President Emeritus Clark Wood's talk on techniques for soaring over tech interviews. Clark covers: Side Projects Resumes Public Speaking and Leadership Appropriate Behavior & Appearance General Career Advice

1. Hacking the Interview
Human Buffer Overflows? Gross...

2. Inherent Bias
● I’m SFS (security guy)
● Internships in public and private sector, but
no long term work experience in tech field
● Advised and conducted technical interviews
for ACM’s sponsors

3. Agenda
● Before
● During
● After the interview

4. Agenda
● Before
● During
● After the interview

5. Do Interesting Stuff

6. Public Speaking and Leadership
● People want to hire
future leaders
● Get involved in ACM :)
● Give presentations like
this one (even better….
technical presentations)

7. Stay Current
● T shape: Breadth of
general knowledge,
know one area deeply
● Read conference papers
● Subreddits, blogs, etc.
● GPA

8. Resumes
● Bullets, verbs, how you added value, etc...
● The good places to work don’t want
buzzwords...
● But HR does
● So does software:
egrep -i “mobile|big data|the cloud” > hireNow.txt

9. Resources
● Your professors
● Google Scholar
● http://makingawesome.org/
● https://studentgroups.fsu.edu/organizations
● Internet (for InfoSec I can give a huge list)

10. Agenda
● Before
● During
● After the interview

11. Behavior & Appearance
● Suit will never hurt, looking scrubby might
not help
● Be ready to self promote, have stories ready
● You are in the interview to MAKE FRIENDS

12. Interview
● Certain types of questions are inevitable, so
have good answers
● Google moving away from “shrunk to 1 inch
and stuck in a blender” type questions and
GPA requirements
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-2013-6

13. Interview Judo (Sorry Gustafsson)
Do you know $foo?
Well, I know $bar,
which has:
$bar.a
$bar.b
Just like:
$foo.a and $foo.b

14. Their Questions
● Technical
a. Convergent - List and describe the OSI Layers
b. Divergent - You need to hack a vending machine
● “Tell me about a time…”
a. You succeeded
b. You failed
c. You dealt with a difficult colleague
d. You came up with an ingenious solution to a hard
problem
● “How do you feel about?...”
a. Working remotely
b. Company culture
c. Etc

15. Your Questions
Nature of Question Impact
About the organization Asking for facts is lame. Asking
about company culture, or about
living in the location is fine.
About the interviewer If it looks casual, very good.
Otherwise you are a brown-noser.
Technical questions Jackpot! Bonus points for (politely)
stumping the interviewer

16. Resources
● ACM (soon)
● http://www.career.fsu.edu/mockinterview/
● Places you don’t want to work
● Engineering Fair
next Tueday (Suit up!)

17. Agenda
● Before
● During
● After the interview

18. Follow Up
● Give it a few days, then send a “thank you”
email to your interviewer
● DO: Be short and sweet, polite
● DO: Use names, mention something funny
or memorable that came up
● DONT: be a suck-up

19. General Career Advice
● High GPA, one novel project, Meaningful
outside school stuff
● Apply to lots of places
● Get started early
● Craft a personal trajectory, make
incremental progress

20. Questions, Comments, Complaints?