Education Experience

[00:00:00]
>> After we put the experience part, right, and then we have our projects, now comes our education. Now the only time I recommend putting certifications on your resume, only times this actually matters, is if they are in correlation directly to technologies. Our experience, my eight years of experience, what I have seen is that.

[00:00:34]
If the certification has absolutely nothing to do with a type of technology directly, it is owned by a company, it does not matter. If it's cool that you have a free Code Camp certification, doesn't matter. Now that AWS cert, that Azure, and the AZ-900 cert, that's something, right?

[00:00:58]
That tells me, that you have actually looked at a technology that we may use for work and you've certified. And you've gone through and from the company itself and these aren't small companies and they just don't throw their certs away. So that lets me know that you've done some serious work, you have a ground-level understanding of technologies we use.

[00:01:26]
Beyond that, I do not recommend you putting certifications on there. Unless I might say it was from a technical institute, but even if you go to a bootcamp, well, most bootcamps aren't accredited. So the real only certifications that truly matter come from the technologies of companies, like technology companies with the tech that you're gonna be using, all right?

[00:01:51]
So you have cloud computing, certifications are gonna be very important for you, right? When it comes to your job hunt, there's one thing saying you wanna get in cloud computing, one thing talking about Edge computing. You need to know the difference between cloud computing and Edge computing. If you're computing in the cloud, Edge is you're trying to bring the data as close to the user as possible, right?

[00:02:12]
So you need to know those differences, you need to understand how you would use, Azure, or AWS, or whatever technology. I guess what CloudFlare, to be able to do those things with the person, and that's where those certifications they matter, right? I'm pretty sure the chats called Banana is over for that.

[00:02:33]
>> Just some questions.
>> Yeah.
>> One was around that this person did a year and a half at university, then switch to more self-taught. Do they put the university experience on at all?
>> I don't, I don't know, I tell my students we need to finish the college, there's just no point because it's not they're gonna ask.

[00:02:54]
If it requires a college degree, they are not going to ask for proof of you going to college and you didn't finish college, right? And they only really asked for the degree if it's pertinent to the job or you put on the resume. One of the students that just came through last year, it held him up for his job because he went to school for drama and he had a degree for drama.

[00:03:24]
And they gave him a lot of drama because he had to wait for his degree to come through before he could start his job. So he almost lost his job waiting for the degree to start his job. Cuz the federal government was like, hey, we need this degree before cuz you put it on your resume, so it has to be a part of our records.

[00:03:43]
And he got the job in December, nobody was at school at the time he got the job. So it took them like six, seven weeks to get this degree and he barely almost lost his job because of it. So, I recommend that if it's not important to the degree, I mean it's on the job, if you didn't finish your degree program don't even put it on.

[00:04:06]
>> So what about if they did certificate from a company that uses Python but they're looking for a JavaScript-TypeScript role?
>> Well yeah, you can do that, cuz it still shows you that you've learned some programming, right? That's where the whole, like I said, learning patterns comes into play, right?

[00:04:25]
Learning those patterns helps you transition, learning other languages faster, right? People know, or at least it's lore in our culture that once you learn one language, the second language is gonna be faster to learn. I personally don't believe that, or maybe it's just that my brain didn't do that the first two languages, JavaScript's my second language, Ruby was a dream, JavaScript was a nightmare.

[00:04:52]
PHP made me never want to write PHP again and then Python was like this is nice. Nice, this is lovely, okay, that's cool. But then C# came back, and I was like, okay, here you go, you hate me too, all right. So, like I said, I don't believe in that but a lot of people do.

[00:05:16]
I say put it on, cuz it at least shows that you have experience working in a language.
>> What about graduate level courses, like Stanford courses, that kind of thing?
>> How would that correlate to your ability to program? For me, it's like okay, that shows that you're good at going to school, that shows your mastery level of that subject but not so much.

[00:05:42]
How does that correlate to your programming skills? My rule stands, if it has nothing to do with you being able to code, or you like technology roles when comes to education I don't even put it off. I've never put my degree on my resume. Only reason people know I went to FSSU is coz I have it on my LinkedIn.

[00:06:09]
And the only reason I have it on my LinkedIn is because my wife and I went to the same school and she made me do it. So that's it, I don't even care.
>> How about having a universal resume for everything versus multiple more specific?
>> I love that question, I am King of universal resume versus 8000 different resumes with light core things.

[00:06:35]
I for me, I have written one resume, I know the skills that I have, I know where I'm trying to be where I'm trying to go. I focus on, if I'm going to a job search, this is what I'm grading every job I applied for by. Because I know that if it's not about this, probably I'm not gonna be a good fit for them, I'll be wasting their time, I'll be wasting my time.

[00:06:59]
I'm not gonna be able to put the best foot forward to make sure that I get the greatest success metrics. So, that's one of the first step I do when I plan my job hunt. I wanna make sure that I put myself in the strongest position possible. So I put a thing like, I believe in my 3 AM rule, there's no tomorrow.

[00:07:24]
All right, this is the thing that you call me about it 3 o'clock in the morning, I would be like okay, let me get on my computer and figure this out, right? If my pager, if I was on call I had a pager a PagerDuty, blew up my phone like that's part of being in tech.

[00:07:41]
You might be on call for a weekend rotation, and PagerDuty will send a Slack message, then send a text message. And then call you if something goes down, right? Is this the thing at 3 o'clock in the morning, if I'm on PagerDuty for work, I'm not gonna be 100%, man, I might be 30, but I'm not gonna be 100.

[00:08:02]
Yes sir.
>> How about listing only the program main languages that you are really good with versus a lot of programming languages?
>> I don't recommend listing anything you don't wanna work it. You could be good at something and still not wanna work in it, right? So let's say, right now market strategy.

[00:08:25]
Ruby on Rails is actually growing and jobs right now in the market. So, if I'm like okay, Ruby on Rails is what I wanna learn, am I gonna put Django, Python, .NET? No, I have experienced in .NET. I will never put .NET on my resume, cuz I do not wanna get paid for writing .NET, that's a fact, right?

[00:08:52]
I know PHP, I don't put it on my resume, as a matter of fact, I've scrubbed my GitHub of PHP, that's how serious I am. I don't wanna get paid for it, I don't wanna anyone to ask me about it. You don't even wanna get recruiters hitting you, there's one lone resume from when I worked in PHP.

[00:09:13]
Almost a decade ago, that I can't find and I keep getting hit up from random people to hey, I notice you have experience in PHP. Where are you finding this resume so I can burn it off of the Internet, I don't do, right, so that's just my rule.

[00:09:30]
I don't put anything on my resume that I'm, A, not amazing at, B, don't wanna get paid for. And usually when you're working in languages they have to go together, right? So, if you're putting Python, .NET all these backend languages on your resume. Usually, what's going on for the job, they're not asking you for all those backend languages unless you're like DevOps.

[00:09:53]
And you need a little bit of understanding of multiple back-end languages to be able to make things work. But usually, it's a comparison style, right? Okay, like back before years 2015, right? If you were using Rails, you weren't really using JavaScript, you more than likely going to use jQuery, cuz you're gonna make Rails do all the logical things, right?

[00:10:22]
So now use JavaScript and Hotlink and ES 2015. But back in 2013-2012, when you were using Rails, is this Rails jQuery, that was in unison, right? You use the RBs, ERBs.
>> Or even CoffeeScript.
>> CoffeeScript is another thing that I will never put on my resume. [LAUGH] Why would you bring, that's just bad memories, man, that's triggered, okay.

[00:10:49]
>> So, I've seen this on people's resumes where they put like the percentage level or like.
>> Do not do that.
>> Okay.
>> Don't do that on your portfolio, don't do that on your resume. One, who are you basing these percentages on, right? There's no table, like there's universal that says, yeah, this is the percentages of everything, you answer these, this is the percentage of.

[00:11:13]
Are you basing upon, how much of it you've written, have you based upon how fast you can write it? Or what is this metric that you're using to get these percentages, right? You don't have that metric. That metric may not mean even if I see these percentages, and you've put them there, it may not even mean the same thing to me when I'm looking at it as opposed to what you did when you put it on there.

[00:11:37]
So just don't do it, cuz I might interpret it as something you don't want me to interpret it as, so.
>> I have seen people use stuff like HackerRank and the assessments they do in combination to kind of show off what Hacker Inc thinks they can do, I'll put it that way.

[00:11:53]
>> Yeah.
>> The resume is that worthwhile at all or not?
>> No, it's not, when it comes to teach or learning code. Not learning code, but assessing people's coding skills, it's more alchemy and then arithmetic, that's one. And two, when I look at those hackering things, I'm like, are you good at solving hackering problems or are you good at solving problems?

[00:12:19]
Cuz those are two different things, and like full disclosure. I'm considered a HackerRank star all-star by them, right? I still don't buy into the HackerRank philosophy, because I've seen people who bomb. HackerRank problems can even get past the basics, build amazing things when done the right way. This is how we teach you how to solve our problems type deal.

[00:12:49]
And a company can say, all right, well you can solve those problems, I know that you at least know how to solve problems, right? Versus how some companies like Microsoft, they are looking at how you solve the problem, why you solve the problem that you solve, right? I was there in my org in ISE we're looking at okay, could you have reused some code to solve this problem?

[00:13:20]
Was there a common-sense solution to this problem that you weren't looking at technically? I literally had a, one of my hardest questions from my interview was. So you're trying to get all the data from all these cars at the same time, but there we're in different time zones, how do you do that?

[00:13:46]
And I'm sitting here going through all of these cron jobs and all this other stuff and the guy was like, well, you just wait till 2 o'clock in the morning, and on Eastern coasts on the West coasts. And he was like, about for usual matter of time, like 80% of those cars have stopped, so you just wait till that time and you just pull them all of their time.

[00:14:08]
And I was like, yeah, that's right, it makes sense. Most people are sleeping around between those hours late either dead asleep or they're just about to get up isn't when on the West Coast lot. I was like, yeah, that makes 100% sense not technical at all, I just was just waiting to the west.

[00:14:23]
He said you just wait to the West Coast, goes to bed and then you pull all the data, that was the answer. It wasn't a super intricate problem, sometimes that's not how you solve it, right? When you're thinking about these ideals of how to judge yourself on code, don't even do that, that's not your job, your job is their job to judge you on code, not your job.

[00:14:49]
Your job is to know that you can solve any problem when given the right tools.