I had a great time at Cornell’s engineering fair. It was incredibly humbling and a great opportunity and blessing to be in a room with such fantastic companies. I really enjoyed meeting the sizable Cornell Google Team. I got to talk to the Facebook team in private this evening which was a lot of fun. Dropbox is getting to be a big deal, especially with Apple‘s bid for them — I thought our conversation went well, and they gave me a Tshirt and 5GB of extra storage (definitely the best freebie of the day). I got a preliminary interview with Yelp, which seems to keep a really fun culture. There were a lot of other fantastic companies there, like Box, Palantir, as well as a few hedge funds and HFT shops.
It was interesting seeing the fair. I have a few observations. A lot of people–I dare say most people– wore suits. I firmly believe that is utterly out of place at an engineering fair, unless you only want to talk to Goldman Sachs. A lot of people wearing suits were wearing them wrong too–poorly matched ties, ill fitting shirts, etc…. At a lot of these startups it says you completely misunderstand their culture. In fact, my suspicion was validated by Pivotal Labs who went out of their way to thank me for dressing down. I went with denim and oxford with rolled sleeves. That might not be ideal, but I hope it exudes that casual/serious feel that I think companies are looking for in engineers.
The other thing I tried that I think worked well was not “resume pushing.” A lot of employers aren’t trying to kill trees these days and want to learn about the candidate and get the info online, not necessarily get a huge stack of paper CVs. This allowed me to get to know the person, the company, and their desires before they needed a resume.
Finally, I tried to keep my resume in the 21st century by featuring my Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn usernames. Google and Dropbox both commented on it and thought it was really unique and cool that I did that. The days of the standard serif-font one-size-fits all resume are over.
