Job search.
As I wind down my academic journey at Oregon State University (OSU), I have been preparing myself for potential software development/engineering interviews. My first experience of searching for a software job was exciting, intimidating, and ultimately heartbreaking. The Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA) was not only an academic program, but it was also a military transition program that coached on both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills for civilian jobs. The soft skill basically focused on how you work with other people and questions about why you want to work for the company you are interviewing for. Hard skills were focused on technical questions and demonstrations of knowledge via a whiteboard or take-home coding tests. I learned valuable skills in MSSA, but I haven’t experienced too many technical interviews in my short career so far.
My previous technical interview experience.
In the MSSA program, every member of the program gets the opportunity to be interviewed by Microsoft employees. The interview was conducted over Microsoft Teams. It seemed that the interviewer did not want to be there from the beginning, and there weren’t many following up questions to my responses. I felt that the whole experience was cold, phony, and uncomfortable. I wasn’t chosen to move on to the next stage of the interview process, but neither were over half of the participants in the program. There were participants that I felt that has been chosen (not necessarily including myself), the absence of positive or negative feedback for anyone that was not chosen, and I think was detrimental to the confidence of the interviewees that this program was supposedly helping to transition from military to civilian life. But, this type of policy is typical of large tech companies.
My second interview experience with a military contractor was a completely different experience. I was contacted by a recruiter from a government contracting company. I agreed to the interview and the primarily asked ‘soft’ skill questions, I felt my soft skills and my prior military experience helped me during the interview. There weren’t too many ‘hard’ skill questions or technical questions (which I found very surprising!). A couple of hours after the interview, I have presented with an offer and I decided to accept my first software developer job.
On the job hunt!
I left my first software job about a year ago, and now I’m ready to rejoin the workforce. After two years of work experience, COVID-19, and getting close to completing my post baccalaureate degree at OSU I’m a little nervous about applying for jobs.
The first thing I want to do is update my resume. My current resume reads like a military evaluation that is would be non-sensical to most people that were never a member of the military. Most of the bullet point list quantities and terse explanations of accomplishments. There are many examples out there, but I think I will seek professional assistance once I have a solid working copy of my resume.
The next goal is the development of a portfolio page that showcases the projects that I have been working on for the past three years. I have an idea of how I want to organize and display my work, but I still need to sketch out my ideas. I bought a domain name a few years ago and I probably start using it soon.
Finally, there is the “eating my spinach” part of my job search/interview process. This includes practicing my data structures and algorithms. It’s one thing to work through these problems with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which gives you hints and code snippets and writing while explaining the code from memory. I tend to learn by repetition and I have a good idea of which coding problems and concepts I need to work on to prepare for a technical interview. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort, but hopefully, it will be worth it in the end.
Wish me luck!