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Last year i finished with a bachelor degree in computer science and now I am working for a pretty big company as a software developer. The purpose of this blog if mostly to give a very important advice to anyone who is in the same field as me.
Here, you get a bachelor degree in computer science after 4 years in university.
During the first year, I realized that we were only learning technical stuff (hard skills). Knowing I somewhat lacked in social skills I decided to do something about it. I got some advice about joining a student association (or student organization - I don't know the exact term on how it's translated into English). At my university, the largest such association was BEST (Board of European Student in technology), which (as the name implies) a multinational association located in multiple technological based universities.
They had me for an interview (both solo and team interview) and somehow i passed both of them. But during these interviews i realized something. The group of people I would have been joining, were more or less similar to me. They didn't exactly give me the "WOW this people is really great" vibe. I decided not to join them. Later I found out that I was part of the 40 people out of 300 applicants that were accepted.
Luckily I had also applied to another association, but not from my university, but from a business university. While I didn't realize the importance at that time, this association had just joined a large confederation (know as JADE) which is the second largest in the world (after AIESEC). They were no longer just an association, but a JE (Junior Enterprise).
My knowledge of Photoshop and HTML was something that they were searching for but couldn't find in their recruitment process inside the business university. I got accepted and joined their advertising department.
While at first it was obvious my interest in technology and programming wasn't exactly clicking with their interests, there I learned what I now consider my greatest asset: my ability to adapt to any situation and any person.
They even had a project related to IT....which I joined and even got to negotiate some contracts with big IT companies. In my time in this JE, I even managed to become part of their board of managers (as the manager of the Advertising department). I was their first ever (in their 10 year history) manager from a technical school.
I now admit that I didn't learn anything new on the technical side, but the soft skills were invaluable.
I got to speak in front of over 200 people, I now know how to negotiate and how to best present myself.
Each summer I had internships at IT companies and NOT ONE (technical or HR) interviewer ever cared or asked me about my time in the JE. But that wasn't important. The important thing was that I was never nervous and even when I didn't know the exact answer to a question I knew how to respond properly. Those are things I couldn't have learned anywhere else.
My advice to anyone currently enrolled in computer science or thinking about it:
- join a student association/organization/whatever. It will differentiate you from the other 90% of students who do nothing
- soft skills are really important and you should develop them.
Sorry for the long blog
 
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Hey, thanks for the advice. Many of us are lost during college or afterwards due to lack of initiative on our part. I feel that one of the greatest mistakes a student can make is to wait. No one will come after you and offer you a job, or at least that is very rare. Having experience before finishing college is great and it really helps in landing a job.
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Or just do a ton of interviews. I sent out a shit ton of applications for internships each semester during school, and had days where I had half a dozen interviews. Even after one semester of that, I was pretty much unphased by any interview.
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Interesting, so you're saying that the 3-4 years of involvement in an association was a valuable enough experience gap between you and other applicants that you got the job where they did not?
We hire almost entirely on hard skills because they are much more difficult to develop for the type of programming we do. The soft skills are learned by doing on the job, mostly. Beginning training of the soft skills 3-4 years earlier would be great, but much of our interview process is derived out of how to see through "correct" answers to whether or not you would want this person's code in your system. This is based on the idea that soft skills can be trained on the job without too much difficult.
It's very subjective to the environment you're trying to work in. A larger company requires some maneuvering in order to get things done, but in a small company, it's a whole different ball game.
That said, it was my ability to write a coherent e-mail that got me my job now, since the intersection between C coders and people who can talk to other people while looking them in the eye is almost the null set.
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I'm getting to do more and more job interviews in my current position, biggest advice I can give so far:
don't lie in your resume. first of all, you'd probably be nervous about it, and being nervous is never that good. And secondly, your interviewer will have learned the hard way to give you some practical task.
I had a total clusterfuck of an interview yesterday, I asked him one tech question and the answer he gave was so bad I should have ended it there and then. However, for political reasons I had to waste almost an hour on that turd.
In my work environment (startup starting to get a bit bigger, lots of contractors) the soft skills don't really matter that much, in big corporations, this is of course different.
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Thanks for sharing your experience. It's probably applicable for people in the "soft" fields too, to spend some time getting a basic working knowledge of technical and scientific subjects. In either case it opens up communication with a whole bunch of people.
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This sounds like good advice. What are you supposed to answer if you don't know a question? Just be honest and say you don't know it?
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Or give a solid background of your thought process in answering the question, ending in a "but that's where I would have to go look this up, probably by asking a coworker or google"
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Good post. I work for a large international consulting company that primarily focuses on technology/systems implementations. I was CS for a year in undergrad but switched to English and briefly lived in the fear that I would be unemployable because I basically had no hard skills. I was fortunate to get a job with my current firm, and what I have found over time is that hard skills are great to have - they can open a lot of doors because they are less ambiguous and add more quantifiable value; they're also easier to commodtize.
That being said, I think if you look at senior management (directors, VPs, C-suites), particularly in larger companies, you'll generally see a steep rise in soft skills. I also see a lot of brilliant technical resources that have trouble making the transition to more senior roles because those roles are highly dependent on a fairly sophisticated soft skill base.
Tl;dr, there's a place for both hard and soft skills in a professional environment. If you're all hard skills, it will be more difficult to take on jobs that are deep on people management; if you're all soft skills, it will be more difficult to establish credibility based on quantifiable contributions. I expect my teams to be honest with themselves about which side they need to work on, and to find the right balance for their careers and the firm's needs.
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I am a second year computer science student myself and i have been working on my soft skills aswell. I also joined a student union last year, where i organize trips to nearby countries twice a year. My grades are excellent and I am also following the university's honours course (following an extra curriculum and stuff).
Even though these things I do, I dont really feel comfortable looking forward when I am done with my study. I feel the study is very theoretic with all the math and stuff (ofcourse we learn how to program, but just programming isn't enough right?). Am I totally wrong feeling this way? Or is it a little bit true and should the experience come mostly from your very first real job?
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Scrubs: I'm interested in what folks might say that are working in very specific technical fields. Most of my friends that are deep on the technical side (engineering, coding, etc.) participated in internships or co-ops either during the school year or on longer holidays. I think these are good ways to get a better sense of what life is like in a "real job", but it's healthy to recognize that even these are a bit different from the real thing.
At my company we hire interns in their junior or senior years during their summer holidays to come work on actual client projects. The internships vary quite a bit from project to project, but you report to a manager, are responsible for deliverables or some type of work product (could be coding in some cases), and are evaluated at the end of your program; typically if you do a really good job you get an offer with the company for when you graduate. I didn't come in through this program, but thought it was a cool way for students to get a bit more hands-on experience with the job itself, and to let people in the company see if these students would make good additions to project teams.
A side benefit of the program was that everyone goes out together, so you can see what it's like to spend time with people in a combined work/social setting. I remember going out to bars with some interns on a project I worked on, and...well, let's say that some demonstrated a little more professionalism than others ; )
I think if you can find these kinds of opportunities, it can be good exposure for you (so you know what kind of job you'd like to take) and it's useful on a resume because you can convey more concrete/material work experience to potential employers.
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@obesechicken13:
I'd generally expect some counter questions to at least establish what area the problem falls in, and then either something along the lines of using some diagnostic tools for further analysis, or going down the right avenues for finding solutions to software problems on the internet.
I presented a problem on a vista laptop to him where copy&paste out of libre-office does result in a windows error sound and sometimes a popup of 'clipboard: resource currently not available'.
Legit answers would have been to check the windows system logs via event viewer (technical approach), or probably google, with an emphasis on the official windows knowledgebase, or the libreoffice (and openoffice, which it is based on) forums.
@Scrubs: The experience should come from some pet project(s) you adopt. Some open source stuff you put on the net and support, some project on sourceforge you work on, some actual work at uni (the next IT department here for example built their own linux distro, a buddy of mine wrote the drivers for cd burners in it). Or of course you decide to start at an absolute junior position and work your way up.
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I'm actually taking a course on soft skills this semester, even though I don't have problems with adapting to people/situations or talking infront of people, etc.
But I am looking forward to still learn a thing or two during the course.
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On April 13 2013 02:46 obesechicken13 wrote:
This sounds like good advice. What are you supposed to answer if you don't know a question? Just be honest and say you don't know it?
If that sounds like something you've heard of, mention it but explicitly say that you don't know.
A lot of technical interviewers will deliberately ask questions with no intention for you to get it right -of course it would be a bonus if you do- but would they rather see your thought process as they guide you towards the answer.
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On April 13 2013 04:46 Rimstalker wrote:
@obesechicken13:
I'd generally expect some counter questions to at least establish what area the problem falls in, and then either something along the lines of using some diagnostic tools for further analysis, or going down the right avenues for finding solutions to software problems on the internet.
I presented a problem on a vista laptop to him where copy&paste out of libre-office does result in a windows error sound and sometimes a popup of 'clipboard: resource currently not available'.
Legit answers would have been to check the windows system logs via event viewer (technical approach), or probably google, with an emphasis on the official windows knowledgebase, or the libreoffice (and openoffice, which it is based on) forums.
Thanks. That's a very specific and non bullshit answer like saying that you'd just google the question and that you don't feel like it's something worth memorizing.
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This is so true. So many people who have hard skills like computer science or math will look down on those who are not as well versed in those hard skills while never considering "soft skill" things like "okay, I know what I'm thinking is right - can I now explain this in a way this other person will get?" I can't claim that I'm the master of that myself, but I'm trying - and trying to learn those kinda skills (and recognizing that as a valuable skill) is just as important to others as learning the harder skills is to us.
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Good advice, thanks for sharing. It's definitely true that we often forget about the skills that involve explaining ideas to others, interacting, and working in a team environment etc. ^^
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Being socially awkward is definitely worse than having an empty brain. I'm sure those with great soft skills would be able to pick up hard skills along the way even if they weren't developed well in the earlier years.  Nice long blog post to get me think about what do I really want to achieve in my 4 years of university.
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Luckily I'm great with people and giving presentations because I'm not that intelligent and I'll be studying Physics/Math haha.
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I work as a software developer in a consulting company and I just want to say how absolutely correct you are when it comes to soft skills being extremely important. At least as a consultant you can be an absolute genious when it comes to technology, but if you can't communicate with your customer properly you are just not fit to be a consultant at least. Internally we have own courses to teach employees soft skill, presentation skill, etc...
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EPT
