Hey everyone,
As you know, we are moving towards building out support for connecting clients with terminal players for internships and job offers. We have a question for you all that may provide some useful insights for us.
What do you think is the best format in which you can demonstrate the depth of your software engineering skills to potential employers? Is it your resume? Side projects? Github profile? Something else completely?
Feel free to answer it if you are interested. Currently opting into our recruitment program gives employers access to your public github information on your linked github account, a resume if you upload one, and terminal-related metrics. We are curious if there are any other ways we can showcase your skills to employers.
In my experience, this is honestly the best thing on my resume right now. That and Halite II (a very similar competition last year). For a multitude of reasons, these competitions are great for people like myself just starting out and eager to learn on the fly. But in that (rather limited) experience, I found it’s rather difficult to convey that accomplishment. I couldn’t even get an internship interview with the company that hosted Halite II, after finishing 15th, and it’s been difficult to land any interviews at all.
I’m not sure how the more veteran participants here would want to demonstrate their skills, but on the more rookie side I’m interested in the terminal-related metrics being presented as well as learning how to convey those metrics myself. In the few interviews I’ve had, employer interest in that part of my resume started and ended with “AI competition? But not machine learning? Oh…”
Regarding the terminal-related stuff, I think a post-mortem should be included for employers to view once the competition ends. At the end of the year I’ll probably write one up to showcase my algo. Usually I’d put this in the README along with all the code in a public repo on Github, but depending on how these hinted “seasons” are announced, it might not be a good idea to open source all the code, so it’d be nice to have somewhere to put a post-mortem.
What exactly do you mean by a post-mortem?
A post-mortem is just a summary of what the algo does/what it’s intended to do. Like your thought process and strategy for the competition. Here’s the post-mortem I wrote for the Halite competition https://github.com/RyanDraves/Halite-II-Bots (it’s just the README). It’s not very good (it’s clear I didn’t/still don’t know what I’m talking about), but here’s the winner’s post-mortem https://recursive.cc/blog/halite-ii-post-mortem.html, which is much cleaner and professional.
Once the competition was over players posted their insights into the competition on the forum. I think it’d be beneficial to go along with other Terminal-related stuff employers see as it can provide valuable insight into how someone approaches an intricate problem.
@Ryan_Draves that is an excellent suggestion.
We can create a guide or a couple of examples for participants to write-up how they approached algo building. That would be a great way to showcase your critical thinking to potential employers and discuss the various tools, tactics, approaches you used throughout the season. Players would then have a tangible piece of work (along with their source code) to give prospective employers an insight into their problem solving.
We could even have a service where the C1 team reviews and helps to polish the write-ups for the top X players as a perk for being a top player or an open source contributor.
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