Chris Bourdon

The rate at which CS engineers are graduating is honestly scary, and something doesn't add up either. The demand is high, and so is the supply. Yet, there are so many engineers who are unemployed. This points at the lack of quality in education. Amidst this huge crowd of engineers, how does one stand out? How to learn better and make some real difference?

Last month I decided to switch jobs & join a start up. I received a few offers & currently at different stages with some. The whole process was very overwhelming for me & I wanted to see if I can do something else to make my life easier. A typical workflow looked like this for me: - Discover start-ups I am interested in on angel.co, workatstartup.com, triplebyte.com. (Filters help but not enough to narrow the search. Hence it takes a lot of time) - Start conversation with the startups I am interested in & book intro calls. (Startups, particularly at workatstartup.com were very unresponsive. Some startups simply stopped responding in the middle of the process) - Intro calls with the hiring contact. (Each call lasts about 30-45 mins & it becomes very time consuming to talk to multiple start ups) - Call with founders. (Very similar to Intro call. But, coming from the founder) - Assignments. Most start ups involve first step as take away home assignment. The typical duration of each assignment is between 2 - 4 hrs. (This is the most time consuming step) - 2 more technical rounds (each lasts 60 mins) - offer discussion (lasts around 30 mins) - 1-on-1 with team members. Completing the full process with a startup typically took me 8 hrs. Doing this with a full time job was very overwhelming. And I am pretty sure if it would have been overwhelming for the start up as well since they are doing this in parallel with multiple candidates.