Com2Kid's Journal: Dear Western Washington U: Your career fairs suck

Dear Western Washington University:

Thank you for the wonderful education. Your focus on professors who love to teach works wonderfully.

What the hell is up with your career fairs? THEY SUCK. THEY COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY SUCK.

You do not even HAVE a high tech career fair. Redfin does not come. Expedia came ONCE last year and apparently decided that we suck so much not to bother coming again[1]. MS comes, thankfully. Boeing is actually doing technical recruiting this year up here (thanks in part to the 3 WWU engineering and CS[2] students who where interns down there last summer, woohoo!), but NOBODY ELSE IS COMING.

UW has an ENTIRE science and technology career fair. We have 3 companies. W-T-F. The incompetence is amazing.

This would be slightly understandable, except that EVERY company who I have discussed our curriculum with has loved it. Why? Well here is a brief overview:

• Unit testing based grading of assignments. %50-%60 of the assignments grade is based upon unit test results
• Software engineering. Including Extreme Programing, and Agile.
• Software Testing. JUnit, Python testing scripts.
• POSIX, WIN32, and .NET
• Cross platform network code.
• Almost EVERY professor grades on code readability as well as functionality.
• Every single class is fully taught by a Professors for the full amount of credit hours, NOT by TAs.

Oh and I have not yet even mentioned Java RMI, Java Beans, SQL, PHP, Perl, C#, C, and C++.

For kicks, we also do 3 quarters in Ada95. So yah, we can write stuff under B&D scenarios as well.

[1]Granted this is because the recruitor was a fool who only interviewed people who had "SQL" on their resume, we are CS, we can learn SQL in 10 seconds, and whatever we learn in school is only worth 10 seconds of book reading anyway!. He ended up interviewing all the departments really nice students, but NONE of our top students. Bleck!

[2] The CS dude would be me.

we can learn SQL in 10 seconds

[tomhudson]

> DELETE from "Candidates" WHERE "Comments" like "%can learn SQL in 10 seconds%"
> 3124 rows deleted
> select count(*) from "Candidates
> 3

Not to be mean, but while you can learn the basics in an afternoon, there's a big diff between "learning SQL in 10 seconds" and actually being able to use it without running into "gotchas". Companies don't want to have to train someone for something that they should already know. You should know SQL before pretty much any scripting language if you want to be

Re:

[Com2Kid]

The recruiter was looking for students who just knew basis select and join type stuff. That can be learned in a few seconds, and is in of itself no reason to weed out candidates.

SQL has many gotchas, but they are not going to be learned in College!

Re:

[tomhudson]

True, but anyone who doesn't mention that they have some SQL knowledge (especially in this day and age of credential puffery) isn't going to get the nod.

So next time, if you know a bit, why not mention it in your resume and you'll stand out from those who didn't bother mentioning it?

Re:

[Com2Kid]

I did not have any SQL experience at the time. Of course a quarter later (the internship started in summer, it was the winter career fair), I did.

Bleck.

As I said, the guy didn't do a very good job screening candidates.

Limited reinvestment

[andy314159pi]

Modern companies aren't reinvesting in research and/or technology development because the payoff takes too long. I'm sure there are notable exceptions, but they'll be just that...