本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛I'll finish this article in bits and pieces. It's hard to find a big chunk of time to write it. I actually started this many times but never went very far.
I named this series "First Job" but I feel the points are equally applicable to experienced job seekers. More so with this article.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've gone through more than a dozen interviews over the years. A couple of them in Toronto, but most of them in New York. Except for two odd ones, every interview resulted in a job offer. Looking back, I feel the most important thing is confidence. With confidence, you nail hard questions. Without it, you fail even the simple ones. I was so confident that I sometimes made the interviewer feel they asked bad questions.
Confidence comes from competence. From knowledge and skills and ideas. In my experience, reading and thinking helped me the most in building up my confidence.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most efficient way to gain knowledge is to read books. A good book can teach you in a matter of days what you'll have to spend months or years to learn on your own. A great book like <<Design Patters>>, which distills decades of experience of many masters in the field, offers you what you may not be able to figure out in your life time.
Reading books is also an effective way to gain advantage over other job seekers. Most people probably don't read books. Happy with just a pay check, they have no desire to upgrade themselves. When I interviewed people, I asked everyone what design patterns they knew. Majority of them couldn't say anything beyond the Singleton pattern. This probably means they never read any books on the subject, even though they claim to be senior developers, team leaders or even architects.
It's possible to convincingly put a brand new skill in your resume by just reading a book. Years ago, EJB was a hot new Java technology. A job in a big investment bank has this as a key requirement. I never worked with EJB, but I was interested in the job and the bank. So I bought a book and started reading. About a week later, I passed their interview. What's more, the interviewer told my future boss that he'd never met a guy who understood EJB so deeply. Without the book, I wouldn't be able to understand it so "deeply" even after months of experience.
You don't need a big effort to read enough books. If you take public transit to work and spend 40 minutes each way, you can easily read one book in two or three weeks on the road. That would be over 10 books a year. Since most people don't read much, including even your interviewers, you'll be better equipped than them. And you'll be more confident during your next interview.
--- to be continued ---更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
I named this series "First Job" but I feel the points are equally applicable to experienced job seekers. More so with this article.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've gone through more than a dozen interviews over the years. A couple of them in Toronto, but most of them in New York. Except for two odd ones, every interview resulted in a job offer. Looking back, I feel the most important thing is confidence. With confidence, you nail hard questions. Without it, you fail even the simple ones. I was so confident that I sometimes made the interviewer feel they asked bad questions.
Confidence comes from competence. From knowledge and skills and ideas. In my experience, reading and thinking helped me the most in building up my confidence.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most efficient way to gain knowledge is to read books. A good book can teach you in a matter of days what you'll have to spend months or years to learn on your own. A great book like <<Design Patters>>, which distills decades of experience of many masters in the field, offers you what you may not be able to figure out in your life time.
Reading books is also an effective way to gain advantage over other job seekers. Most people probably don't read books. Happy with just a pay check, they have no desire to upgrade themselves. When I interviewed people, I asked everyone what design patterns they knew. Majority of them couldn't say anything beyond the Singleton pattern. This probably means they never read any books on the subject, even though they claim to be senior developers, team leaders or even architects.
It's possible to convincingly put a brand new skill in your resume by just reading a book. Years ago, EJB was a hot new Java technology. A job in a big investment bank has this as a key requirement. I never worked with EJB, but I was interested in the job and the bank. So I bought a book and started reading. About a week later, I passed their interview. What's more, the interviewer told my future boss that he'd never met a guy who understood EJB so deeply. Without the book, I wouldn't be able to understand it so "deeply" even after months of experience.
You don't need a big effort to read enough books. If you take public transit to work and spend 40 minutes each way, you can easily read one book in two or three weeks on the road. That would be over 10 books a year. Since most people don't read much, including even your interviewers, you'll be better equipped than them. And you'll be more confident during your next interview.
--- to be continued ---更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net