Why I Chose Android Last Year:

To back up a bit, I switched from an iPhone to Android last year for a few reasons:

• The iPhone mail client doesn’t support merged inboxes. This effectively meant that I couldn’t manage my work email from my phone, since I have one Gmail “page” manage multiple email addresses. (Yes, I know you can add multiple email accounts to an iPhone. But if I did that, then my sent items wouldn’t be merged.)
• I wanted to be able to send SMSs online (via Google Voice). The iPhone doesn’t let Google Voice override your outgoing calls’ caller ID, and so doesn’t support Google Voice well.
• I wanted to be able to create 4G wifi hotspots. Android supports this; iPhone doesn’t even support 4G.

Each of these were pretty huge value-adds of an Android for me. I knew the apps wouldn’t be as good on an Android, but what was that compared with the phone being superior in terms of the most common things I do on a phone (email and SMS)?

Why I Went Back to iPhone

What I didn’t expect was how frustrating the Android would be on a daily basis.

Certainly, the biggest issue was the battery life. It was terrible. My phone couldn’t even last a day with pretty minimal usage. I tried everything I could think off — re-installed the OS, upgraded to a new OS, got a new phone, tried different battery management apps, turned off 4G, etc. Nothing worked.

But even beyond the battery life, there were all sorts of little issues that made the phone feel very poorly designed and frustrating to use:

• Annoying notifications. The phone would vibrate / beep to alert me that the battery was fully charged. This means that every single night — and frequently right as I’m falling asleep — BUZZZZZZ. I know this isn’t a huge deal, but, who on earth thought this was a good feature? Poor design.
• Caller ID was slow. The caller ID would sometimes take 10 seconds or so to kick-in, so I often couldn’t tell who was calling. This presented a problem frequently with my building’s buzzer, which rang my phone. I wouldn’t realize it was the buzzer and wouldn’t think to buzz someone in.
• Google Voice issues. In order to send SMSs from my Google Voice number (which is the only number I wanted people to know of), I couldn’t use the built-in SMS app — only the Google Voice app. (If Google could fix the calling caller ID issue, why can’t they fix SMS?)
• Slow. The UI was frequently slow, non-responsive, and clunky. I hated using it.
• Frequent reboots. The phone would frequently freeze. I had to reboot it every several days. I’ve missed many phone calls because of this.
• Bloatware. The phone had a lot of pre-installed apps that you couldn’t remove without rooting the phone. I’m not talking about things like Calculator that you might actually want to use — I’m talking about golfing games and strange apps that most people would never use. It reminded me of the bloatware when you buy a new computer. (Yes, I did root the phone, but I shouldn’t have had to do that.)
• Poor app management. Apps were always sorted in alphabetical order. So when you installed a new app, or just wanted to find a specific one, it could be hard to find it. Yes, you can add “shortcuts,” but there was no real concept of grouping or re-ordering apps the way that the iPhone allows. This is particularly problematic given all the bloatware.
• GPS issues. The GPS often didn’t work on Google Maps.
• Navigation issues. Even when the GPS worked on Google Maps, somehow the GPS on the turn-by-turn Navigation app would rarely work. It worked at most 5% of the time.
• MMS / Google Voice issues. Google Voice just dropped MMS messages. That is, if someone sent me a picture, it would just… disappear. They would think that I received it, and I would never know that there was a message. There was no error message on either side. (Of course, this isn’t Android’s fault, but it is Google’s.) This became an even bigger issue when iPhone started supporting group SMS’, which also uses the MMS protocol. Friends would send me a group message and I would never receive it.

I know, I know — each one of these isn’t a big deal. But this is just a partial list, and all these tiny little issues add up to a phone that I hated using. The only thing I really loved about Android was the mail client, but that wasn’t enough to keep me.

Every time I used my Android phone it felt like a chore. And that’s why I switched.

[Related: How to Port a Number Out of Google Voice and into Verizon.]

There were a lot of things I loved about Google Voice — being able to send online, having a history of all my texts, being able to send/receive SMS while traveling internationally (without crazy fees) — but ultimately, the fact that messages would disappear was unacceptable. Why would they disappear? Because Google Voice doesn’t support MMS. While I don’t need to send my friends a pic every time I see a cute puppy, I do want to know when my friends send me a pic. Or, at the very least, they should know that the message was dropped. Google Voice fails to report any error message on either side. Not okay.

This issue became particularly problematic with iOS’ new iMessage functionality which supports group chat. This works on the MMS protocol, so, again, messages would vanish. People thought I was just being rude and not responding.

So, after much debate, I switched off of Google Voice. Plus, I hated my Android and Google Voice doesn’t work as well on an iPhone.

I couldn’t find much online about what to expect when porting out of Google Voice, so I thought I’d write up my experience. [For simplicity, I'll call 610 my Google Voice number and 650 my Verizon number. Prior to porting, my 610 number forwarded to my 650 Verizon number.]

1. I unlocked my Google Voice (610) number at www.google.com/voice/unlock. Because I’d previously ported that number into Google Voice, I didn’t have to pay anything. Unlocking appeared to happen instantly.
2. [Monday @2 pm PST] I went into the Verizon store to explain what I needed to do. I already had an existing Verizon contract, so they would need to switch my contract to the 610 Google Voice number. The representative appeared to understand what Google Voice was, but wasn’t very clear on how to go about this.
3. The Verizon rep talked to a manager and various people and eventually learned that he needed to port the (610) Google Voice number as though it were a land line number. 
4. Their system requires an account number. This is your Google Voice number (610). Apparently, this failed the first time he tried it (possibly he typed in the wrong number), but worked the second time. I spent about an hour in the shop total.
5. The Verizon rep explain what I should expect. He said it would take 2 to 10 business days, during which time I might not receive SMSs. When I left the shop, nothing had changed. My old non-Google Voice Verizon number was still active. I continued to get calls and SMSs to my (610) Google Voice number. Google Voice showed the same “status” of just being unlocked. There was basically no sign that anything had changed. Verizon explained that, at some point in the next 10 days, my phone would be suddenly disconnected. At that point, I needed to call *226 to attach my 610 number to my Verizon iPhone. It could still take a while after that to complete the porting though. Of course, their “what to expect” explanation was based on land lines, not Google Voice.
6. [Wednesday @ 6:30 pm PST] My phone just disconnected with no notice. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the instructions with me right then, so I couldn’t re-connect my phone.
7. [Thursday @ 1:00 am PST] I call *226 to complete the porting. With a few minutes, I received an SMS to my 610 number that I’d missed while my number was disconnected. Everything seemed to work instantly.
8. [Thursday @1:30am PST] I need a local phone number for my apartment buzzer, so I set up a new Google Voice number to forward to my 610 number. Although some people report having difficulties doing this, I was able to have my new Google Voice number immediately start forwarding to my 610 number.

As far as I could tell, everything started working instantly. Others report it taking several days (or even weeks) to receive SMSs from all carriers.

If you decide to port your Google Voice number to Verizon, AT&T, or any other carrier, I’d recommend that you do the following:

1. Unlock your Google Voice number before going into the store.
2. Start this process on a Monday, or maybe Tuesday, as this process is measured in business days.
3. After the porting is theoretically complete, have people on each major carrier test sending you a message. If you are using an iPhone, you should probably select “test senders” who are not on iPhones. iPhones will use iMessage to SMS between each other when possible. It’s possible that iMessage is working when normal SMSs are not.

All in all though, it was a pretty fast, seamless process. (For what it’s worth, porting from AT&T to Google Voice resulted in about 2 – 5 days when I couldn’t receive any SMSs.)

I wanted to talk to you today about why I think technology is such a great field to enter. But, first, I think I need to tell you a bit about who I am and how I got here.

Geek^3

Fifteen years ago, when I was fourteen, my mother sat me down for a “chat.” She told me I had to take one programming class before I graduated high school.

Now, for some people, it’s surprising that it was my mother – and not, say, my father – who would require me to learn to code. But the truth is that I’m far from the first woman in my family to be “geeky.”

In fact, it started with my grandmother. My grandmother was the first woman at John Hopkins University in engineering. This was in the 1940s of course – a time when few women even went to college, let alone take something as “serious” as engineering.

My grandmother later transferred to Cornell with my grandfather, where they wouldn’t let women enroll in engineering. So instead, she did a math major, but decided to sit in on — and do the coursework for — my grandfather’s engineering courses. I can only imagine how well that went over with my grandfather’s buddies, to have his wife in their classes. And kicking their butts.

When she graduated, she and my grandfather started a successful engineering firm together – a company that they ran for the rest of their lives.

My grandmother lived in a world where the rules actually barred her from doing what she wanted – but she found a way to do it anyway. Her attitude was “rules be dammed. I’m going to do what I want.”

My grandmother must have set a good example, because three of her four daughters chose engineering majors. My mother, of course, was one of them.

I once asked my mom why she majored in electrical engineering. Her response: “Because it was the hardest.” Well, okay then.

By the late 1960s, when my mother was in college, the rules had slightly relaxed from my grandmother’s time – women were now actually permitted to major in engineering. Of course, that didn’t stop her professors from actively discouraging her from pursuing the sciences.

Her freshman year, her physics professor asked all the students who got As on the midterm to stay after class. My mother, one of the A students, listened as the professor explained why they should all strongly consider engineering. He explained that it was a difficult exam, and by getting an A, they have  demonstrated that they have quantitative skills and ambition to excel in such a rigorous field.

After his speech, the students got up to leave. The professor then pulled my mother aside: “Oh, Kathy, obviously I didn’t mean you…”

My mother went on to not only major in electrical engineering, but also to get her PhD in it – while working full time. She’s now launching her fourth medical device company.

So, you see, when my mother told me that I was required to take a programming class, there would be no whining about it being too hard, or there not being enough girls in it, or it being too nerdy or geeky or whatever. If my mother could do it, and her mother – not to mention my aunts too  – with actual real obstacles in the way, the least I could do was give it a shot.

I wasn’t too happy about the situation, but what choice did I have? So, I figured I’d take computer science my freshman year of high school and get it out of the way.

Becoming an Inventor

Unfortunately, then, something terrible happened: my mother was actually right about something. Which is weird, really, because when are parents ever right about anything? But, the sad truth was… I loved programming.

Programming was different than anything else I’d done before. I’ve always enjoy math and science, but this was more like… grown up legos.

I was the kind of little girl who, when she got a barbie, was like, “but what does it actually do?” I never really understood what other girls like about Barbies. I mean, rearranging Barbie’s limbs to make Mutant Barbie and then setting its hair on fire was fun and all, but then what do you do with it? Booooooooring.

I much preferred legos. I loved legos as a little kid. I loved how you could turn these tiny little bricks – that, really, were stupid and useless on their own – into houses, cars, stores, and so on. Programming was just like that. Building some really cool thing from these basic little parts.

Actually, programming was more like super-charged grown up legos, because you could do so much more with it. In my first two months of programming, I was already writing games – in fact, some of the same games I remember growing up. Except this time, I was writing the games. So they went by my rules.

And that’s what’s so remarkable about technology – it gives you the ability to create.

Most of my non-techie friends are in what I would call analytical roles. Some sit at their desks and analyze financial reports. Others analyze market data and make recommendations. That’s great – hey, the world needs those people too. But, interestingly, so many of them say, “darn, I wish I’d gotten an engineering degree.”

Because that’s what’s so empowering about technology. You’re not studying what’s already there, or analyzing a bunch of information. You’re not piling through mountains of numbers to make vague projections about the future. You’re actually creating something new. You are an inventor, and you can invent anything you want. You have immense power.

College Opportunities

So I stuck with Computer Science for the rest of high school, and throughout college. Now, I’ll be honest. It’s not always fun. Some aspects are less enjoyable than others, and there are great teachers and less than great teachers in every subject. Plus, it can be really challenging sometimes.

What got me through these courses – the reason that I stuck with it – is that I found a side of it that I loved. I loved the part where I was actually building software. And I knew, that if I stuck with it, I would not only love what I did, but I would get some incredible opportunities.

After my freshman year of college, I landed one of the prestigious Microsoft internships and got flown out to live in Seattle for the summer. While most of my non-CS friends were working at restaurants, I was building real experience. That was amazing.

Opportunities like this are so much more common in engineering because the US is severely lacking in sufficient technical talents. Companies are literally throwing everything they can to recruit talented engineers. Huge paychecks. Free gourmet lunches and dinners. Free soft drinks. Onsite massages. Flexible hours. Bring your dog to work (cats are rarely permitted – sorry cat lovers). It’s literally perk overload.

What can you do with an engineering / computer science degree? Anything and everything.

But the true benefits of pursuing computer science are not just money and glitzy perks. It’s about this simple fact: you can swim farther and faster when the tide is in your favor.

So I wanted to speak to you all to tell you all to pursue technology and engineering careers.

Not just because we need more females (but we do).

Not just because we need more people in the field (but we really, really do).

But also for you — because I truly believe that it’s one of the best investments in yourselves that you can make. The possibilities are endless.

When I graduated from school, I took a role as a Software Engineer for Google. Now, many people think, “well, of course that’s what you do with a computer science degree. You go write code for some big company.” But the truth is that there is no standard career path.

• Some of my classmates chose to join a start-up instead and build software all day.
• Some went to start-ups to design, but not actually build, the software.
• Some went into marketing roles because a CS degree is really, really valuable there.
• A lot of people went to take on a role called Program or Product Management, where they help figure out what kind of software people wanted.
• And then a bunch of my friends went to work for banks on wall street. They love CS majors there, even for non-coding roles, because it’s like a giant stamp of approval that you’re smart, quantitative, and can work hard.
• And still others went to launch their own businesses.
• One good friend of mine went to be an agent for stand-up comics in New York. And, yes, he was a computer science major too.
• A few went on to get their masters and PhD degrees, and are working towards becoming a professor or a researcher.
• Still others went on to become lawyers. In fact, some types of law require an engineering degree.

Many are still doing what they started off as – though much more senior – while others have switched careers. The fact is that it’s easy to switch careers and to move up quickly and to do anything you want when you have a skill that is desperately in demand.

For me, I graduated college and went to work at Google as a software engineer. A few years later, I sort of accidentally launched a company and I’m now some bizarre mix of an engineer, an author, and an entrepreneur.

And I can tell you, without a doubt, it would be a whole lot harder to be any of those things – let alone all of them, or be successful in all of them – without a technical degree. It just wouldn’t be possible.

As I said before, you can swim farther and faster when the tide is in your favor.

The Future

What I’m most excited for though is the future. My future. Your futures. Everyone’s future.

Technology is increasingly the backbone of the world. You connect with your friends through your iPhone. You record the events of your life in digital pictures and then you upload them to Facebook and Flickr. You can do almost all your research for school work online. You can decide that you want a song or book or movie and be reading or listening or watching within seconds. You might buy so much stuff online that you may forget that actual, physical stores exist.

But what’s happening today goes so, so far beyond that.

• Self-driving cars are being developed as we speak. This doesn’t just make your parents’ morning commute a little less stressful. It’ll also give freedom to disabled people who may currently depend on other people for getting around .
• Foreign language translation is not just about dodging learning French and Spanish in school. It also will connect people in non-English speaking countries, giving them access to critical agricultural and healthcare information.
• Video conferencing is helping grandparents watch their children grow up. It’s enabling soldiers to say hi to their children on their birthdays. But it’s also enabling patients in developing countries or rural areas to speak with a doctor.
• Robotic devices help Amazon ship your purchases to you cheaply and efficiently. But they also help find survivors after earthquakes and tsunamis.
• Even things as seemingly frivolous as YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook is helping launch revolutions around the world. And even within the US, it’s enabling kids who are victims of gay bullying to connect with people who will support them and tell them hey, it gets better. This stuff is so, so important and technology is enabling it.

So technology is not just about making our lives easier and more convenient. It’s also about saving our lives. It’s about connecting with friends, family, and even strangers around the world. It’s about learning and growing. And sometimes, it’s just about making our lives a little less hard and a little more fun.

Where do we go from here?

In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing at the time – light bulbs basically eliminated the need for candles. But to say that that – eliminating candles – was the entirety of his impact would be doing a great disservice to Mr. Edison. After all, I don’t think you can build a computer monitor with hundreds of mini-candles. So no light bulb means no computers, no smart phones, and virtually none of the technology we depend on today.

This is where we are with technology. With the internet, computers, and mobile devices, we’ve only just scratched at the surface of what we can do. This isn’t going away; in fact, the pace is accelerating. We can barely even guess at where things will go from here. We just know that it’s going to be really exciting.

Technology is a wave that’s moving very fast, and it’s growing in size. It stands to change everything in its path.

So get on board.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell is author of two books, Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company. While Cracking the Coding Interview is a deep-dive into coding interviews, The Google Resume is a comprehensive book covering a person’s full career path. It starts from how someone should be thinking about college courses, majors, and other topics, up through resume, cover letters, interviews, offers, and graduate schools. It’s the perfect book to help guide yours or your child’s career. [Click here to purchase it on Amazon.com.]

This week, a start-up called Sqoot got their brush with “fame” when they offered women as a perk for hackathon attendees. No, really, that’s actually exactly what they did. Under “Great Perks“, they listed this gem: “Women: Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) event staff get that for you.”

It’s almost sort of impressive what they’ve done here. They’ve managed to be offensive on four levels simultaneously.

1. They’ve implied that all coders are male.
2. They’ve implied that all male coders are straight.
3. They’ve sexualized women. (Possibly fine when you’re out drinking with your buddies; totally inappropriate when you’re at work.)
4. They’ve treated women (and their female staff, no less) as objects offered as a perk. [define:objectify]

Congratulations, boys.

What’s really remarkable here is that many people are still saying that it’s “just a joke” and we just need to lighten up.

I get the impression, from Sqoot’s terrible apologies, that they think much the same thing.

Apology #1 [snipped - read the full thing]

While we thought this was a fun, harmless comment poking fun at the fact that hack-a-thons are typically male-dominated, others were offended. That was not our intention and thus we changed it.

We’re really sorry.

Apology #2 [snipped - read the full thing]

When we put together the original event page, we used language that we now realize was reckless and hurt efforts to diversify gender in tech. We immediately and deservedly received an enormous backlash. While we aimed to call attention to the male-dominated tech world through humor and intended to be inclusive, the gravity of our wording was just the opposite. Our words completely undermined our intentions and went further to harm the world we’re trying to have a positive impact on.

Their first apology failed to actually recognize what they’d done wrong; in fact, it blamed those who were offended.

Their second apology was much better. They recognized the harm and admitted that people had a right to be offended. But… then there’s that little part where they claim that they “aimed to call attention to the male-dominated tech world through humor” and “intended to be inclusive.” How on earth would explicitly offering women as a perk to bring the men beer be “inclusive”?

So their second apology is insufficient because, well, it’s a lie. They were most certainly not trying to be inclusive. They probably didn’t have malicious intent, but they obviously didn’t care too much that they were making sexist comments. Probably because they thought, “Who cares?!? It’s just a joke!”

Why This is a Big Deal

Here’s what Sqoot, and everyone saying we’re just being “too sensitive,” need to realize: context matters. When I read Sqoot’s hackathon ad, I’m coming at it from this context:

• I hear language everyday that just “forgets” that female coders / execs exist. Language like “we needed to have a business guy as CEO” is not okay (Paul Graham, I’m looking at you…).
• I frequently get emails directed to “Mr. Gayle” or “Mr. McDowell.”
• 70% of the comments on my Cracking the Coding Interview YouTube video are sexual or sexist. Things like this charming comment: “wow shes hot. she should be a in strip club.”
• People at networking events ask which company I’m recruiting from. Or just ask me out.
• Articles state that I was a recruiter, despite my very clearly telling the reporters that I was a software engineer.
• I’m always “the girl.” I can never blend in. I will always be different. (Different is great! But I’d prefer to be different because of what I’ve done, not how the genetic lottery played out.)
• People assume I’m a PM or a tester (or marketing / recruiting). Anything but a programmer.
• If my husband and I ever go to a tech event together, I’m assumed to be just “tagging along.”

And this is just the stuff that I see, regularly. There’s a lot more happening in people’s minds that isn’t vocalized.

So Sqoot and others may say, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a little joke!” But I, and many other women, see it as one of the many, many instances of sexism that we see on a daily basis. You try being harassed about something regularly and see if you think the “joke” is funny.

Speaking personally, it’s the little stuff that’s the hardest. Because I see it everyday. Because it adds up. Because if I say something, I’m hypersensitive and I will certainly get no support. Because it’s a lot harder to brush it off as “well, that person is just a jerk” when it happens all the time. If that person’s a jerk, then I’m surrounded by jerks and by people who will only see me as technical / smart / whatever when I fight a little harder. And, frankly, it’s exhausting.

So this is the context that I, and many women, are coming from. This is why we’re so offended by it. It’s not just a little joke. It’s one more example of the crap we deal with everyday.

What Sqoot Needs to Do

#1. Understand what you’ve done. This was not just “one mistake.” This is the third time that Sqoot has unnecessarily used sexual imagery / remarks [see one | two]. You’re a daily deal company. These images have no place on your company blog:

I get that you’re trying to make a cute little pun. But eww. And why? You’re not Pepsi. You don’t need to use sex to sell. This isn’t even good marketing for you!

So you need to start talking with people to understand – really understand – why they’re offended. Because I don’t think this was a one-time mistake, and I don’t think you get it. Yet.

#2. Issue another apology. Yes, I know that you apologized twice already. But those weren’t good enough. Sorry. Try again.

Your apology needs to

1. Take full responsibility. Do not blame those who were offended.
2. Explain, in your own words, why what you did was bad. This shows people that you understand.
3. Explain yourself — but not make excuses. Your explanation can be ”we were stupid and immature;” it shouldn’t be “we were trying to be inclusive.” Because you weren’t.
4. Explain why a commitment to non-sexist and other (*ist) language is so important. This will help show people that you believe in diversity and also hopefully educate those who maybe don’t, yet, “get it.”

#3. Demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusiveness. When the University of Pennsylvania’s Computer Science club proposed making “brogrammer” shirts, many people were offended (and many were not). The idea was eventually rejected. But afterwards, they held a forum to discuss sexism in Computer Science. That shows that they care, and that matters.

You need to do your own thing, but you need to do something. Maybe it’s a hosting a forum to discuss sexism. Maybe it’s a new hackathon sponsored with some women’s groups. Maybe it’s just finding ways of recognizing more women in Computer Science. I don’t know. But you need to do something.

Show us that you care.

What does Google ask Software Engineers?

The questions usually fall into a few categories:

• Data Structures and Algorithms: These questions can be very challenging, but typically do not rely on “advanced algorithms.” It’s very rare for an interviewer to ask you about Red/Black Tree. They could, of course, but tend not to because (1) it tests knowledge and memorization, which is not something they especially care about and (2) your interviewers, typically being at least a few years out of school, probably do not remember this knowledge.
• Coding: This may involve coding an algorithm that you just designed, or it may be to code a pretty straight-forward method. Remember that even simple problems can be tricky to code.
• Scalability: It’s very likely that at least one of your interviewers will ask you a question like “design a system to search a billion documents.” These questions do not require advanced knowledge in distributed systems; just good instincts. How would do this if there were just one computer involved? Now how do you scale that to many computers?
• Behavioral / Experience Questions: Almost all of your interviewers will probably ask you about some elements of your prior experience. You should be prepared to speak about anything from your resume.

Most people think through if they want to live in the city, but what people forget to think about is the long term impact of living in a particular city.

Suppose you’re graduating college and you get an offer from Google’s Irvine CA office. That’s fantastic. You must be really excited. Great company + great weather. What’s not to love?

But what are you going to do in, say, five years? Odds are good that you’ll want to leave the company, or at least consider leaving. Where do you go?

And there’s the problem – you’re sort of stuck. I’m sure there are other tech companies in the area, but how many? And do you want to join those companies? If you do, will you get an offer?

You may be stuck choosing between three less than great choices:

• Sticking it out at your current company for some indefinite length of time.
• Going to a less desirable company than you otherwise would have wanted.
• Leaving your friends and possible uprooting your family.

This is true for almost every field, but especially so in technology.

Even in Seattle, arguably the #2 tech hub in the US, has limited choices. If you’re a software engineer at Microsoft in Seattle, you have basically three other choices for major tech companies: Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Maybe you’ll get an offer from those companies, maybe you won’t.

The situation gets much worse if you’re not in the bay area, Seattle, or New York. It may still be worth it for personal and other reasons, of course, but that’s a tradeoff only you can make.

I’ve come up with these five skills that, I believe, virtually guarantee success in life.

1. Writing

This doesn’t mean you need to write beautiful, eloquent prose; in fact, if misused, that’s often a negative. Good writing means that you can communicate your point clearly and concisely. You need to be able to structure your thoughts and understand what information is and isn’t essential. And, of course, you need to be able to write with correct grammar and spelling.

2. Communication Skills

By communication, I am including not only public speaking, but also one-on-one or small group interactions. Like written communication skills, you need to be able to structure your thoughts and understand what’s important. You also need the confidence to not get nervous in front of large crowds. Many people struggle with the last one, but fortunately, practice will largely solve this.

3. Confidence

Confident people do better in life. You don’t need to think you’re better than everyone else; you just need to believe that you are good enough to achieve what you want. Confidence will help you push for your goals and to ask for what you want in life.

4. Quantitative Skills

Being able to sort through information and make data-driven decisions will help you make better decisions. It will also set you apart from the crowd, as far too many people are intimidated by numbers.

5. Programming

This isn’t essential, but it is a skill that, if you have it, will help you tremendously. The U.S. has a severe shortage of qualified programmers. If you’re smart and can code, you’re basically guaranteed a great job out of college.  But if you don’t want to dedicate your life to coding (and even most Computer Science graduates don’t), knowing how to write code will still be a very valuable skill. Businesses are increasingly built on technology. If you can understand computers at a deep level, you will open yourself up to fantastic jobs at tech companies — and many, many jobs elsewhere.

What do you think? What skills do you consider to be the most valuable?

• Alpha Nu Scholarship Recipient (2010).
• 1st Place, Innovation Award (2009).

Although the second bullet is a bit better than the first one, both are fairly meaningless. The reason is that both are totally “unquantified.” I have no idea what these awards really mean.

Awards can be a selling for your application because they show at least one occasion where you were, objectively, better than everyone else. So, your job is to show that this is what that award means.

Make it meaningful!

How do you do that? Tell the reader these details:

• How selective is the award? It’s great that you won an award, but there’s a big difference between placing first out of 5 teams and placing first out of 500. Tell me how many people you beat out to get that award (percentage or absolute numbers are both fine).
• What is the award for? I have no idea what the John R. Robertson award is. Tell me why you won the award. Was it academic achievement, test scores, a business plan, etc?
• What did you win? A good way to make an award “meaningful” is to tell me what you won. If you received a $50,000 scholarship, I know you must have done something pretty cool to get that. They don’t just throw $50,000 at anyone.

So next time writing you’re resume, I want to see this instead:

• Alpha Nu Scholarship Recipient (2010). Selected out of 1,500 students to receive $50,000 academic scholarship from Greenberg Bank due to outstanding academic performance and community involvement.
• 1st Place, Innovation Award (2009). Awarded most innovative senior project (out of 120 senior projects) by student and faculty vote.

This Is About More Than Just Awards

Before you assume that this doesn’t apply to you (because you don’t have any awards), remember this is about more than just awards.

Ultimately, this is about how you quantify what your accomplishments, and it’s not always as straightforward as it might seem.

Suppose you wrote this on your resume under your projects section:

• Snakes and Ladders (iPhone App): Built iPhone game for [...].

That’s neat and all. But it’s not nearly as good as this:

• Snakes and Ladders (iPhone App): Built iPhone game for [...]. Downloaded 10,000 times and received rating of 4.7 out of 5.0.

The above one shows that it wasn’t complete junk, because it got good ratings and a decent number of people downloaded it. But is 10,000 downloads great, or just decent? I don’t know – and neither will the person reading your resume.

An even better way of doing this is if you can put it in a way that other people will understand. For example:

• Snakes and Ladders (iPhone App): Built iPhone game for [...]. Downloaded 10,000 times and received rating of 4.7 out of 5.0. Ranked as #2 game on iPhone App Store in June 2011.

So remember: make your accomplishments meaningful.

What other mistakes have you made with your resume? Find out with CareerCup’s Grade My Resume service. Get your resume checked for the 15 biggest and most common problems. Learn more.

I had 5 interviews for a software development position. 4 went really well – I got all the answers perfectly. I bombed the fifth one though. I don’t think I got the best solution, and I made some mistakes in coding. What are my odds of getting an offer?

Let’s step back a moment.

First, your interview performance is nearly impossible to judge. So when you say you “bombed” this interview and did “really well” on the others, you don’t know that – trust me.

Second, I find it hard to believe that you were basically flawless in all your other interviews. For that to have happened, you either had incredibly easy questions or were one of the best candidates that anyone has ever seen. In my interviews at Google, fewer than 1% of candidates answered my moderate-to-hard difficulty questions “perfectly.” Odds are, you made a lot more mistakes than you realize.

Remember that you’re judged relative to other candidates (which is why your interview performance is nearly impossible to judge) and on things like:

• how quickly you arrive at a good solution
• how optimal your algorithm(s) are
• how you discuss the trade offs between the different approaches
• how many bugs you make in your code
• how easily you discover those bugs
• how you fix the bugs

All of these factors are qualitative (and relative to how other candidates do them), not binary “correct vs. incorrect” factors. I have never, ever asked someone a question like, “Design an algorithm to …” and reported that a candidate got the question “correct” or “incorrect.”

So when you say you got a question “correct,” it doesn’t make sense (unless it was a simple factual question). You can say you did an interview flawlessly, but that would mean that you immediately spit out the optimal solution to a problem (and somehow you knew it was optimal), coded it in completion without a single mistake, and checked for bugs anyway but there weren’t any. Did you? It’s possible, but it’s far more likely that you made a bunch of mistakes along the way.

And that’s okay – everyone makes mistakes in interviews. And you can get an offer while bombing one interview. But again – you don’t know which one you bombed, if any. I’ve see a lot of candidates say that they did “bombed” in one interview, when in fact, that was their best interview of all.

Cute things like Ninja make me think I’ll be working with idiots and hipsters. [Start-up Employee]

Personality is cool, but “ninja” is such an overused term that it decreases personality rather than adding it. [University of Washington Student]

I dislike “programmer” because it implies work consisting of only programming, as opposed to design and algorithmic aspects. “Code ninja” is a beautified form of “code monkey”, which is bad for the same reason as “programmer”. Titles like software developer are more general and more neutral. [Student]

The company shoudn’t force cool on its job descriptions. [UC Irvine Student]

Ninja / Rockstar / whatever just sounds immature. Have you ever heard someone outside of technology refer to themselves as a Ninja? [Anonymous]

Ninja and Expert are sometimes outside a new grad’s reach! So I hate it! [NC State Student]

I conducted a survey of 200+ software developers, asking them their thoughts on different titles / labels in job descriptions. Each person was asked to rate the following titles on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best.

The specific question was this: Suppose you see “we’re looking for a _____________”, do you like it or hate it (the title / job name)? 

• Programmer
• Software Engineer
• “Ninja” (Code Ninja / Java Ninja / Ruby Ninja, etc)
• “Expert” (Java Expert / Ruby Expert / C++ Expert / etc)
• Software Developer

People were also asked for their gender, country (US, India, or “Other”), and profession (Professional vs. Student). Note that the last of these was added after about half the responses had been submitted, and not everyone chose to answer these questions.

So what happened?

75% of coders like the term Software Developer in a job description; only 25% like “ninja.”

Cool terms like “ninja” do not impress – anywhere.

In the above graph, I've simplified the data to just "love" and "hate." "Love" = 4 or 5 rating. "Hate" = 1 or 2. The main (purple) bars indicate the overall rating, with the colored lines indicating the rating for a specific subgroup (US, India, Women, Students, and Professionals).

Average scores reported on a scale from 1 to 5

Percentage of people reporting each of 5 scores, on a 5-point scale, across entire population. 1 = Hate It. 5 = This is the Term I Prefer.

Another way to look at this data is this: For every person who hates the term Software Developer, 11 people like it. For every person that likes Ninja, 2 people hate it.

Why are some titles liked more than others? 

The titles tell you something about the job itself.

• Software Engineer / Software Developer: As the official title given at company, these terms are largely neutral and synonymous with each other. They’re not “flashy,” but you can’t really be turned off by them. It is what it is. Only 8 – 11% of people reported hating those terms, and in almost all of those cases, there was something wonky about their response (giving 1s to all or almost all of the choices, etc).
• Software Developer is just slightly preferred over Software Engineer in India, but there’s little difference in the US. Software Engineer may have more of a “science-y / advanced” connotation to it, while Software Developer sounds more practical / real-world. The data here is really too close to tell much more than it doesn’t matter much.
• Expert is preceded with an expert in something – java, rails, etc. If you’re looking so much for someone who’s a Java expert, it suggests that you might be one of those people who doesn’t understand that a good engineer can pick up a new language quickly. And if you don’t understand that, do you really respect engineers? Is your current team talented?
• Programmer sounds like code monkey. Developers are advised not to call themselves programmers, and you shouldn’t call them that either.
• Ninja is perhaps the most debatable term. Not surprisingly, it had the highest variance in responses compared with any of the other job titles. Some people love it; it’s the new hip term. For precisely that reason though, some people hate it. It’s too trendy, and it sounds like you’re trying to be cool. You’re the kid wearing the clothes that some magazine told you was “in style,” not realizing that everyone else is looking at you kind of funny. But hey, some people still think it’s cool.

• Women are statistically more likely to be turned off by job descriptions featuring competitive language (note: “competitive language” is not the same thing as “competitive jobs / careers”). And you don’t get much more competitive than terms like ninja and expert. In fact, here’s a great story: “In 2006, GNOME received almost two hundred GSoC applicants – all male. When GNOME advertised an identical program for women, but emphasizing the opportunities for mentorship and learning, they received over a hundred highly qualified female applicants for the three spots they were able to fund.”
• Students and Professionals differ little, interestingly, with the exception of their feelings on ninja. The relative youth of students probably makes them more accepting of hip / trendy terms.
• India is considerably more accepting than the US of the terms ninja and expert. I’m not an expert in Indian culture, but this might suggest a greater focus on competition. India also doesn’t like the term Software Engineer as much. Anyone who knows a bit more about India care to explain this?