Importance of Job Experience in Co-op

[Snario]

Hey, I'm in Computer Science first year and have co-op next Summer. I'm wondering will I have a hard time if I don't have any job experience? My friend stresses to me that work of any kind (even completely irrelevant to the field in which I'm applying) is very important to have, but I feel as though open-source projects would be looked at as more interesting to a potential employer.

Also how relevant are your marks? If I were to show up with a transcript of all high 90s, is that common or would employers be really impressed?

Basically, is my friend right? Would an employer really lift someone with a years experience at a restaurant over someone else with no experience that is otherwise just as qualified?

[Tony]

it... depends.

If the employer is looking for a warm body to run through manual QA test scripts and fetch coffee -- they'd likely be more interested in your ability to not post questionable facebook statuses from the stress of dealing with shitty retail customers.

If the employer actually expects you to develop something technical, actual skills and relevant experience begin to matter.

Marks are important in a way that most of your peers will not have any relevant work experience when applying to that first job, and you're all taking the same courses anyway... so marks are one of the few distinguishing factors here.

Marks are also important if you aspire to work at a place such as Google -- apparently University grades are the only thing that has any kind of a correlation with long-term technical performance; so they pay attention to those numbers. Of course you'd also need to take the hard CS courses to grind out the experience needed to get through the technical interviews... it's a delicate balance.

[Dan]

It should also be pointed out that you probably are going to be looking at a placement with a smaller more local company for your first co-op job. Smaller companies tend to have less policies in place about hiring technical people and it can be far more dependent on the individual interviewer what is important. Having a technical interview done by an HR person can be... interesting.

[mirhagk]

My company hired off of whether the person knew how to program at all (solve FizzBuzz) and knew English. Only 1 candidate of about 10 that applied actually had both skills. The others either were copy-paste programmers, or couldn't communicate in English.

The most important thing is to be honest IMO. If you don't know the answer to a question, just say that. Take a guess if you can, but always let them know you're guessing. The worst candidate we ever had was a phone interview where the person literally googled the answer to every question.

[Aange10]

mirhagk wrote:

(solve FizzBuzz)

Turing:

var myString : string := "" for i : 0 .. 20     if i mod 3 = 0 then         myString += Fizz     end if     if i mod 5 = 0 then         myString += Buzz     end if     if myString not= "" then         put myString     else         put i     end if         myString := "" end for

<3

[mirhagk]

Yeah that's one way, although technically Fizz and Buzz aren't declared, and personally for a problem this small they should just be constants inline. Also the myString string should probably just be defined inside the for loop so that you don't have to reset it each time.

One of the benefits of Fizz Buzz is discussions like that, but the major benefit is that you can't program it unless you understand programming (or have seen it before) and it requires very little knowledge, just loops and if statements.

[Aange10]

I meant "Fizz" and "Buzz", sorry. And that would define the variable 20 times. Where our intent is to change it to "". If it didn't define it 20 times, it sometime during the running had to decide that it was defined, and then go and do what we were doing anyways.

[mirhagk]

Efficiency-wise it's pretty much the exact same (I'm not sure if locals in that context are allocated on the stack, but either it it doesn't matter).

Logically there is a big difference. Variables should only be defined in the scope that they are actually used. There is no need to have myString defined after the fact, and that actually could be characterized as a memory leak (you have a variable that simply sits there and doesn't get used, just takes up space).

[Aange10]

Oh interesting! Didn't think of that.

It's too bad boolean evaluations wont return 0 and 1 in Turing. I was going to do something like

Turing:

for i : 0 .. 20     put "" + ( "Fizz" * (i mod 3 = 0) + "Buzz" * (i mod 5 = 0) ) end for

[Tony]

but here you just want value of 0 to map to 0, while values 1,2,3,4 would map to 1. So you could do a bit of math transformation here

code:

for i : 0 .. 20    put ceil((i mod 3) / 5) end for

[Aange10]

Hmm. But then how would you add fizzbuzz? But wow, great logic.

[mirhagk]

@Aagne, the great thing of the problem is how inefficient it is. That code you had wouldn't work because you still need it to output the number if it's neither fizz nor buzz. That'd require storing it in a variable and then doing an additional if statement.

I did something similar by calculating a number from 0 to 3 based off of something like:

code:

(i mod 3)+(i mod 5)*2

and used that as an index of an array of strings, but while being shorter, and kinda clever it's still terribly inefficient.

[Snario]

I've never had a job, so in the experience portion of my resume, there isn't anything there. The closest thing I can think of that would be regarded as experience is that from ages 12-14 I created an online forum that had around 30,000 members; but that would be too unusual to mention as experience, I think.

Am I ok for co-op? My marks are great, but I lack experience.

[Tony]

Snario @ Tue Oct 09, 2012 6:32 pm wrote:

but that would be too unusual to mention as experience, I think.

Am I ok for co-op? My marks are great, but I lack experience.

Unusual is fine, if you can make it sound relevant.

Something important to realize -- a resume's only purpose is to get you to an interview. Unusual is fine (it might grab some attention). It will be a lot of hard work, but if you can write resumes targeted at specific companies (instead of throwing everything you've ever done together), then any individual application has a better chance of not going straight to the trash (generic cover letters are the worst).

[mirhagk]

I agree hugely with Tony's point of targeted resumes. I hate when schools have kids make resumes and then say "so now you'll have a resume that you can just make a little update to to hand out". Unless you're applying for a minimum wage job you don't care about, you should take the time to research the company, and make a personalized resume.

When I was going through resumes with my supervisor we noticed and put emphasis on whatever candidates actually took the time to research the company beyond the job application. So long as those candidates could write decently we brought them in. With co-ops you're not expected to know, you're expected to learn. Researching the company shows you actually want the job, and care enough to look into what it is.