Re:Ask HN: Why isn't there any feedback for job finders?
by HeyLaughingBoy on Tuesday July 27, 2010 @08:17PM
(#1553151)
For a junior position, I think one of the best ways to show what you can do is to have a side project you've worked on. At that level we normally don't care about your leadership ability, skill at designing scalable architectures or knowledge of the domain, etc. We really want to know if you can take a design and produce good code from it and if we would like working with you. The former can be very difficult to ascertain in an interview for a number of reasons.
If you have a project that you can point to, particularly if you have a URL on your resume, or some other way the technical interviewer(s) can see it before the interview, you're well ahead of everyone else.
Honestly during my last three years of college I made a huge wrong journey. I spent all my free time by solving general algorithm puzzles posted in the web such as top coder practice, Facebook coding challenge, RapLeaf coding challenge and their nature. I thought that was the best way to score an interview.
Now that I am interested in applying for a startup, I realized that real projects that involve a diversity of technologies actually gives you more credential rather than technical knowledges. But it is a bit too late.
I better start grabbing some of my small algorithm codes and put it online now.