Guest Post: “Grumpy Sister” on Applying for Software Jobs

My sister gives some good advice:

Resume: Resumes are ONE PAGE long. (Plus a page for publications if you have them.) Nothing makes me grumpier than a new graduate with a three page resume. I do not care what you did in high school. I do not care about your ambitions for your life or your job search or your cat. I do not care to read paragraphs of text. If you include coursework (which you should only do if you’re applying right out of undergrad), only include unusual and high level courses. If you’re applying for a job in software, I should hope you’ve had Intro to CS.

Some places will ask you to do a presentation. If they do, YOU SHOULD ACE THE PRESENTATION. The entire rest of the day is going to be people asking you questions that may or may not be in your area of expertise. The only part of the interview you control is the presentation. There is simply no excuse for this not to be outstanding. Specifically:

  • Practice it. You probably will be given a time limit and it will probably be short. You will not get through twenty minutes worth of content if you have to stop and think and um and er your way through every slide. Plus, if you’ve practiced enough, you’ll have some inflection to your voice and you’ll have some leisure to look around and smile and make eye contact instead of frantically trying to remember your next slide. If you can find a friend and make them sit through it ahead of time, even better.
  • Words are bad. Pictures are good. Videos are great.
    • Make sure your graphics are readable. If you put in a graph, the lines need to be thick enough to be seen, the axes should be labeled, and it should have a legend if it needs one. Also make sure you actually know what your graph is of (you think I’m kidding? I’ve been in not one but two presentations in which the candidate couldn’t remember what his graphs were).
    • If you put math on the slide, define your variables. Please. Engineers can’t even agree on the correct letter for the square root of -1.
    • Everyone likes to see results. Especially results that are videos.
  • Be prepared for questions in the middle of the presentation.
  • Present one thing that you know very well. Within that, pick one aspect you want to go into depth on and teach it. Do not just present a slide of math because you learned how to use beamer in grad school and think it makes you look smart – it just makes you look like a poor communicator. If you have multiple things about which you think you could give an excellent presentation by all means pick the one you think will be most interesting to your interviewers. But that’s a concern secondary to being able to explain it in your sleep.
  • Don’t include a biography slide. We’ve all read your resume. Similarly, don’t waste five minutes telling me about the projects you’ve done that you’re not going to talk about today. If you think people might ask about them, make some backup slides.

Interviews: Almost any software interview is going to make you do whiteboard interviews. Review your favorite algorithms textbook (I recommend CLRS if you don’t have a favorite), find some example google interview problems online, and practice coding on a whiteboard. If you don’t have a whiteboard, tack some paper to the wall and use that. It’s really different from coding on a computer and it’s really important to get used to. In my very first interview ever, they asked me to code binary search and I messed it up. I’d actually been a TA for algorithms… and I got flustered with the different feel of the whiteboard and the interview and I made mistakes.

07/16/18