Jobs#
People panic a lot about jobs, especially with the ongoing AI hype. Perhaps the panic is warranted, but if you believe in yourself and your degree (assuming you’re pursuing one), you will be just fine.
Just know that you may not always get the heavy-hitter companies first: Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. They might take a bit more experience and a bit more networking, but that’s okay!
The job search#
Please, for the love, do not search up internships or jobs based on salary. The money will come - you work in a lucrative field already. Search for companies that excite you to work at and align with your values. Realistically, you may not always get these jobs, but you can work toward them and you should start with them first.
Happiness is in the doing, not the result. [1]
Your happiness should be in the every day things: what you’re coding at your job, the overall big picture of what you’re working on, and the people you’re working with. Not your salary or the names on your resume. Find a company with a culture that suits you. Glassdoor is a good website for seeing what people generally think of working at the company you’re looking at.
One exception: with internships, go for quantity over quality. In a competitive and arguably oversaturated market, experience anywhere is better than no experience at all. Apply around and see what you can get, and then evaluate your options from there. In my internship search for Summer ‘24, I applied to around 140 companies, didn’t hear back from about 50 companies, got rejected from over 80 companies, and got two offers, one of which was partially from networking [2].
Network, network, network. Companies want to hire good people, and if you know good people, they will hopefully know you and recommend you [3]. This trumps everything else. If you network, it’s an immediate “in” at the company which gets you past a lot of the initial interview shenanigans or through them even if you do poorly.
I know a lot of young people in similar situations to me think networking is cheating or morally wrong; e.g. they want to get a job on their own merits. I can see that perspective, but ultimately you should take what you can get. A lot of people network [4]; it’s normal! Assuming you then get hired, you’ve already got a friend there who is looking out for you, which is good!
Decisions#
A decision is hard because you don’t have all of the information to make it. Deciding to move somewhere for a job is super tough. Thinking if the company culture is right for your personality is super tough. Figuring out if the company aligns with your career and personal ambitions is super tough. But you’re not locked in forever.
The 40-70 rule states that “you need between 40 and 70 percent of the total information to make a decision.” This is a great way of summing up my mantra above: decisions are hard, and often you don’t have enough time to get all of the information, so do your best to get most of it. At least 40%, so you don’t cut yourself short, and at most 70%, because you probably don’t have time to get more and it might make the decision harder.
Trust your instincts and intuition: if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, and that’s fine! There are plenty more fish in the sea. If it does work out, great!