How to Get a Job in Silicon Valley?

Parents Forum
21

Look at a bunch of job postings of today and see how this would match a graduating student in 5 years. All in all, do NOT expect a miracle from the school name alone. The reality is a bit different: top schools attract top students and among those, chances are that companies have their pick of the litter. However, that does not mean that students who were competitive or did not get one of those 1 out 20 slots at the Stanford of the world are necessarily unable to land great jobs in the industry. A great coder might have a mere high school degree – if that much!

Have the kid take a look at buzzwords such as Python, Ruby on Rails, and similar terms that float around in 2015. Inasmuch as graduating from a school such as Stanford helps --for the reason written above-- the industry has a lot more capacity than for the few hundreds who come out from the Farm on a annual basis.

Fwiw, the same applies to “internships” as some are very nice but hardly essential. Internships are easily the most overrated element of transitioning between school and a real job. Many internships are mere abusive tools that profit from an overblown reputation and the insecurities of parents and their kids and … do NOT lead to great jobs.

All in all, kids from obscure schools get jobs every day in Silicon Valley!

22

Be sure he keeps his GPA up. That was important to several of the internship sites and employers. Certainly if he can get an internship in SV in the summer between semesters I think it couldn’t hurt! Older s did have job offers from his summer internships but they were not what he wanted to do, so declined them. The internships on his resume probably didn’t hurt, but probably didn’t matter a lot for the direction he chose.

23

Actually, “internship” in the CS world typically refers to a well paid summer job or summer+semester co-op job, not the kind of unpaid internship that seems to be the entry-level job in some industries where the number of applicants is far greater than the number of paid entry-level jobs.

24

If this kid is good the big Silcon Valley firms will provide summer housing. The question is what he needs to do to compensate for not being at a pipeline skill. Xiggi is right it’s about skills and experience. Having an internship straight out of high school would be helpful. Use those connections. My son worked for my brother’s firm for two years. That gave him a bunch of experience that made him desirable. His first college internship was at Nvidea and then at Google. Google offered him a permanent job.

I don’t know everything my son did, but among other things:

In high school:
Taught himself Linux
Did programming for Civ 4 mod
Took the MIT open courseware course in Scheme
Did some volunteer work for a local med school doing some modeling (helps to have a Dad and a friend of his Dad who needed help)
Job shadowed one summer at a computer firm where he impressed people so much they gave him some projects and hired him full time the following summer. He learned SQL (and probably other stuff) for this job at some point
He spent a lot of free time teaching himself - he read computer manuals for fun - he could program in VBasic in elementary school and learned Java in middle school and eventually became something of an expert on the Linux Kernel.

Google is on record for saying that they have learned that it’s not all about GPA and big name schools. If he’s smart and driven he can get where he wants from anywhere.

25

ucbalumnus beat me to it–CS internships are a very different beast than the type of unpaid internship seen in many other fields.

One of the really useful things that my D got from one of her summer internships was learning that she really didn’t want a certain type of work environment/company culture. Nice to be able to learn that over a college summer.

26

Have to agree that the type of internship matters. Older s had the high paying type with big name companies, with lots of employee perks including discount stock purchasing (just sold the stock to help pay for his house) . Younger s had lower paying but helpful internships that gave him experience in areas that were useful in career pursuits. Neither are in CS , but in other areas of engineering. Older s got his internships through his college career fairs. Younger s got his through personal contacts. Both ultimately ended up in the same place, so there are multiple routes to these opportunities .

27

It depends on the company, but in general they do not limit themselves to top… schools. For example, few would call San Jose State a “top 20 school” since it is not ranked as a national university on USNWR, yet according to LinkedIn, a larger number of software engineers working in Silicon Valley attended SJS than any other college. This pattern also occurs at some companies that new grads tend to think of as especially desirable. For example, at Apple’s Silicon Valley location, there are more software engineers on LinkedIn who attended SJS than any other college. A full list of companies that employed recent SJS grads is at http://www.sjsu.edu/careercenter/employers/salary-data/sjsuHiringEmployersReport_2011-12.pdf , which includes a good number of quality SV tech companies.

Attending the local SV state university (with a good number of CS grads), such as SJS, will likely put him at an advantage for SV employment over the more prestigious out of state university. There are going to more SV employers attending career fairs and other on campus recruiting including for internships; there are going to be more connections to SV area companies in general with more alumni; etc. That said SV employers are also going to consider the out of state applicants who apply, even if they may not have as much (or in some cases any) on campus recruiting and such.

28

UCB, while my comment could be distorted as only applying to your “typical” summer filler for liberal arts, business, or other “lite” majors, it ALSO applies to a number of CS internships. It is a known (and despicable) facts that a great number of startups are bragging about their ability to recruit “staff” for the summer for no compensation and pretend that jobs would be available when the small company wins the VC or Angel lottery.

Next to the world of Stanford sophomores and juniors getting a taste of Facebook or Google, there are plenty of garages where people are expected to sweat during a SV summer with little to no realistic chance of a landing a decent job.

Nothing is ever black on white, but there are many ways for employers to evaluate candidates that do NOT include the rite of passage that is an internship. I, for one, will consider (with a high degree of skepticism and huge grain of salt) a list of internships but absolutely NOT consider it a sine qua non condition for extending an offer. Internships are hardly as important or relevant as people have made them. Again, their ubiquitous existence is in direct relation with a poor economy and the fact that applicants are prepared to make huge sacrifices to upper their chances.

Internships in 2015 are the “necessary” Suzuki mastery of the 90s!

PS None of the above intimates that it is better for a student to spend a lazy summer “hanging out” or touring the wineries of Tuscany. It only means that people have successfully gained employment without having ever interned, and that students who accumulated plenty internships in college found that their experience amounted to little to nothing when looking for a first job.

29

We have a young family friend who went to CSU Chico and is now working for a big CS company. This person was NOT a CS major! In fact, she double majored in two subjects that generate eye-rolling around here in terms of employability.

S1 is at a big SV firm. Went to an excellent, but non-obvious college as a math major, but had a lot of programming background.

– self-taught C++, Java, Haskell, Python (and who knows what else)

– got involved in ICPC (int’l level collegiate programming competition, as both participant and assistant coach). There are also various coding competitions sponsored by various SV companies. If nothing else, these are good way to develop skills and see what kinds of things employers value.

– got involved in open source coding after his freshman year and made substantial contributions. He continued that in his free time (and time he should have been studying for his other courses…) through the rest of UG. He now works in the department for whom he was doing open course, and is doing language development, large data and other things. This was probably the most important factor in getting his employer’s attention. They knew he could do do excellent programming, found problems in what was already out there, was willing to listen to suggestions, and worked as a team member.

– did USACO (Olympiad programming competitions) – I mention this because they have an outstanding curriculum online for folks who want to learn algorithm-based programming skills vs. coding.

– he worked two summers in academic CS research and two summers at a big SV company (though neither were at the SV offices).

My advice is to get out there and work on projects, whether for pay, open-source or for a non-profit. Develop critical thinking skills. The big firms have you solve problems on the fly on phone and online interviews, but what they want to see is how you work under pressure and how you think, not so much coding skills. Big SV is not for everyone. I have friends IRL and through CC whose kids are in a variety of CS-related positions all over the country.

Academically, take as much math as possible. CS is much easier when one has a solid background in math. A math/CS major can be a very useful credential.

Agree with getting on LinkedIn and keeping it updated. One of my younger S’s friends got his summer internship (not CS) and FT job after graduation from LinkedIn – an employer saw his profile, liked the variety of things this student had done, and hired him. S’s friend never sent out a resume to them.

30

I believe college name is not everything but you can reference this list. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/12/17/the-top-10-colleges-that-fuel-the.html?page=all

31

Yes, this. Though (again, seen through the lens of one student’s job search) some firms are looking for the best possible coders, and others are looking for the thinking skills. Or both, for that matter. :slight_smile:

There are plenty of paid CS summer internships outside of SV, especially in cities.

32

Don’t Silicon Valley recruiters go to job fairs at any other CS schools???

33

I don’t even know why CS calls them internships. Not only were they incredibly well paid they paid transportation and housing costs.

I’d forgotten about the various computer contests. One summer we had to interrupt our vacation to get our son to an internet connection for some contest Google was running at the time.

34

Looks like you are referring to pre-funding startups, where the compensation tends to be in founders’ stock or some such. Of course, most of those never get very far, so such stock compensation usually ends up worthless. But there are plenty of other employers (both public companies and pre-IPO companies that have passed the initial VC/angel funding so that they have the money) for CS students to find summer or co-op jobs at where one gets (in addition to work experience) actual money for one’s work.

A CS major should not feel any obligation to take a summer or co-op job at a pre-funding startup where the compensation may only be in stock that likely ends up worthless, since there are plenty of other employers offering jobs for CS majors that pay in actual money.

35

Post #33, I’ve heard my daughter mentioned unpaid internships starting Freshman year, lots of kids are doing it but I poopooed the idea. If she didn’t get paid internship somewhere that paid for housing and transportation, she has to take local job that pays at least minimum wage and lives at home. Luckily that is not an option this summer.

36

My son never asked about working summers non-paid. Even when he was at a start-up, he was paid well. I guess if the student really believed in a start-up, he’d or she would work for stock. I learn something new from CC all the time.

37

Maybe the kid can call the job placement office at the school that the kid is interested in and find out which silicon valley companies recruit there

38

You know, companies and individuals pay recruiters big money to bring them the best heads. It would be depressing to think they camped out at a few institutions and didn’t look for bright young talent everywhere.

39

When S1 was in college, major SV recruiters would hold networking events (and even coding competitions or workshops) in major cities. These were open to students from the entire area, not just well-known colleges. One could check with career planning and placement on campus or check the companies’ websites for info. They also gave out cool swag, prizes and food. (Know thy audience!)

Will also say that at S1’s employer, those folks at recruiting events are often software engineers. S and DIL have both done recruitment on campuses and at other regional events. They are not directly involved in hiring, but are there to meet people, talk to them, share their experiences and potentially give a heads up to HR on interesting folks.

Networking – it’s not just a hardware thing!

40

CS recruitment is a mix of job fairs and online recruitment. D1 found jobs both ways–and again, she did not attend a big name CS school. And as CountingDown says, many CS job fairs are regional.