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Chapter 14 Getting First Job

“If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” -Ruth Ginsburg (first female CEO in USA)
    1. When to start looking for one
    2. Where to look for one
    3. What kind of company to work for
      1. Small
      2. Big
      3. Medium
      4. startup
    4. How to look for one
      1. Friends
      2. Family
      3. Websites
      4. recruiters
    5. Cover Letter
    6. What should your resume have
    7. What should it look like
    8. How to act at an interview
      1. Questions to be ready for.
      2. Questions to ask
    9. Follow up email
    10. Negotiating pay
  1. First Job
    1. What to expect
    2. How to work
    3. What to demand
    4. What is demanded
    5. How to quit
    6. How to act
    7. Keeping activities outside of job



At some point you’re going to graduate and all those years of high school, college and advice from this will book will culminate in your first job. Remember a job? That thing your parents said you were going to need one day when you’re all grown up and have to start paying all those bills? Well, that feeling of adult is here (or will be here). I know you don’t feel it (it’s been ten years for me and I still don’t feel it) but now you gotta go and get that job and make a living.


A lot of new grads graduate and have no idea what job they want, what to apply for or where to look for it. Many get waiter jobs and have horrible resumes which they send out into a void without hope. However, if you do it right, you should have to send only a handful of resumes to well picked companies where you hopefully have done some probing and found names of hiring managers. Out of those submissions, you should have gotten several interviews and had your first offer within a few weeks of starting your search.
My first job after college was not easy to get. Most people think that you go to college, have fun, graduate, a bunch of people want you and they pay you lots of money and then you’re rich! And that’s exactly how it does not go. Sorry to tell you, but even if you are Ivy league grad, you will need to have work experience on the resume to compete, and I’m not talking about Jamba Juice. I’m talking some real life work experience.
 If you want an easy time finding a job with good pay, you will have to put in some work at a summer job or side job while you’re studying. And if you’re working while you’re in school, then you may as well make it in the field you plan to work in.
       My first job in school was my first job after finishing high school. I heard about internships, I submitted my resume and got two interviews. One for a pharmaceutical company creating artificial blood and lungs and the other at McDonalds. I gave McDonalds a try, but when they said that they want me to organize files, I said good bye and began doing odd jobs for the pharmaceutical company the rest of the summer. A job like that can give you valuable skills that you can use at the next job. I was testing batches of artificial lung in ovens, fixing industrial printers and doing web-design.
At the end of that job, I didn’t hate engineering and stuck to my major, which is what you want at the end of internship. Not to stick to your first choice necessarily, but just awareness of it is what you want or not. At the very least, you now have a credible, professional resume and people who could vouch for me.


Getting the job
You’re going to have to find it first and there are two avenues: one is economic times are great so you go to where you want to work (search well) apply, apply, apply over and over until they have a position for you and hire you. The other is economic times are bad and you will have to network your little hiney off. I actually found my job in the midst of “The Great Recession” while I was volunteer coaching at a high school. My middle school wrestling coach was looking to hire an engineer and so there I was, hired by someone I knew. So try to remain calm and keep your eye out, employers hate seeing a pushy, stressed and desperate applicant. Just imagine that it is just like dating.

 

So you network, or apply and you have a bunch of jobs under your belt, you are ready to send a resume.  Having experience means nothing if you can’t get it across to someone who is looking at you on a piece of paper; you have to be able to present your work and experience in a way that other people reading your resume will be able to grasp what you are trying to communicate. As an engineer, I had no idea how to do that. But I didn’t know that I didn’t know that.


I remember I went to see a talk by Jim Branson at UCSD. Jim Branson was the owner and founder of SpaceDev (now part of Sierra Nevada Corp). This was the company that put SpaceShip 1 in orbit. I knew I wanted to get a job there and I sent them resume after resume. After a week or so of no response,  I would tweak the resume again and send it again. When I still got no  response back,  I went to my parents for help, they shredded it and I remade the resume. I sent it in again and no response. I went to the career center on campus and they shredded it again and I fixed it and again I sent it to SpaceDev.  After eight or nine months, my resume represented my experience and me in such a way that another person could pick it up and say yes, I want to see this person for an interview. I got the interview and got the job.
 
My point is that you may think you have something that’s great, but until you ask others for help and review, you don’t know. So keep fixing and keep sending. 

 The thing about sending in your resume again and again is that it shows that you really want to work there. People don’t build companies to just make money, they build them because they believe in something and they want people working with them to believe in what they believe. Because people like that will work tirelessly to create what they want to create.
This is why you have to apply to a company where you really want to work and to a company that you really believe in. Because you cannot fake enthusiasm, you cannot fake knowledge. Learn about them, know them, ask lots and lots of question and never be afraid. Fear will loose you the interview, fearlessness will just keep you from getting the wrong job. As Steve Jobs said “Keep looking, never settle” if you find your passion you will have the motivation to keep going and never stop.

Resume Basics:
When it comes to resumes there’s less of a what to do and more of a what not to do and you would be surprised about how much one ought not to do but is done by new grads and even old experienced people everyday.

As far as the dos, you want a clean, basic, honest and succinct resume. As far as the don’ts, I’ll just list some that I saw glaring at me when I had friends send me theirs for review.

  • No more than a page. If you’re so accomplished that you have more than a page, then they know of you already and you don’t need a resume.
  • No @college emails. Unless it’s MIT, no one cares.
  • Irrelevant experiences that you think “show” what a great applied experience you may have, employer sees it as padding at best and throws it straight into trash at worst.
  • Objective that uses the word “learning”, your new bosses don’t want to teach you, they want someone who knows who they are and knows what they will do.
  • Overly wordy cover letters, experience or skills. Drill it down to the bare essentials. This will take a lot of work, but you’re trying to get someone to give you money; it’s worth it.
  • Being vague, know what you want.
  • Sending it out to someone who maybe concerned. It’s the Internet age, if you can’t find someone at the company to send it to then you’re not doing enough homework.
  • Read it ten times and only then have someone else read it. You want mistakes caught like the wrong name used and those kinds of mistakes are caught only if you’ve done your part of work to get rid of the big mistakes.


There were some sticky points for me when I was looking for jobs: I didn’t want to work for a defense contractor. Defense is great, we all need it, but I didn’t want to build something that I knew contributed to killing people. So when I took a well paying job at a defense contractor where the CEO promised he wouldn’t give me that kind of work, I was naive enough to believe him, I sold out. He gave me a project creating rifle scopes and I couldn’t not work on it in good conscience. I did not believe in the project I was assigned to and I ended up loosing that job. If you cannot believe in what you’re doing, you will not do your best and you will not satisfy yourself or your boss. This is why you have to be true to yourself.


When you are true to yourself you also have confidence when you walk into the interview. You know why you are there, you know what you can do and that fearlessness and asuredness will carry you through the questions you know and don’t know. It almost doesn’t matter what you answer as much as how you answer. This is not to say, if you’re an idiot and don’t know your shit you will get away with it, a good engineer will spot BS and throw you out before you have time to even recognize what went wrong.


After the interview, send an email to the people who interviewed you. If you did well they will give you their cards, if you didn’t then they won’t and you probably applied for the wrong job. Do not send a pretty letter to HR, do not spray perfume on it, do not email HR. They don’t care, they will not pass it on, they will send it straight to trash.


Where to work:

I have worked nearly everywhere. Big companies, small companies medium companies and even start-ups.
Start-ups
Let me get to start-up first because that’s what EVERY one wants to know about. Start-ups take a lot of money and a lot of work and are like winning a lottery, you hear about the winner but most of the players are losers. They are usually run by people who don’t know business, creating a product that may or may not work for customers who may or may not exist. It’s fun, it’s great, but I would recommend it only for the very young (nothing to loose) or the very old (nothing to loose).
Most important thing about a start-up is the people, do you believe that the people can execute; are they talkers or doers? If the people creating the product are those who can set out to get something done and can get it done, then you are likely to succeed. But if your team is a bunch of people who couldn’t get anything done somewhere else and this is their another attempt at doing something after a failure, then you may very well waste your time, make no money, and and be jaded by the experience. So my advice after the several start-ups I’ve seen, be careful before jumping in and if you have any reservations about the people, don’t. You may regret it, but most likely you will not.



Big Corporations

Big companies are great because there are lots of people to do the jobs you don’t want to do. You learn little about the product and most of learning is about the bureaucracy of the company. If you learn it well enough, you will see a bright and promising career and you can see yourself rising through the ranks. Should you engage in prideful fighting over details hoping to show others how smart you are, you are very likely to be laid off. You don’t have to do a great job at a big company, just look busy and don’t make other people’s job any worse than it is. They are probably just as bored and uninspired as you are. The giant machine with a tiny clog can wipe the spirit out of even the most spirited little clog.


Some companies however are great at keeping the spirit alive. I saw once how Intel encouraged it’s workers through bonuses, team meetings and posters to remind of goals. This was great, but most people who just followed their job description, kept quiet about their lack of motivation and dissatisfaction about their bosses, did best.



Medium Companies

Medium companies offer that middle ground of support and expectation of hard constant work. I would say it is my favorite but it does depends on the job and the company. It also offers enough room to move around and ability to compensate the workers.


Small Companies

Small companies on the other hand can be volatile, are full of politics, always short on resources and have a lot of challenges. The place where I had to build a rifle scope was that way and it was really great. Except for I had no choice as far as what projects to do and when your heart isn’t into your work, you will have a tough time biting the bullet and putting in an eight to ten hour work day.
But it is usually a tight knit team where everyone helps out and you will more than once go out with the CEO for beers.


Salary

To figure out how much you should be paid, just be honest with yourself and know your worth. Check how much other people earn. For instance even though Internet was pervasive and I could check how much others are paid with my education, I didn’t know exactly unless I asked my co-workers when I was interning. From them I found out how much someone with my qualifications can ask and so when the interview and negotiations came up, I had no issues discussing pay and generally was offered the amount that made me happy. When you’re earning your worth, you do not work with fear that you’re being paid too much or that someone is using you and that you could earn more somewhere else. That peace of mind is important and so you should not compromise that if you don’t have to. Being firm but polite will always be appreciative so long as you can back up that which you ask.



At work, Under-promise, Over deliver.
Some people think that they have to constantly work, they burn out. Some people have no idea how to work, they are thrown out. And then there are those who take their vacations, work eight hours a day, don’t brown nose and just get their shit done.


That’s my MO. I remember when I was at Luxtera and I was hourly. I traveled every two months. I would work my hiney off and then take off for a week or two to some far off place. The important part was always to be dependable. Get your work done, keep your bosses and co-workers happy, don’t leave for so long that they have to replace you and then all the rest is up to you. One thing is estimating how much something will take you to do it. Usually whatever it takes, multiply by two. Especially if you are new because you will have some snags, you may have to pick up someones slack and no matter what you want to finish early or on time so that your boss is not angry. If you finish early, I recommend keeping it to yourself, then when you come back from that vacation, you can hand him your work and he is happy rather than slamming 15 more hours on you and making that vacation just another day dream.


Quiting

If you have to quit, you probably knew it a while before. Be a sport, ask for that raise or change in assignment first and don’t be so scared of rejection. If you have to be scared of your boss, you may need a new boss anyway and if you ask for those things, they may give it to you saving you the trouble of searching for a new job. If they do not give what you feel you need and you really want to jump ship, make sure to get something lined up before getting out. At least throw the line and see what comes up. Then when you get something else, give the boss a couple weeks notice and always go for an exit lunch and ask what you could have done better. Your boss will most likely give you a great set of pointers that will prove themselves invaluable.


Jumping ship makes sense for two reasons, the company is falling apart and you are no longer learning. Don’t waste your life stagnating, as soon as you’re done learning you should be looking for the next venture. However if the company is crumbling you better get out before too late or you will be getting unemployment and that is a terrible thing to get if you have a mortgage and kids, better go early. How do you know you ask? You see smart people leaving. Smart people don’t leave good places.


Co-workers
Don’t burn bridges, you will meet those assholes again and be good to the good people, they will push you ahead and you can often pull them to wherever you are working. Aside from that, enjoy these people, they probably have the same passion as you and you are working on the same goal. So invite them to bar-b-ques, go out to happy hour because workers that have fun together, accomplish great things together. After all, if you’re reading this book, you’re not just going to have a job, you’re going to have a passion.



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