavaScript instead of trying to cover everything. I see no reason why the statement "So I can code." should be wrong.
Man that kind of makes me sad that I've wasted so much of my life over the past decade learning one useless 'skill' after another.
Its a sad realization that someone who only started coding 3 months ago is kicking my ass finding jobs at startups meanwhile I am being rejected( when they respond) constantly .
Coding knowledge is a long way down the list of things that a startup needs from a developer, especially a junior level one. Enthusiasm, willing to do boring stuff, personality, culture fit[1], a low salary, etc are all far more important. Maybe you don't have one or more of those attributes.
[1] I hate 'culture fit' as a reason to employ someone. Employing people who fit in with the existing culture is a fast track to creating a business completely lacking in diversity.
Sometimes it's not only skill, but what they think they should pay you. I've seen more skilled candidates avoided because my company didn't want to pay them their worth.
To clarify, I didn't get a role as a dev at the start-up in the post on HN, it was in the investment team.
Then after I left I spent 2 weeks solidly trying to hit the course requirements, then 3 months on the coding course. There was also time before that learning syntax on coding academy in my evenings.
Since finishing the course (in December 2015) I've been freelancing with some mentorship at Founders & Coders. It's only now that I feel I could apply for a role as junior dev. So really it's been 7 months, and a lot of hours, getting to that standard.
It would be okay if prototypes would be prototypes, but in the software field prototypes are too often taken into production. It's like a designer giving you a small model how they envision it. You don't expect to shrink yourself and live in the model house out of paper. It should be the same with software. Just recall the struggle with Twitter's MVP that failed to be available. Maybe we should differentiate between builders, designers and visionaries in the software field.
I agree that there is a lot of space for distinction between the kind of work that people are doing in the software field, but I see prototypes being thrown into production as a hugely positive thing, not a problem.
Part of the beauty of the current startup landscape is feasibility of throwing a working prototype written by a junior, garbage code and all, into production to see if it gets any traction. It costs little money, offers a chance to hungry juniors to prove themselves and later drives the demand for senior engineers to clean up or rewrite the codebase into something that can scale.
If the org plans for and provides the resources to engineer it properly from scratch, yes, it can be good idea. I've only encountered the scenario where the original developer was only allowed to band-aid patch it repeatedly.
Great article. It seems that she has an outgoing, friendly personality. Companies need those types of employees just as much as they need good technologists.
>After some more standard interview prep and a short interview at Crowdcube a few days later accompanied by my newly filled little black book I got taken on for the job.
Meanwhile, I am being humiliated by stupid whiteboard interviews .
I really need to work on my (non existent ) people skills.
62 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThis sound like very good advice.
Unless we're talking contracts of course, then you'll simply want the best technical candidate because you need someone who can deliver good quality on time.
I'm not from a God-tier school, but I've been on teams solving non-trivial problems. And I was flown across the country before I had experience like that.
> My job search experience has been that it's pretty much "perfect match or gtfo".
I've seen a lot of that, too. Maybe their own nth degree persnicketiness is why they have problems filling positions and are willing to fly people in from far away. I was once flown halfway across the country by a medium-small webdev company just north of the golden gate bridge.
I've heard countless times from other developers that they would be happy to hire a competent programmer with no familiarity with their stack because it's better than waiting 6 months to find a dev with the preferred experience. I've never seen or heard about this in practice.
Chutzpah's critical though- you're usually not going to get what you want if you never ask for it. You can wait a really long time for people to just give you what you want, especially if you never express an interest by asking for it.
It sounds like common sense, but it feels like it took about 20 years too long for that to really sink in with me. I always assumed people understood me a lot more than they actually did.
Maybe if you're a young woman (as the author is) approaching someone at a coffee shop, then sure.
Reverse the genders and watch the interaction take on a dramatically different character.
https://medium.com/life-learning/what-are-people-working-on-...
Anyone who's tried to get petitions can attest that doing this on a street corner is a much different beast, but I think hallway testing (or lead finding, or whatever else) is more viable than most people think.
I'm also reminded of the study about asking people for their seat on a subway - it's almost impossible to ask, but surprisingly easy to succeed.
Now, perhaps it will not work so well for every person. Perhaps in the general case people will instead recoil in horror at being approached nicely for small interesting favours. Perhaps a more universal lesson to take away from this is that success is more likely if you play to your strengths, and push every advantage at your disposal. The author is a Cambridge Law graduate, so one might safely presume reasonably skilled at speaking - I'm not exactly sure how surprised she was that she could engage strangers in professional conversation at a coffee shop - but the experiment is available for others to replicate! I'm not sure what parameters would have to be changed for the interaction to take on a "dramatically different character" though, maybe don't get drunk beforehand.
I dunno, give it a shot. I generally don't have much interest in just randomly starting up conversation, but when I talk to a stranger about something it rarely goes poorly.
Never again!!
you don't know if you don't try.
beards and winter hats in summer seem, counter intuitively, to incubate a lot of unique little snowflakes.
"At SXSW, Rei Inamoto, the chief creative officer for AKQA, shared a nugget of wisdom that I’ve observed to be true: “To run an efficient team, you only need three people: a Hipster, a Hacker, and a Hustler.” - http://www.forbes.com/sites/andyellwood/2012/08/22/the-dream...
It was a colloquial way to get across the point that I couldn't code or design at the point I was looking for a role at a start-up.
Hint: startup is more like 7-10y+ unless you're just playing at it, or it fails. If you go into it expecting it to be a year, it probably will be.
I will add that a person actually in the industry would be wise to "stick around" their first job or two for at least a year. Failing to do so is a red flag for many companies as bouncing around early in the CV is often interpreted as leaving before being fired.
My point was that anyone entering into the dev/tech world would be wise to spend a year at their first job in order to:
* Learn about what is involved
* Have time to refine their skills
* Be able to show to other companies that they can survive
Yes, but that was what she was looking for when she said "find one start-up I wanted to devote the next year or so to building" and what I agreed with as "some sort of minimum commitment as an employee"?
My plan wasn't to leave after the year, just to re-evaluate if I was learning what I wanted to be in the role. As it turned out, I did leave as I wanted to develop my technical skills instead of carrying along the VC/Biz-dev career path.
I agree that if you're starting your own thing then 7-10 years is a good minimum time frame.
0 - http://www.gadgette.com/2016/02/19/how-i-learnt-to-code-in-a...
Its a sad realization that someone who only started coding 3 months ago is kicking my ass finding jobs at startups meanwhile I am being rejected( when they respond) constantly .
[1] I hate 'culture fit' as a reason to employ someone. Employing people who fit in with the existing culture is a fast track to creating a business completely lacking in diversity.
Then after I left I spent 2 weeks solidly trying to hit the course requirements, then 3 months on the coding course. There was also time before that learning syntax on coding academy in my evenings.
Since finishing the course (in December 2015) I've been freelancing with some mentorship at Founders & Coders. It's only now that I feel I could apply for a role as junior dev. So really it's been 7 months, and a lot of hours, getting to that standard.
Part of the beauty of the current startup landscape is feasibility of throwing a working prototype written by a junior, garbage code and all, into production to see if it gets any traction. It costs little money, offers a chance to hungry juniors to prove themselves and later drives the demand for senior engineers to clean up or rewrite the codebase into something that can scale.
Meanwhile, I am being humiliated by stupid whiteboard interviews .
I really need to work on my (non existent ) people skills.
I just went through my most humiliating whiteboard interview last week. Never knew how bad it could get until that...
No matter how experienced you are you have to face this everytime you change jobs.