How to Not Work at McDonalds With Your CS Degree
Scott has a good post of recommendations for new CS graduates is food for thought. I was lucky enough to keep a job that I got while in the co-op program at school, and stayed there for… well, far too long.
Most of the post comes out to “get street cred”, which is good. I think my first step on hiring someone would be to do searches on their name/email address on the net and see what comes out. The impression there will go a long way to see if I think they are the sort of person I’m looking for (ignoring the really early stuff of course).
I wonder if this sort of thing will influence people to not associate their “real” name with some types, or all types, or online activities. Personally I’ve sort of given up hiding / using a nick… it doesn’t take a whole lot of work to figure out that the person who calls himself “Arcterex”‘s real name is Ted Barreiro.
As y’ll can tell I’ve given up on using my nick. Main reason is that I don’t like my nick, but not enough to change it. On the hand, I like to believe that I can tell anyone “go ahead, search google for me” and be OK with people reading the 1600 hits on my name. Ie, having no dead corpses in the closet, no burnt bridges, etc.
Occasionally I use my nick for Yahoo, some website registration things, but that’s about it. I guess the otherside, is that in a normal business environment (old style offices, non-geek, not-solid-software-development) it’s not common to use nicknames on whatever instant messaging system is being used. It’s hard enough to remember 200 different peoples’ names, never mind nicks for everyone 🙂