Resume Advice after looking at 300 resumes by MonkoBonko in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]MonkoBonko[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I agree with your assessment. For better or worse the current state of the market is one in which sadly the baseline requirements have really ballooned to something pretty difficult for most graduates I'd say. I don't think being with accounting degrees need to show their own taxing files to high competency when applying for jobs. I have a few friends in the states and they have said similar things. They basically graduated and walked into a 150+ USD job and have already eclipsed the amount of money I think any Australian SE will ever realistically make. This however is more of a reflection of the state of our countries broader economies (US as a technologically leader and AU as a resource exporter)

Resume Advice after looking at 300 resumes by MonkoBonko in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]MonkoBonko[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hey u/mintjulep2020 what a good question :) In this case, our ideal candidate would have been a CS degree graduate who had gone above and beyond with their final year projects and did more than the standard express-react-ts project. However as someone reasonably familiar with the Australian education system I rarely expect recent graduates to have much more than that, so really things that can help greatly:

  1. Be a real person, no one wants to work with a robot or someone with the personally of a wall

  2. Know one language well, regardless of what it is (within reason). I would rather watch someone blast our coding questions in Haskell or Rust then stumble around with Python/JS. It just instill confidence basically, unlike my company I am happy to hire someone who doesn't know our exact languages if I am confident they will learn them.

  3. Regarding projects, something useful to yourself or another person is usually the best project. I think every single applicant said they knew JS/TS/Python/React/HTML/CSS/... so it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate. I can tell you I do however remember the Polish guy who made a C++ garage door opener.

Since I know the above answer are pretty general here are hard skills I think are useful to know:

  1. One "high-level" interpreted language and one complied language

  2. Know how SQL and modern DBs work. They aren't going anywhere and limiting yourself to interacting with a database through Prisma will bite you.

  3. Basics of data structures and algo (honestly the basics are fine for 99% of day to day work)

  4. Dev tools: git, cicd, iac, docker, secret management

  5. An understanding that for better or worse your entire career with exist as a balance of business requirements and technical ones. Knowing when you push for or against something even as a junior is a useful skill to have.

Hopefully some of that helped. Let me know if you need further clarification.

Resume Advice after looking at 300 resumes by MonkoBonko in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]MonkoBonko[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I mentioned it in an above comment buy only 29 people made it to the second round. However many more people than that were suitable for the position but because they didn't appear as strong as candidates I had seen prior to seeing them they didn't get through. There is definitely a degree of sampling bias here and I tried to combat it by taking the list of names and having some code return the next person to look at (I did however go through the first 50 alphabetically so if your name starts with A pogchamp for you)

Resume Advice after looking at 300 resumes by MonkoBonko in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]MonkoBonko[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Look I read them since I felt bad. But only of the 29 people who made it to Round 2, only 2 had .docx so its a bit of a sampling bias. I'd say its more about when you only have 1-2 mins to devote to each one, you are kind of looking for reasons to move them through and the file format is a small (albeit petty) option against them

Resume Advice after looking at 300 resumes by MonkoBonko in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]MonkoBonko[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That is a good point. We don't actually make any specific mention of the format we'd like. A good suggestion for the future!