Today I was [un]fortunate enough to be invited to a recruitment event for engineers. Never mind how it happened. I’m a computer science student, what can I do in an engineering company? Turns out not a lot.
One of the main events of the evening was speed dating with employers where each student got to spend five minutes with each employer. So what does a computer science student say to an employer who is looking to hire photo voltaic or mechanical engineers? What do they say to me?
The conversations were varied. I’ll make up some fake names, not to protect the innocent, but I honestly can’t remember all of their names.
John and Steve didn’t know what a computer science students did, so I tried to explain. That is when I realized that my degree is so broad that even I wasn’t sure exactly what computer science is all about. A computer science student will rarely continue to pursue the maths and science behind computing, many won’t even study much of it. Some of us focus on low level software such as operating systems, while others are interested in abstract subjects such as artificial intelligence and formal verification. A large number of us will end up working 9-5 in the IT department of a multinational corporation, a few of us will go into R&D, many more will change careers completely. It was like describing an arts degree.
One of the first things that Bill said to me was “I’ll be honest with you, we don’t really hire any computer science people”. Direct and honest, I liked that. It’s something that we both knew from the beginning, and getting that out of the way let us move into a more interesting conversation. Others like Jeff tried unsuccessfully to see where I might fit in, “well, we have an IT department, we have about 12 IT people [out of a company of hundreds of engineers] working to help our engineers.” It was nice of him, but unnecessary. I mean, we both know that there’s a 0% chance that I’ll be asking for a graduate job there, so why beat around the bush? It’s social courtesy to try and be nice and leave a sense of hope, but in this case, doing so only made it awkward.
It was clear early on that I was not a match for any of these companies, and knowing that was the chance to turn the conversation around the other direction and ask the employers a lot of questions rather than talking about myself. It was much more interesting to hear about their experiences, especially in managing engineers and other technical people. Since all of them have engineering backgrounds they could go into a lot more detail about what their companies did than an HR or worse a recruitment firm person who will only give a superficial talk about how they encourage creative thinking and foster young minds in a global professional environment, and other jargon from their mission statement.
I had mentioned that I prefer to work for smaller startup companies rather than large multinationals to Glenn. Take some risks while I’m young, and be an entrepreneur. Glenn advised me otherwise. “Work for a big company first and learn how it works,” he advised, “it’s very hard to go from small company to big company, but very easy the other way around”. He has a good point, working in a large company can give me a much broader view of how businesses work, I’ll probably have a much bigger and powerful network to be able to bootstrap a startup company. However, I don’t necessary agree given the likely circumstances. It’s too easy to get too comfortable living on a stable salary. By the time I have enough experience and big enough network to bootstrap a new venture, it might be too late, I probably wouldn’t give up a stable job and take that kind of risk if I’m say, 30 or over.
