Skip to main content

Real Life

A good family friend has a kid in high school who is a very good programmer. Over the years, it has fallen on me to "navigate" T given his interests. His parents are non technical and feel a bit lost. While tasked with helping T pursue his technical passions, I have tried to draw him out of the narrow confines of his geek universe to see that possibilities exist everywhere he is not looking. His grades have never been great and as he skills up as a programmer, he feels his work is real and the silliness of school is not relevant to him. Recently, I started to help him with looking for a summer job. Going into this project, I had assumed this would be easy. T's resume is very targeted - it's clear he has some great skills that many companies would pay good money for. A resume bot would be able to identify all the keywords that make him a good intern candidate. 

I was naïve enough to believe that posting his resume online would trigger bunch of interest and if he applied to enough jobs he would have multiple options for summer. It turns out I was sadly mistaken on all counts. Development has become far more commoditized than I remember from back in my day. It is not nearly as hard to develop a decent level of competence so the entry level is teeming with candidates who are self-taught or went to some bootcamp. There is no real foundation on which this programming experience stands. What I have come to realize, that the companies that have a strong intern pipeline are looking for people who they can hire once they graduate college. The employer needs to see just about every sign that this student would make a great hire. So credentials matter and grades most certainly do. Just being a great programmer is not a ticket for admission. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...