j,

What about career fairs, on-campus interviews, etc?

It's all relative. For you, a new grad with no dev work experience to show, it would definitely be a positive differentiating factor.

I went to one career fair but I got really claustrophobic and had to leave. I gave my resume to one recruiter but never heard from them.

Someone mentioned in /programming, it might have been larry, that I am getting brutally hard interviews because my resume says I am an honors student and I might be coming off as arrogant. I am considering leaving my GPA entirely off my resume now because I felt in multiple interviews now they expected me to have a complete mastery of the classes I took 2+ years ago but I could only really remember major concepts and terms and had a hard time explaining them well. so it might look like I'm lying on my resume or I just am a moron. In my life I've definitely had a problem with coming off less smart than I really am. I don't know if it's on purpose or not or what specifically I do but it's definitely been a recurring thing where someone has known me for 6+ months and remarked "Wow, you're actually pretty smart."

i'm not saying this to pump myself up or humble brag in any way it's just a thing that has happened so many times I am wondering if it might be coming across in interviews as well.

I could just go back and review everything I guess to fix the problem of not knowing anything.

J,

University career fairs and other places where you can sign up for interviews with companies specifically coming to hire new grads on campus are going to be way higher chances of success for you than firing resumes out via email. You should take advantage of those resources, even if it's not the most pleasant experience for you.

You should definitely keep your GPA on your resume.

a friend of mine, who I went to school with for about 3 years, is a poster in /programming and graduated last year. he did the resume spam strat and got a really good gig in SF and he's a much, much more competent programmer than I will ever be, so I wanted to try it.

i don't think there are any more tech career fairs this year but i will check the schedule.

you mentioned blizzard being a potentially really good place for me and I agree that would kind of be a dream job. The hearthstone team is hiring right now but I am not qualified for the position yet.

re: my current job, I do love the work itself even if customers are occasionally annoying. I go entire multiple month stretches without getting into spats with difficult people anymore. I can't even remember my last one, I am really good at letting things go nowadays.

my #1 problem is my coworkers and boss. I could see myself getting a local job and then taking 1 night shift at my captain job where I don't need to interact with any of my annoying coworkers and I'd be pretty content with that. my boss is so absent that working 1 day I'd likely have very little interaction with him at all.

the latest issue is my pay becoming equalized with every other schlub there, I'm not sure if I have a right to be pissed about it or not but I really really am. it's even more ironic because it's something that I think I directly influenced by talking to the big boss about how everyone else's pay was too low and not in line with the market. But I thought I'd get bumped up too and I wasn't.

it's not even a question of whether or not I am worth more, i clearly am. I run the show while I am at work. if there is a problem i fix it. I have no accidents and have prevented tragedies/huge damage more times than i can remember off the top of my head.

for instance, saturday my transmission broke at the end of my shift. i could have just clocked out and called maintenance but I went down into the engine with some tools, figured out it was a simple fix and I fixed it myself and left. no one else on my pay grade would have even thought to do that or have been capable of it. I easily saved the company a thousand dollars with ~20 minutes of work.

not to mention the transmission problem was so subtle that no one would have even noticed there was a problem but I drive my boat so much I can tell when the tiniest thing is wrong and i spotted it very quickly. if it had ran like that for the rest of the evening, there would have been catastrophic damage to the transmission. not only do i never get any recognition for stuff like this, it isn't reflected in my pay.

j,

There's no reason you shouldn't do that too. But your easiest path to a job is likely using the resources you have available to you via your university.

If you prefer pure math to programming, maybe consider grad school in math leading to a teaching or research career.

J,

That. My advice was based on you wanting to get a software developer job.

I don't think i have taken enough math to be able to complete a post graduate math course. The best thing I could do is apply for a post grad program in CS and focus in a math-y area I am good at.

I've shown a really strong aptitude for algorithms and complexity analysis and the proofs are really satisfying to me. lately I've learned I'm pretty good at computational geometry.

This path would have me use a huge chunk of my inheritance and might lead to a dead end, so I don't know if I want to go that route before I try working and see if I like it. If I don't like it, going back to school's an option to become a professor or something. I would probably enjoy that but i don't think it's a good first choice.

jmakin,

First, do some self-analysis. I've been a developer for 30+ years. My employer and I parted ways a while back, I thought I hated development now and was ready to retire or move on.

Turns out, I hated that specific employer. More specifically, the idiotic management; I enjoyed the people I worked with and solving the problems I was solving.

So, after taking some time off and reflecting, I've decided that I really enjoy the problem-solving aspects of development, but not the bull****. So, I'm gearing my searches to places where there's very little management interference.

I can't speak to Irvine, but keep in mind in IT generally, jobs are disposable. If you get into a situation that you're not enjoying, you're allowed (I'd encourage it) to look for something else.

Try to find work that you enjoy doing, with people you enjoy spending time around.

Your situation is somewhat different, as you do need to get your foot in the door so to speak. Do some self-analysis on what part of working in IT you enjoy. Maybe it's networking, or development, or sys admin. "What motivates me?" needs to be part of that analysis.

If that answer is "nothing", then I don't know what to tell you. I've only been in IT. But my understanding is just having a degree opens up a bunch of doors in other fields of endeavor from your major. So make sure to finish that up.

As others have said, keep up with the therapy, that will help. Also that $135K is not enough to make you a "spoiled trust fund brat", or set you up for life. It's a nice chunk of change, but you're not going to live a life of ease on that.

Best of luck. Let us know how it goes.

I spent years in infrastructure networking. Now I'm ****ed because networking has been dovetailed into Sysadmin.

I'm trying to step down a level or two to be able to work while picking up Linux / admin experience. There is significant resistance to that in my market. So I'm pigeonholed and irrelevant at the same time.

Moral is in IT stay aware of trends and keep your skill set relevant.

Boat engine repair 2 months of the year, travel for the other 10.

At which point, he will have been a mate, a skipper, a professor and on his way to being a millionaire. If the teaching gig doesn't work out, I'd suggest acting lessons.

oT,

Amazing.

Jmakin,

Maybe you can use your expertise to write an ebook on a subject that you feel like you're an expert in. Give away 20 copies or so for Amazon reviews in exchange and host on Amazon. They can also publish paperbacks and take a vig ($4.50 ish for a 300 pg black & white paperback)

http://kdp.amazon.com/en_us/help/topic/g200634500

Even if it's a dud, it looks amazing on a resume that you published a book and will stand out over other prospects.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

Omg POTY

Do not go to grad school for something unless:

a) you need it for a career (i.e. you want to be a social worker so you need to get your MSW; or you want to be a finance bro in a field that only hires MBAs, etc); or,

b) you're really interested in something and don't mind spending a few years of your life studying it and don't care if it leads anything in the future; or,

c) you love that thing more than you've ever loved anything and can't imagine doing anything else with your life

If your more interested in math than CS, going to grad school for CS because you can get in and couldn't get in for math without taking some additional courses would be a terrible reason to go to grad school for CS.

oT pushing hard for top 10 status with this one.

My cousin's wife works for the US Gov't designing mathematical models.

The only one she's told me about is a model that recognized tanks in satellite images.

So there's that. Always a good retirement program with Uncle Sam. And he hires math geeks.

What Chip says is significant. In development, I think it's somewhat easier to lag the trends a little. Many organizations see updating software to stay current as an academic exercise that "those geeks want to do just to play with new stuff", geeks aren't good at making the business case as to why staying up-to-date helps ROI, and the volume of software to change is so great, so upgrades get pushed off.

But, one certainly wouldn't want to be picking up COBOL for today's market. Although I bet there's still some out there that needs work, if one looks hard enough.

For hardware, it's more obvious and immediate: servers get overwhelmed without upgrades, which causes website outages, which leads to missed business.

This is just magnificent. I strongly suggest jmakin apply at Julliard or somewhere like that.

jmakin - lots of great advice in here for you. You are lucky OOT likes you so much.

Here are a few more thoughts.

I've only ever not been offered a job from an interview a single time. Probably because that was the only real interview I ever did. Every other interview was a formality, because I already knew someone on the inside who had vouched for me or was the person hiring me.

That's my long way of saying that who you know is usually far more important than what you know.

You know a lot more people than you think. Start leveraging those resources. Having to actually compete against other candidates for a position is for suckers.

In your blog you mentioned some stuff about your dgaf attitude and how that wasn't going to change. Bad idea. Absolutely a major leak in need of fixing. So much of working in a workplace is interacting and getting along with other people, far more important than most people understand. Give me a friendly workhorse who shows up on time and gets along with the rest of his co-workers each and every time over the prima donna. I'll 1099 the prima donna when I have to, but my W2s are all going to be the steady consistent worker bees.

135K is a nice cushion, but that's about all it is. Best to either stick it in an index fund for a jump start on retirement and pretend it doesn't exist, or use a fixed portion for a specific goal like grad school. Don't go oldfoatie with it.

Absolutely finish your degree no matter what. You've worked too hard and come too far to just abandon it. Even if you end up in a completely different field for the rest of your life, having an honors CS degree from a decent school will go a long way for opening doors in your future.


You have a lot of people rooting for you and supporting you. It was smart and a sign of maturity to ask for advice. You're going to be just fine.



If you do end up working for El Diablol, please also move in with him and be his roommate so you can set up a cam and stream your joint wacky hijinks for OOT's benefit.

the answer is sort of "nothing." I've posted about it in /programming but my only real passion is designing and playing video games. it's a really hard industry to get into.

I know of an open source video game project I could involve myself with but the devs involved are total jackasses and I'm not sure I want to deal with them more, it was thoroughly unpleasant last time.

I could try to make my own game and see where that goes but I'm not super confident in my ability to do so on my own.

almost the exact same thing with nearly the exact same system happened to my aunt, but she's since moved to a different field.

i had to google this reference lol but it's really good

the only thing I'm 100% confident I know a lot about is winning in hearthstone but I'm not sure how much of a market there is for books in that area. someone recently posted a link to a pretty decent one in the /hearthstone sub-sub-forum.

i agree with this.

i don't know if i really know that many people. i don't socialize and i have few friends, no close ones. I just work and study and play video games.

I'm not in danger of not finishing. I can fail every course from here til june and still graduate.

I've never received below a B- in a course before and that was one course, a weird outlier and I 100% believe I got screwed somehow. It's mostly an ego thing that I want to try to finish these last 2 quarters with a B/B+ average.

I am glad this thread was so well received, I hesitated to post it and sort of dreaded reading the responses this morning but I am really encouraged. thank you

There's always this:

Grunching from the OP, but definitely change your living environment. Can't imagine having my landlord in my affairs.

I personally would look for work in a new city/state, and when January rolls around you'll be able to fund moving and a solid, well appointed place to live. Fresh start.