What you do after you graduate matters way more than where you went to school. Here’s the data.

The first blog post I published that got any real attention was called “Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data.” It was my attempt to understand what attributes of someone’s resume actually mattered for getting a software engineering job. As it turned out, where someone went to school didn’t matter at all. By far and away, the strongest signal came from the number of typos and grammatical errors on their resume.

Since then, I’ve discovered (and written about) how useless resumes are. But ever since writing that first post, I’ve been itching to do something similar with our platform’s data.

For context, interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs.

If you do well in practice interviews, and you advance to guaranteed (and anonymous!) technical interviews with companies like Uber, Twitch, and Lyft.

Over the course of our existence, we’ve amassed performance data from thousands of real and practice interviews. Data from these interviews sets up us nicely to look at what signals from an interviewee’s background might matter when it comes to performance.

First, some background on our dataset

When an interviewer and an interviewee match on our platform, they meet in a collaborative coding environment with voice, text chat, and a whiteboard and jump right into a technical question. Interview questions on the platform tend to fall into the category of what you’d encounter at a phone screen for a back-end software engineering role. Interviewers typically come from a mix of large companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber, as well as engineering-focused startups like Asana, Mattermark, and KeepSafe.

After every interview, interviewers rate interviewees on a few different dimensions, including technical ability. Technical ability gets rated on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is “poor” and 4 is “amazing!” On our platform, a score of 3 or above has generally meant that the person was good enough to move forward. You can see what our feedback form looks like below:

You Might Not Need TypeScript (or Static Types)

TypeScript has gained a lot of popularity since the Angular 2 project decided to adopt it and write all their documentation examples in TypeScript, but is it really worth the investment?

Before we get into this, I’ll preface it by saying that I’m a fan of the tools that static types enable, and TypeScript is currently my favorite static type system for the JavaScript community.

I come from a background using statically typed languages including C/C++ and Java. JavaScript’s dynamic types were hard to adjust to at first, but once I got used to them, it was like coming out of a long, dark tunnel and into the light. There’s a lot to love about static types, but there’s a lot to love about dynamic types, too.

I’m not religious about tech stacks and dev tools. I’m practical. I do consulting, and a lot of dev teams use Angular 2 and TypeScript these days. If I’m going to give them advice, I’d better know what I’m talking about.

I strongly recommend that you adopt a similar open-minded attitude towards new and different tech stacks and tools. Believe me, you’ll learn more than a few during your career.

Being a developer means that you’re choosing a lifetime of learning new things. It’s a good idea to make peace with that right now. That doesn’t mean learn all the new things, but do be open to new things if you need to learn them for your work, or just the joy of discovery.

You Will Not Be Denied — Develop Your Daily Inspirational Routine

The winter solstice just passed and now, we find ourselves deep in the peak of shortened days, cold weather and lots of time inside with family and relatives. The lack of sun can really damper our moods and take away some of our energy. If we let it. Winter can make it challenging to find inspiration at times. But the days of less sunlight can also lead to great opportunities for solitude, reflection and contemplation.

While it may be tough to feel as inspired, I find that wintertime often is great for planning and refocusing our priorities. Some of my best ideas, as well as my most productive planning and actions have taken place at this time of the year. Following the holidays, there are less distractions. And as a result, there are more reasons to find things that inspire and light the fire inside of our hearts.

In this vein, I urge you to develop an inspirational routine each morning. It may come through the power of meditation, prayer, genuine heartfelt interaction with those that you love or from your favorite song. It could be a video that plays back the piano recital you played to perfection that brought the house down.

It may be the words of this article or a book you find so profound and hold in such high esteem, you get the chills before opening the pages.

Develop your routine. I’ll show you what works for me and how you can integrate this into your life. But first, a story.

Action Planning

In today’s competitive world, getting a highly paid and reputed job is becoming much more challenging. In that scenario, having knowledge in a limited scope is not enough to fulfill the dream we have at all. Even in USA, “half of the new graduates are jobless or underemployed” (USA Today, 2012) let alone be the cases in other countries. It clearly tells us that just having a good educational qualification is not enough to earn us a good job.

Being a bachelor’s level student, I have to take the above mentioned figure seriously. I definitely don’t want to end up being unemployed. For that, I need to start working to improve my skills. One of the most important skills to start with, is personal development skill. No matter how much knowledge I have, it’s no use unless I am able to present it well for which I have to upgrade my English and develop self-confidence. Talking about other soft skills, leadership skills must also be taken into account. Also, being a BSc.IT Computing student, I need to improve my programming skills as well. I need to be able to understand the logic inside any program, tackle the hurdles properly and also come up with better logic.

In order to improve personal development skill, first of all, I need to practice speaking, be it in front of a mirror or by giving presentations. That will help me to boost my self-confidence and my English. I also need to start getting more involved in group works and volunteer to become group leader in order to sharpen my leadership skills. Likewise, to improve programming skills, I need to push the limit and learn new things through internet and other sources.

So, if I work on these skills, I will definitely be able to achieve success in the future. I need to start working from right now. I need to believe in myself and never lose hope.

Skills Attributes & Employment Development

Hello everyone. In this post, I am going to discuss the four modules that I am currently studying in this semester and the possible impacts they can create in my career. These four modules include Problem Solving for IT, Study Skills for Computing, Introduction to Programming and Logic.

Problem Solving for IT, as the name suggests itself, deals with providing a new dimension to view our problems related to IT. We have learned algorithm and flowchart till now which is essential for developing flawless and efficient programs in the future. Likewise, these days, different companies seek qualified as well as candidates with good problem solving skills and this module will definitely uplift my chance to get a good job.

The next module, Study Skills for Computing, emphasizes on polishing our presentation skills and our command over written and spoken English. Writing blogs, reports, giving presentations and plenty of group works are the major coursework for this module which is helping me to improve my vocabulary, grammar and to boost my confidence. These skills will make me able to present myself better later in the future.

Introduction to Programming is all about java and the programming concept. We have been made familiar with the basic structure of java programming. In coming days, I expect to gain more knowledge and ideas about programming in order to write programs that can be useful in my day-to-day life. Furthermore, the programming concept I gain through this module will make me able to learn many other programming languages quicker.

Lastly, Logic is somewhat related to mathematics but its actual use is in building digital circuits. Till now, we have learned logic gates and sets. I am looking forward to study more technical aspect of it. This module will create a base for the studying circuits and electronics.

This sums up the modules that I am currently studying. These subjects are definitely going to be tougher as time progresses. 

Building my IT career

“The best way to predict the future is to create it” (Abraham Lincoln, n.d.). But, I cannot create my future unless I have dreamed of one. In this blog, I am going to discuss what I have achieved till now and what I expect to learn at the college that will help me transform to a person I have dreamed of becoming.

Being a bio student during my high school, I did not have opportunity to learn programming or anything else related to Computer Science. However, I did study Computer Science in my school level which helped me a lot to develop basic programming concepts and also to develop a foundation for Computer Science. Likewise, as speeches and presentations were part of weekly assignments in my high school, my written and spoken English were also improved and I know it is going to be quite handy in my projects and presentations at the college.

My freshman year, till now, has been going quite interesting. I have been learning many new things, be it basics of java, problem solving skills or presentation skills. In due course of time, I expect to learn more programming concepts and other fields of Computing like database management, operating systems, software engineering, etc. Not only knowledge in these fields but other skills such as dealing problems, personal development or study skills are also equally important to embrace success in future. Furthermore, to compete globally, good command over English is also an important aspect and I expect to polish my English even more during the course of my study.

Lastly, just the lone effort of teachers at the college is not enough; I have to work hard too. I feel that sky is the limit for learning when you have the desire. That reminds me of the quote “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in” (Leonardo da Vinci, n.d.)

Stepping into the field of IT

This is my first post in the blog so, let me familiarize myself to you all first. I am a freshman at Islington College doing an undergraduate course of IT computing. I completed my high school from United Academy and currently stay at Chhetrapati. I love reading books and prefer listening to music and playing guitar to freshen up my mind.

Being born in a middle-class Nepalese family, hard work, discipline and dedication were the only things I was taught. Having consistently performed well in my school, I believe that "life without cause is life without effect". Besides studying, I do love partaking in extracurricular activities. I even performed in a band during my high school. So, I am a pretty fun loving person.

After passing my high school, I had plenty of options to choose as my career but since I had a deep interest in computers from my schooldays, I decided to make my career in the same field. I had always been keen to know how computers worked. The world of electronic art always fascinated me. During school, I was pretty good at Computer Science as well. The passion and eagerness to try out something new was always there in me. When I heard about IT and its scope from my teachers and elders, I got more interested in it and started to see clear image of myself in the same field. I specially have interest in software than hardware that's why I chose this field of IT computing.

Furthermore, I don't just want to work in Nepal but also compete globally. I want to achieve something great and become a source of inspiration for everyone in this field. I hope I would be successful in achieving my goal by ample endeavor and following the path shown by Islington College.