Looking For A Dev Job All Across Europe

[A_SN]

Yup, I'm still looking for a job. I did what you guys suggested me last time I asked for help here, and that almost got me a lowly Windows admin job, but after two months (these guys really weren't in a hurry to get on with things) and a couple of interviews with them, they finally didn't give me the job. Not that they even told me so, they just avoided replying to my mails or pretending they were in a meeting when I'd call.

So fuck it, if that's the best I can hope for in this city (Dublin, Ireland), I gotta look elsewhere. Namely, the rest of Europe (or anywhere else I can get a visa to, don't care if it's South Korea or Canada), provided I can get away with either French or English (i.e. Netherlands may be fine, Italy is a no-no). So far I tried applying online (mainly on totaljobs.com) to embedded engineering jobs, even graduate embedded jobs, there's relatively lots of them out there in the UK, but I never got a single reply so far. I'm afraid it has to do with the fact that, despite my long personal experience in programming and what I've achieved through my projects, I have no relevant degrees or commercial experience, which I've been told made my CV an insta-bin.

When you don't have the experience or the degrees, all you have left to find a decent job is networking, so since I'm looking for a job anywhere, I thought that would be a good idea if I asked people out here who'd know of a company who could be interested in a young (22) guy with my skill set. I'd be mainly interested in positions that involve C or Assembly programming, and I'd be most interested in something having to do with embedded programming or even digital signal processing. However I'd be interested in sysadmin positions as well (Unix/Windows, although I'd prefer Unix) (my last position was Debian sysadmin during my internship).

As I said I don't have much of a professional experience, however I have quite some personal experience which I believe makes me qualified for the job I want to do. Some of you may already know about my ARSS project, which is my biggest achievement so far in either programming or signal processing (the full C code can be found here). Recently I also released colourd, a program that pokes the GP2X hardware registers to fix the GP2X's LCD colours, and also I've made (and am working on again) Sponge Blob Tennis, which is relevant in that I only used SDL for timers, the rest was all using directly the hardware for everything, and I believe it's also relevant cause of the very accurate physics (accurate gravity, air drag, ball bounce) and all done in fixed point arithmetic. Also I've done some ARM ASM. As for the rest of what I've done, I worked a lot on an accurate solar system/Saturn V simulation, on a vector graphics engine, and recently picked up PHP, MySQL and all that good stuff while working on HomebrewGames.org.

All job offers are welcome . Advices are too, although I'm under the impression that I need to network my way into a job more than improve my CV or anything.

Oh and here's my CV.

 

[ledow]

Do you mind some constructive criticism on your methods and your CV?

First, networking is a part of it but I've had jobs handed to me before people have met me based on my CV. I have a degree but at first I had zero formal experience in IT (but, like you, lots and lots of my own stuff in various areas.) When applying for jobs, it's literally a matter of volume and getting the tone right. Just keep applying but watch out for what the adverts are expecting. You can aim a little above your experience but not too much. You can get jobs that might require one or two years of experience to get but to go for a DSP engineer suggests a lot more experience is necessary. It's good to aim high, and always worth a shot, but the majority of your applications should go for run-of-the-mill jobs that people know you can do straight away.

Speaking from a sysadmin's point of view, there's nothing wrong with the experience you have. But if you want a job in embedded programming, you should apply for jobs in embedded programming. If I saw your CV come in as part of an sysadmin application, I *know* that you won't be there in six months because it's only the kind of job you want to do until "something better" comes along. However, there's very few sysadmins that would know what half of your CV involves, so they are likely to not want to touch you (the unofficial "never employ someone smarter than yourself" rule). I tailor my CV to the type of jobs I'm applying for, so I have a "sysadmin" CV, a webdesigner CV, etc.

Minor points on the CV itself: I wouldn't enclose Marital Status (none of their business, and if they are making decisions based on it, it's probably discrimination... If they employ you and not someone who's married, it could quite easily be seen as holding the fact they have a family against someone. Don't put them in a tricky position - leave it out). I wouldn't even include Nationality so highly, either, but I would discretely mention somewhere: "Fluent in French and English" in that order, probably under some bullet points for "other skills" instead. Personally, the words "technology platforms" would turn me off (I'm primarily technical, not managerial) but there are some corporate types that would love it.

"Performed physical expansion of an enterprise's network infrastructure" seems very redundant among all of the other stuff you have. I would take it to be CV padding from a time when you put a few network cables in. That may or may not be true but I would wonder why you included it.

You don't mention WHAT you got from the "University Institute of Technology in Computer Science in Lannion, France". Although it appears you have "Baccalauréat", I have no idea what that is but a quick google tells me it's the equivalent of our A-Levels. So all I know is that you went to University. That makes me suspicious about whether you actually passed in the end or not. I have a (quite poor) degree but I always make a point of saying "graduated from University X" on my CV. If not, you could use "Studied at" instead. But any doubt you leave and anything you *don't* mention draws my attention much more than the stuff you do.

Although you only have a little formal internship experience, from the look of it, you don't describe it well. I would have the "Unix" position written similarly to: "As part of the internship I performed such duties as: Instituted and deployed a caching proxy and firewall system. Instituted, deployed and tested a VPN server. Routinely deploy / service / install laptops for high school students". Even then, the last one is a candidate to remove entirely. Also, that you did a 35 minute presentation is unimportant to me (I do that every day, and the fact that it's "on" VMWare means nothing - I can bluff on any subject for 35 minutes. If you were doing it every day, it's something to boast about) and the fact that you include it makes you come across and desperate to "fake" relevant experience. That says you're not confident in your abilities alone. If you're really desperate, just say "giving presentations on" without mention of time.

The training courses - fine. But "Attended" sounds like you didn't do anything on them. Maybe "passed" or "received certification for" or something similar? Or even just "Professional Training" and then a list of courses.

The Projects bit is where your real strength should show and you show one application and a vague description of the programs you have wrote for what might be a console that nobody else has heard of. I include GP2X stuff in my CV now but I explain it as you have and keep it brief (I actually say that the GP2X is a Korean console similar to the Sony PSP... it's not exactly accurate but it gives them an idea without having to google it). If you're applying to embedded jobs, it's good to push it but explain that it's an ARM/Linux-based handheld console. This section is also incredibly short. You can push a CV to 2 pages without problems, especially if this section contains a sort of "personal statement/cover letter" material too (because then your cover letter will be quite brief). I squeeze my CV into 2 A4 pages, one of which is almost entirely paragraphs of interesting stuff I've done in work, on my own, etc.

The explanation of ARSS is fantastic (and it's a very technical program) but leave out the future development bit - if I want to know, I'll look it up on the website you gave me. You're advertising at me and I probably don't care about the actual app, I just care that you know enough to write it. Use the space you save to pad out more of the stuff you have done off your own back, in your own time, at your own expense! Leave out the explanation of the Linux daemon entirely - although **I** know what's involved in that and what it does, it's not clear to most people. Don't forget that often CV's go through several layers of management that don't have any idea what this stuff is.

Instead I'd emphasis the homebrew ASM that you did, without getting too technical. Even the solar system simulator is easy to understand what it does and puts you in the category of "rocket scientist" to the layman. There must be other projects you're contributed to. There must be stuff you do on your own that's worthy of inclusion - even if you have to include it as descriptive passages instead of bullet-points, there's lots of stuff that can go on. I'm more interested in the fact that you love playing with electronics, DSP's, embedded kits than I am about your Marital Status. Make it look like you can hardly cram your wealth of experience onto something as primitive as A4 paper.

Just to show you, my CV (which has never failed to get me an interview despite it being quite similar to yours at first) started off as three lines of my university degree, a brief two-line summary of how many other, earlier qualifications (GCSE's, A-Levels - I didn't state grades, just numbers), a bullet-point history of employment (which started as one bullet point) with dates and a brief line of duties, job title etc. and one and a half A4 pages of stuff that I'd done outside of a workplace of educational establishment.

I work in system administration in schools and that CV has got me interviews in some of the largest private univerisities, colleges, schools and academies in London, as well as for the position of Web Designer at the BBC Website. (For a lot of them, I decided the job wasn't for me in the interview, or even beforehand, but the fact that I'm sitting in an interview means that if I have enthusiasm for the job, I can probably get it). It's also ended up getting me actual job after actual job without interview at all, in areas that cover not just system administration but a lot of the "interesting" IT-related jobs that I saw. It's now the same CV, updated slightly with a lot more bullet points for experience, but with the same layout.

You need to emphasis the fact that you're doing stuff to keep you relevant even while you're not working in the industry itself. You need to show the ability to learn, to work off your own back. You need to show that you might not have a big "official experience" section on your CV now, but you have the ability to learn quickly for even the most technical of subjects and that you'll be up-to-speed in minutes.You need to demonstrate that your lack of experience won't be a factor without highlighting your lack of experience directly (it can be inferred from what you say quite easily but if you draw attention to it, it makes me think you're ashamed of it, or believe that it's a bad thing).

You need to send tailored CV's to certain jobs - for this, I have one "super-CV" in Word (Yuk, why do employers still demand that format?) that has paragraphs on everything and bullet-lists of everything and I just "hide" the lines/paragraphs that aren't relevant for that particular job before I send it off. Thus from one updated CV, I can create what looks like tailored CV's specific to each job that show relevant experience, relevant skills, relevant employment history. And if they are smart enough to find the hidden text, they see that it's not only the stuff on the CV that I can do (I haven't had anyone do this yet).

Just concentrate on getting to the interview. The interview is the thing that will get you the job or not. A CV is just a piece of paper that cannot convey whether you are any good or not (a bullshit-artist can craft a wonderful CV but an interviewer can ask for a practical demonstration or test, for instance) and you have to make it interesting. When you get to interview, they'll probe all this history and you have to think quick and divert questions. I often find that an interviewer will ask about something on the CV and be quite impressed when I dismiss it as "Well, yes, but that wasn't much. I think X was a lot more interesting and relevant to this job".

Get to the interview - that means make the CV come alive a bit. Whether you have "3 years experience in X" or "30 years experience in X", a CV-reader doesn't *really* get impressed. But if you have a page full of interesting stuff that they can see what it involves, that's relevant to them and it looks like you could have gone on for pages more, you'll go on top of that nice neat pile of "pursue further" CV's.

 

[Squidge]

Your CV looks nice, but it's a lot of information for someone to read through when they are quickly scanning through (possibly hundreds of) CVs. They may miss some vital information by skim reading. Have you ever thought of putting just the most relevent information on your CV so there is less to read? For example, for a C/C++ developer position, leave out (or rearrange to another section) the sysadmin bits - you can talk about that in the interview if you get that far. This typically means having multiple CVs, each targetted to a specific job type.

 

[A_SN]

Oh I do tailor my CV differently for different applications. I have a sysadmin CV (this one was the software engineer CV) that shuffles things around to put a bigger emphasis on sysadmin aspects and make the programming part sound like a mere hobby.

I hope you don't mind if I keep the buzzy words, I worked hard at making my CV as buzzwordy as possible as to pass the "clueless HR" filter . Not like it's worked so well so far, considered I only got called for one job in 6 months .

I guess that's a good idea to avoid mentioning that I'm French too, mainly if I apply in Great Britain .

The "performed physical expansion of an enterprise's network infrastructure" indeed consisted in pulling cables around, and that indeed is padding to desperately try to make it sound like there was more to my last internship than moving heavy boxes around and playing Nethack over SSH .

I have no other degree than A-levels, I dropped out of college on the first year (which I claim on the CV was 2 years as to avoid the embarrassing "What we're you doing in 2006?" or "Why did you drop out?" questions), and on my second school thing I didn't pass the test to get the degree cause I didn't have much for it anyways and cause of personal events. I didn't mentioned whether I passed or not trying to hide the fact that I didn't graduate, but you're right, it's probably worse not to mention anything.

And yeah, I was indeed a bit desperate for relevant experience regarding my internship, considered there wasn't much to it.

I didn't pass any certification as a result of the Microsoft courses, they were just a part of the sysadmin school training. So yeah I'd be better off just making it "Professional Training:"

I have reeeeally no idea what's relevant regarding my GP2X games! Do they care that I made my own engines and that I poke the hardware registers, doing it all the hard way? Do they care that my tennis game simulates physics accurately, or that I'm good with fixed-point arithmetic? Should I say what the game consists in?

As for the other stuff I did, same problem, idk what to say. I've helped someone fix the jittery touchscreen input in SDL for the GP2X F200, I've helped someone perform 32 bpp to 16 bpp framebuffer conversion in ARM assembly for a game, I've helped someone with look-up table based sprite rotation for a game, I've helped someone with the AI for one of their games, I've helped someone implement fast look-up table based sine generation, and I've made that colour calibration program thing that's been included in an emulator, a commercial game and the firmware Open2X. Oh and of course I co-founded and am in charge of that homebrewgames.org, and do all the development for it in PHP (which I only picked up like last week), and I'm starting building from scratch a web-based file archive in PHP and MySQL too. But how do I mention that in my CV? Also, how can I emphasise that I routinely start stuff without having the prior knowledge of how to do it and quickly learn as I go to accomplish it? Cause that's really what I do all the time, like, I had no clue about signal processing before I started the ARSS project, and that's just one example..

As for the super CV idea from which you would remove things to fit each application, that's a good idea, but I'm not sure it could directly apply to mine at the moment. I mean surely I cam emphasise on different things depending on the job, but I'm not sure there's really anything to hide, considered the little there is so far.

Oh by the way, while we're on the subject of my CV, can I have your opinion on my "cover e-mail"? Of course I do every time customise it to fit the job description, but typically when I apply to embedded positions it comes down to this :

QUOTE
Dear Sir,

I would like to apply for the job of Embedded Software Engineer as advertised on totaljobs.com. I have an extensive personal C/C++/ARM assembly experience, as you can see by some of the code I've produced shown on this website http://arss.sourceforge.net/code.shtml , am specialised in digital signal processing algorithms, and am very familiar with Linux operating systems, using such operating systems in my daily routine but also having been trained to be a Linux system administrator and being occupied as a Debian administrator during my last internship, as well as having developed programs and firmware code for an embedded ARM Linux device. If you require any additional information, I can be contacted at <my email address> or by telephone at <my phone number>.

Regards,

Michel Rouzic


So far I never received any reply for any such application so I trust you'll find something of capital importance to remove, change or add .

Also I've updated my CV ( http://arss.sf.net/Michel%20Rouzic%20-%20S...%20Engineer.doc ) according to all your suggestions, however this is far from finished, there's a lot lacking regarding the part after the (updated) description of my ARSS project, as I don't know yet how to put it.

Oh and thanks so much for you help, that's invaluable! Some people pay for such advices!

Your CV looks nice, but it's a lot of information for someone to read through when they are quickly scanning through (possibly hundreds of) CVs. They may miss some vital information by skim reading. Have you ever thought of putting just the most relevent information on your CV so there is less to read? For example, for a C/C++ developer position, leave out (or rearrange to another section) the sysadmin bits - you can talk about that in the interview if you get that far. This typically means having multiple CVs, each targetted to a specific job type.

Oh, of course, that's a good point you're raising here. So far I was mainly concerned about sounding inexperienced, so I thought any sort of experience was good. I'll do that next time, it's true that if I apply to an embedded position they probably don't care much about my official Microsoft courses.

By the way, is it alright to have a two page CV which second page is half empty?

 

[A_SN]

Oh also, I'm wondering, if I want to apply to lowly jobs like level 1 tech support in French, how much should I take off? Cause I suppose I should get rid of the overly impressive stuff that would make it sound like I would quit in a heartbeat as soon as I'd find something?

 

[Ravnos]

Oh also, I'm wondering, if I want to apply to lowly jobs like level 1 tech support in French, how much should I take off? Cause I suppose I should get rid of the overly impressive stuff that would make it sound like I would quit in a heartbeat as soon as I'd find something?

It's a tough tightrope to walk. You should probably get rid of some of it for the lowly jobs, but you don't want to go too far either. I went for an interview for a jr. sysadmin position with an IT outsourcing company and was told I was the best candidate there (better even than guys with years of experience!), but they passed because they figured I would jump ship in 6 months.

On the other hand, when I interviewed for the sysadmin job I have now, they told me they didn't expect me to make a career here either, just as long as they got their money's worth while I was here and didn't leave them hanging when I left. Some companies know the score and don't mind helping you get your foot in the door of the IT world. It's kind of tough to know which are which, though.

 

[yaustar]

I had a recruiter contact me yesterday looking for a C++ programmer, I can forward your details onto him if you wish. No promises though.

 

[Squidge]

Oh also, I'm wondering, if I want to apply to lowly jobs like level 1 tech support in French, how much should I take off? Cause I suppose I should get rid of the overly impressive stuff that would make it sound like I would quit in a heartbeat as soon as I'd find something?

I'd still put in roughly the same stuff, but I'd make your coding look more of a hobby. You have to carry this over into the interview though, which is more tricky, as its a small lie. I remember going for a job, forgetting what I wrote on my CV, and being told I was over qualified.