Homework due for today
Legend: : Participation | : Early | : PDF | : Team | : Zipped
- Self and Peer Assessments: Assess your own and each of your teammates contribution to your team. Consider attendance and timeliness to the team meetings, contributions in words and deeds to the work and the deliverables, contribution to positivity and harmony, willingness to step in when things go wrong. Write up a brief justification of your assessment, one or two lines for each team member including yourself.
Put the team members in order from most positive to least positive. Give each one a number between 9 (most) and 1 (least) and don’t give two people the same number
Deliverable: Posted on latte as a pdf. It should be around 5-10 lines of text total. Failure to follow the format, or giving two students the same rating will lead to a loss of 20 points. Follow this format EXACTLY:
Pierre Stone (me): Was present for all meetings, feels like I was the leader.
Kept track of deliverables and wrote a major section of the report. - 7
Oleana Root: Pretty good, tried hard to help and was reliable. Good worker. - 5
Ronin Oscar: My partner who was as reliable and had a lot of key ideas.
Figured out the pricing model and did a great job on the mockup. - 4
Chris Abelson: Missed so many meetings, even when promised didn’t show up.
Nice person though - 2
- Read: these articles in preparation for a discussion: The No.1 Predictor of Career Success, The Most Important piece of advice for folks starting their careers, The One Skill that beats talent every time
Continuing Work
- Continue work on Stage 3: Should be completed on December 6. Look at the Term Project Outline. Now we are into the business issues. You will have talked and discussed this along the way. Who is your competition? How will you be different? How are you going to price and what is your financial analysis look like? And how will you plan to drive growth?
Networking
- It’s a gift economy
- The personal network you start building now is more powerful than anything else I say
- Who do you know - who knows you?
- It’s an ongoing project
- Karma. What you sow is what you reap
- Know why you want to talk; know why you’d be worth talking to
- Book: Never Eat Alone
How?
- When you meet someone interesting, make effort to make a connection
- Keep a notebook of people you’ve met who are ‘interesting’ Template People Networking
- Invest a little in the relationship: jeep in touch with some regularity
- Phone call, email, invite for coffee
- Figure out why you want to talk to them and tell them
- Make sure it’s mutually ‘useful’
LinkedIn
- Some people have reservations about LinkedIn… Don’t
- Please join now and connect to me.
- Lets look someone up (Fake account Joan Salas)
- Designing your profile
Jobs
Where to apply, from worse to best
- info@bigco.com
- meet at a career fair
- someone you know even a little
- someone who knows you well
- A ‘warm intro’
What they do and don’t look for, and what they avoid
- Look for
- Specific content knowledge, obviously
- Self-starter
- Perseverence, solves own problems
- Can get things done even when there’s no grade attached
- Hardly look at
- Your GPA
- Your three majors
- What they avoid
Resumes
- Remember: Not what they can do for you; what can you do for them
- Competitive advantage/ What makes you special? (professionally)
- Who looks at them, for how long
- Type, color, pages, appearance
- Put github name or portfolio near the top
- When needed: Career goal; Special qualifications
- Cover letters
- Have dates and make sure they add up
- Put skills etc. in priority order (what you know best goes first)
- One page resume rule
- Personalize resume based on job/job type (within reason)
Companies
Typical functions in ‘Tech’ Companies
- Development or engineering
- Quality Assurance or testing
- Product Management
- Sales and Business Development
- Marketing
- Finance
Large companies
- Fewer interactions outside of department (less personal)
- Process/politics/paperwork etc.
- Career paths: multiple products, departments – more opportunities
- Can get laid off out of nowhere - less connection between you and your job security
- Less scrutiny on each individual employee
Small Companies
- Less process, take initiative to get things done (fix your own problems)
- Very focused; Lives & breathes the one project/product - not good if you want to experience more than one type of thing
- No room/limited room for mistakes (Spotlight)
- Easy access to higher-ups
Choosing
- Location
- People
- Risk factors. Runway. Layoffs.
- Big vs. Small company
Interviews
- Dress, demeanor:
- Trick questions:
- “What salary are you looking for?”
- “Are you a hard worker?”
- “When can you start”?
- “Whats your greatest weakness?”
- Taxes and Benefits
- Some companies withhold taxes automatically
- 401K- deposits are not taxed
- Some companies match a portion of salary
- 5% match - they will match up to 5% of your income
- Stock purchase plan
- vesting - you can buy stock but you cannot get it unless you work at the company for x amount of time
- Significance of each benefit depends on person
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