TITLE: Software Projects, Potential Employers, and Memories AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: July 31, 2018 4:23 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I spent a couple of hours this morning at a roundtable discussion listening to area tech employers talk about their work and their companies' needs. It was pretty enjoyable (well, except perhaps for the CEO who too frequently prefaced his remarks with "What the education system needs to understand is ..."). To a company, they all place a lot of value on the projects that job candidates have done. Their comments reminded me of an old MAA blog post in which a recent grad said:
During the fall of my junior year, I applied for an internship at Red Ventures, a data analytics and technology company just outside Charlotte. Throughout the rigorous interview process, it wasn't my GPA that stood out. I stood out among the applicants, in part, because I was able to discuss multiple projects I had taken ownership of and was extremely passionate about.
I encourage this mentality in my students, though I think "passionate about" is too strong a condition (not to mention cliché). Students should have a few projects that they are interested in, or proud of, or maybe just completed. Most of the students taking my compiler course this fall won't be applying for a compiler job when they graduate, but they will have written a compiler as part of a team. They will have met a spec, collaborated on code, and delivered a working product. That is evidence of skill, to be sure, but also of hard work and persistence. It's a significant accomplishment. The students who take our intelligent systems course or our real-time embedded systems will be able to say the same thing. Some students will also be able to point to code they wrote for a club or personal projects. They key is to build things, care about them, and "deliver", whatever that means in the context of that particular project. I made note of one new piece of advice to give our students, offered by a former student I mentioned in a blog post many years ago who is now head of a local development team for mobile game developer Jam City: Keep all the code you write. It can be a GitHub repo, as many people now recommend, but it doesn't have to be. A simple zip file organized by courses and projects can be enough. Such a portfolio can show prospective employers what you've done, how you've grown, and how much you care about the things you make. It can say a lot. You might even want to keep all that code for Future You. I'm old enough that it was difficult to keep digital copies of all the code I wrote in college. I have a few programs from my undergrad days and a few more from grad school, which have migrated across storage media as time passed, but I missing much of my class work as a young undergrad and all of the code I wrote in high school. I sometimes wish I could look back at some of that code... -----