Gayle Laakmann McDowell | Technology Woman

There’s no grabbing intro story here. No great quote. And no numbered top-10 list. There’s just some simple advice: don’t join a start-up when you graduate. Or, at least, don’t join a small, unknown start-up if you can instead get into one of the top big tech companies. The problem with joining a start-up when [...]

“Self-publishing” is a strange word. It’s hip and sexy in one way – people love disruptive technologies. At the same time, no one wants to be known as being a self-published author. Getting professionally published is hard and self-publishing is “easy” – or at least that’s what most believe. As someone who has enjoyed success self-publishing and professionally publishing, let [...]

Liberals and conservatives alike are looking over their shoulder and laughing at the “Occupy” movement. It’s not because of what their demands are, but rather because of their demands are everything and nothing at the same time. Fundamentally, their core frustration is not a political one, but an emotional one. They’re sick of feeling ignored [...]

Somehow, many candidates have gotten the impression that the interview process is some elaborate system, and if their process is different from their friend’s, it must be a reason for it. The truth is so much more straightforward than that, and once you get, everything will make sense. Or that’s my hope, anyway. Here’s how [...]

The 5th edition of the best-selling programming interview prep book, Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions, is officially on sale. And even better – Amazon is currently running a 20% sale on the book! Now, I know you’re used to new editions being a couple little fixes here, packaged in a [...]

Through CareerCup’s resume review, my time at Google and other companies, and the occasional favor for a friend, I’ve seen hundreds of resumes. Each time, I see the same mistakes. I’m not talking about subtle little wording tricks; I’m talking about the massive issues that all too many resumes have. Think your resume is “good enough?” [...]

UPDATE: Share this with your friends to improve your chances at winning a free copy! UPDATE 2: Raffle has completed! Thanks for playing Since everything is best in rhyming form, I will open this with a poem from an anonymous (and awesome) reader: If you’ve ever wondered how to navigate the Amazon forest, Or pondered how [...]

Recently, during a five week trip to Africa, I got the opportunity to visit a school and a hospital in Mayange, a rural town in Rwanda. Mayange is a beneficiary of both the UN’s Millennium Villages Project and the One Laptop Per Child program. The Millennium Villages Project is an effort to eliminate poverty in which the [...]

We call it many things – online job applications, the resume database, etc – but perhaps the most applicable is the “Black Hole.” Thousands of job seekers submit their resumes each year, hoping to get the chance to interview. But the reality is that standing out from a stack of resumes is extremely difficult. So how [...]

A candidate recently came to me seeking the advice for the following situation: A few weeks after accepting a software development position with Dell, he received an offer from Microsoft as a Program Manager. This was his dream job, and his dream company, but he would have to turn it down. Or would he? I [...]