R E V E N U E

Software developers, and technical people of all stripes, for that matter, have the same role that every other employee in the company has. Solve problems for customers that customers will pay for. Do so sustainably, do so responsibly, and do so ethically. All of our roles exist to bring value to the customer and bring value to our teams. That’s it. Spoiler, that’s the essence of the entire article.

It’s important to note that I don’t mention writing code. We’re not talking about APIs or Microservices. Databases? Design? Don’t care. These are tools that we use. The same way that Vic on the social media team uses short-form content to inform folk of the value their company brings. Just like we collaborate to build a marketing website or a CMS. Just like the fine folks over in finance, we make sure we can be sustainable in the value we bring to customers so that we can continue to work away at those problems.

Increasingly Customer Focused

It’s no accident that over the past few years, as a collective, we’ve focused on bringing back-office functions forward. Even five years ago, sitting in front of a customer to talk about something I’ve built would have terrified me. What if they don’t like the software? What if they noticed that bug I couldn’t fix in time? If you haven’t ridden the “Oh no, they’re on the page with the column that’s three pixels out” roller coaster, are you even a thrill junkie? They didn’t even notice that side of the page because they were focused on the cart.

Getting back-office staff (technical or not) out in front of customers has driven innovation and improved the quality of the products we create. The empathy that we feel for our users has grown. I used to have a CEO that said, “I don’t need to pay for design staff because we’re a monopoly. Our users will use our software anyway, so it doesn’t have to be good; it has to work”. Inspiring stuff.

Ultimately, with any for-profit enterprise, this comes down to money. These techniques produce better outcomes for the humans that pay for them. Better solutions mean more revenue, better retention, and so on. On an individual level, I like to think that we here care more about the people involved than the dollars. We here are deeply passionate about producing something extraordinary that improves people’s lives, but I may just be projecting!

Getting out in front of customers, engaging with other parts of your business and generally getting away from your desk a bit more brings opportunities.

Being close to the customer reduces rework. If you know well what people want, it’s easier to identify that we’re building the wrong thing or that the thing is being built in the wrong way.

Talking to customers is also a great way of getting early feedback, and the benefits of more rapid input in the software we make are well known. It’s easier to stay aligned as a team, and it’s easier to work with product and design folks because of that alignment. Being close to the customer is like greasing the wheels that way.

Is career progression important to you? Being close to the customer cultivates trust with the broader business because you’re not just those speccy folks that want to talk about RAM and AZURE. You’re the people closest to the customer. You demonstrably care about and advocate for your customers. Those above us who make decisions about us and our careers will see and reward that.

AFK

This brave new world does bring challenges. The big one is time management. Time away from keyboards is valuable - but there are already reasons for us to be away from our desks. Meetings are the most common complaint. Reviews, plannings and refinements. Sitting with stakeholders, sitting with customers, general admin. Sometimes it feels like we already spend more time talking than doing work.

It can be pretty demoralising if you measure your productivity or worth by lines of code or the number of releases. Lifting your head and treating time away as an investment in creating better (if fewer) outcomes can help with that. Better still, judge yourself by the impact you make, not by any technical metric.

Parting Thoughts

The next five years are looking good for us. We are people who produce solutions for customers through code, and in that space, demand will exceed supply for quite some time. With trends like DevSecOps, we’ve seen teams of specialists turn into cross-functional teams. With design thinking, we’ve seen groups of people who previously thought they had nothing to do with a customer’s experience realise that we all have an impact. That impact might be a workflow in an app or the pricing model we sometimes inflict on users. Self-sufficient, sustainable product teams are becoming more common. Business people who in the past didn’t have a lot to do with the software are becoming more involved, and groups of technical folk are gaining access to more institutional knowledge, better links into the business and faster feedback loops.

So what do I say in parting? You are not the code you write nor the technical solution you create; that is immensely positive! We’re seeing people begin to value us as complete humans, not as mechanical turks running on undersized EC2s that produce software. We’re seeing that the IT Crowd is now a comedy show and no longer a manual on what to expect from technical staff and how to treat them. With that comes leverage for us, personally and professionally. Think about how that leverage applies in your role and use it! Use it to get better outcomes for the people you create for and better results for yourself!

There are several things we need to understand about ourselves if we are to remain functional while under pressure. We need to understand what our baseline stress profile. We need to learn about how to work on our stress levels over time. We must deal with spikes.

I believe that Covid-19 is a long-lived global pandemic, that will shift the way the world works. Now, or over the next 12 months, our society will have to make changes to the way we live, together. If we can change, we may endure, after we endure, we might be able to start living again. We are not in a sprint right now. We’re in a marathon. Consider the pandemic an endurance sport.

With the recent announcement by the Government of Alert Level 4, it’s time to confront uncomfortable truths. Fortunately, doing so is the first step we can all take to adjust to this new reality. Confronting uncomfortable truths is the first step I’d like you to consider.

Credit: Allex Villegas, Twitter

Take stock of how you are, right now.

How are you feeling? Do you feel loose, calm or limber? Do you think you might evaporate into thin air any second, or perhaps you feel like everything around you is vibrating or spinning?

The very first step here is to figure out how you are responding both mentally and physically. Hopefully, you know what your body feels like when you’re feeling nervous, it might be trickier to figure out your mental state. Asking your mind to observe itself, is like trying to look rocks at the bottom of a pond without disturbing the surface.

If you’re not sure how you feel (or you feel busy but can’t quite narrow down why), you might find it useful to do a body scan. A body scan is a valuable mindfulness technique to begin to understand how you feel.

It’s important that during a body scan, you don’t judge yourself. Don’t beat yourself up at how you feel. The way you feel, is. The way you feel must exist free of any value judgement - our goal here isn’t to fix or solve anything. Our goal isn’t to make you feel better - yet. With a body scan, all we want to do is gain awareness of ourselves, in a way that we might not normally do.

There are several apps out there that can help you practice your body scan. I’ve had good results with both Calm and Headspace, and I recommend them both to you.

Often after a long day in Afghanistan, I would find myself exhausted despite having not done anything of note. My shoulders would feel like slabs of iron, and my back would feel brittle and inflexible. I didn’t know why. I slowly learned that the more time I spent trying to sense how individual parts of my body were feeling, the easier it was to find ways to accept how I felt. Allowing that I felt a certain way let me choose where to intervene, or where not to.

The effect this had, is that it took me from a place where I felt like things were happening to me that I couldn’t control, to a place where I could step back and examine what was happening, make sense of it and respond. I was able to reassert some control over my situation.

Regaining control in this way led me to a core concept that you may have heard before: You cannot always control your environment, but you can control how you respond.

Confront uncomfortable truths

Have you heard the phrase “Disagree and commit” before? Spoken initially by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, Jeff Bezos popularised them as a core leadership principle of Amazon. You may have used these words before when talking about a decision at work. In this way, “Disagree and commit” can shape your reality at work.

They can also shape your reality outside of work.

The Stockdale Paradox states:

Retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts or your current reality, whatever they might be.

This concept was vital for me getting through the pressures of being deployed to a war zone. It can help again by giving us a life raft to hold on to during a global pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen for a hundred years and more.

Practice with me now. Take these facts, understand them, and reflect on them. Take another body scan and reflect on how they make you feel. Be kind to yourself and know that this is a normal reaction.

This pandemic is global and will be with us for longer than our self-isolation. For the next year if not longer, you, I, our loved ones and people we’ve never met equally will be at risk of contracting, and being killed by this virus. Our careers, our families and our ways of life are at risk. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

My two-year-old son is currently immunocompromised, and so I feel this risk very acutely. With practice, we can accept these facts and let them flow over us like water, and none of us is helpless.

I believe, and the goal here is for you also to believe in the core of your being, that we will get through this. We will endure. Of that, there is no question - as we have done before, so to will we now. We must have unwavering faith that we will prevail in the end. Having accepted entirely, the brutal facts of our reality, and armed with the conviction that we will prevail, positive change can begin.

Understand what you can control

Confronting the brutal truths of your new normal is the first step in reasserting control over your life. Regardless of what your chosen list is, make sure you have one. If your limbs feel like lead getting out of bed in the morning right now, it can feel gratuitous - why focus more on the things that make me feel this way?

Avoiding the truth will make you feel good in the short term, but only the short-term. It’s no way to live in anything other than a sprint, and as I said earlier, this is a marathon. If you need to avoid the truth to get through the short term, be kind to yourself, accept it and move on - but make a plan for how you’re going to eventually accept your situation in the same way you accept that your behaviour is what you need to do right now.

You will have worries; you’ll have confronted the world we share and the events happening around you. It can feel overwhelming, and you’re allowed to feel overwhelmed.

To accept what you can and can’t control, you need to be able to think about them all separately. Overseas, I struggled with being removed from my family. I struggled initially with the threat of death or injury lurking around every corner. I didn’t know the language and relied on others for communication that was vital to doing my job. I found myself bouncing around from small job to small job because it was challenging to think about the big stuff.

I adjusted. I had a scrap of paper in my barrack room that contained all of my worries. Writing them down took away the exoticness of them, but more importantly, it helped me to untangle them all. Rather than walking around as one big ball of stress, I could compartmentalise, and store little bits of well-identified stress equally across my body and mind. Once I figured this out, the process of dealing with it was much more manageable.

Accept what you cannot control What if someone buries a bomb in the road and my wagon drives over it and we all die?

For a soldier doing peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan, this was a genuine threat. It has happened before, to people you know, within the last six months. Nothing about this threat is remote or mysterious. If this happens, likely, you won’t even know about it. You’ll just be dead with a snap of your fingers, like that. Done.

How much thought should I have given the possibility I’d be killed by a roadside bomb the next time I left base? As it turns out, the correct answer: None at all. Let me explain why.

We had tactics, training, procedures - the Army spends a lot of time thinking about how to minimise this threat, and we have things that we do consciously and with enough training that it becomes subconscious, to mitigate the danger. Mitigate is the best case here. To altogether avoid the threat would require me not to do my job.

After you’ve done everything you can to manage your situation, what more can you do? Nothing. Accept that. What a beautiful thing! You’ve maxed out! You are now free to live your life!

Paraphrasing a good friend of mine called Epictetus (Discourses, 2.5.4–5):

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own . . .”

In other words, if you have made all of the choices available to you, if you have prepared as best you can, if you have reflected on what you can and can’t control, why should you focus on any choice other then the ones you own?

Acknowledging that your resources are finite and that you have done the best you can with them, you rob the power the uncontrollable has over you. You transform from “I don’t know!” to something as simple as “We shall see.”

Go through your mental list of worries and commit them to paper if that’s your style. Recently, I’ve tended to group and catalogue mine, and then speak them aloud, I talk about how they make me feel, what I can do about them and what I can’t do about them. In this way, I make them familiar, and I take away the power they have to shut me down. I take them from a place of power to a place of internal observation.

Create your new normal

By now, our old routines are gone. No more weekly sit-downs for Dungeons and Dragons, we have to go remote. No more dinner and drinks out. Social Fridays at the Pool and Bar are gone. While some folk continue to work in essential businesses, many will be out of work.

The old rules and old routines don’t apply now - take this as an opportunity to reforge your days in a way that works for you. I’m working from home. The creeping tyranny of meetings that could have been emails are turning into emails. I suddenly have time in my day.

Think about how you operate best. Are you a morning person? A night owl? Schedule yourself some time to exercise every day - staying active is essential, and so is getting fresh air. Stay in your neighbourhood, but do go for a jog. Schedule in some time for doing what you enjoy, schedule time for improving yourself. If you are able, consider scheduling in some time to help others - that may look like assisting a flatmate looking for work, it may be volunteering your time on the phone or making things to help people in the fight against COVID-19. If in doubt, apply this principle:

Spend time on yourself in the now, spend time on the future you, and give time to others; however you are able.

Importantly, build in time to check in with yourself. We started with body scans, why not create some time in now to keep up the practice? One of the best investments I’ve ever made in myself has been the scheduling in of mindfulness practice for a couple of hours a week. Other philosophies might speak to you more, but I’ve significantly improved my wellbeing by integrating regular mindfulness practices and adopting a philosophy of stoicism.

Track your progress

Allocate time (perhaps before or after your mindfulness practice) to have a check-in. Your body scans are an excellent place to start, and there are more practices you might build in then I can mention here (the internet is your friend!). Start with focusing on how you or your body feel now compared to last week. Perhaps spend some time trying to anticipate future stresses before they come along. Catalogue or internalise the things you can and can’t control, or otherwise seek to get ahead of things. Try to position yourself so that when the next wave breaks, you’re a little more prepared for it than you were last time. Alternatively, spend that time creating a place to retreat, a place where you can simply endure, and get back up again.

In Afghanistan, that place was the mess hall at Combat Outpost Romero. After a long patrol full of tension, knowing that I could come back after cleaning my kit, and sit down with a cup of tea and a hot meal and spend some time with friends off the clock made the difference between coping and thriving.

With your regular check-ins, you should be on your way to coming to terms with external stress. If you’re not, that’s okay. Remember that it takes time, and everyone is on their own journey. Be kind to yourself and others. If you don’t make immediate progress, or you do make progress and later lose that progress, give yourself some grace. Adjusting is complicated and is never truly over. What matters is that you’re making progress!

In the words of another influential author, Dr Seuss (Oh the Places You’ll Go!):

“I’m sorry to say so
but, sadly, it’s true
that Bang-ups
and Hang-ups
can happen to you.”

“But on you will go
though the weather be foul.
On you will go
though your enemies prowl.
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl.
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.”

Stay connected - but consider avoiding social media

More than ever, it’s essential to be part of a community. Humans are social creatures. During stressful times we band together. Some of the tightest tribes and units I have seen have been built through shared adversity. I’m well aware that the literature out there says that teams and bonds form through positive reinforcement, but I cannot reconcile that with my own experience.

The tightest, most trusting, highest quality teams I have ever had the honour of being a part of, have been formed as a group of people were put together, and repeatedly flung into the shit. Be that on the sands of Afghanistan or after one dogshit, irredeemable project after another. The most potent teams I’ve observed have become like family in the positive sense of the word, not the exploitative “work until midnight because the company is your family” spirit of the word.

Connect with video calls, voice calls or text-based messages. Maybe it’s a long-running game of scrabble on your phone; perhaps it’s a Minecraft server you’ve set up for the crew. Find a way of staying connected remotely, with those you care for. Even more than usual, make an extra effort to keep in touch with those who might be more isolated than you. The oldies who are still trying to work their new iPad or the neighbour kids whose parents are working 16 hour days at the local supermarket - connecting with others will help your wellbeing and theirs.

Scrolling through Twitter for 4 hours a day will likely make you feel worse. Sifting through your Facebook feed for that one image a friend sent you might not be worth it. I have long-standing issues with facebook’s privacy practices, and have disabled my profile (and even now I encourage you to do the same) - but Messenger is a good way of keeping in touch even without a profile.

There is evidence from studies that say at the best of times; social media can harm our wellbeing. These are not the best of times. I’m avoiding social media as much as I can, and where I can’t, I’m changing my habits to reduce the time I spend on social media. I strongly recommend you do the same.

Dealing with pressure spikes

Themes have emerged throughout this article. Some of them have been deliberate actions we can take on an event occurring; others have been more general strategies or ideas to review. Here’s a summary of the tactics you can use to help manage your stress levels when the pressure is high:

1. Assess how you’re feeling - are you in a good place to face the wave as it comes in or a not-so-good place? Don’t forget to observe the body as well as the mind, as best you can. With practice, you’ll be able to take stock of how you are feeling, and anticipate how that might change as the wave approaches, breaks and recedes.
2. Examine the stress as you see it approach, and begin to accept that there will be some aspects of it you can influence, and some you can’t. You’re not a dummy for being unable to control some things, that’s life! Realising that you can only do your best will help you begin to regain control.
3. Look at your environment, and if you have time, make changes so that when the next stressor arrives, you have choices. If you feel you can withstand it, confront and mitigate it as soon as you can. If you’re feeling vulnerable, or you’re not sure you can tackle the stress head-on, find the place where you can endure, this too will pass.

In creating your new routine, you will have created a new you, a more resilient you. I’m hopeful that if you’ve got to this point, not only will you have adapted to COVID-19, you will have adapted to stress in general. You’ll have new tools you can use to remain active. You’ll have novel ways of integrating stress into your life while also allowing it to drain away, receding like the high tide. I believe that practising mindfulness, adopting a more stoic outlook on life, and being kind to yourself and others will improve the quality of your life, now and for the future.

Above all else, as Prime Minister Ardern says, be calm, be kind, look after one another.

The past month has been crazy.

In the past month, I’ve started a new role, my son has started crawling, I’ve helped launch the second season of Overtime on a brand new technical stack, they only thing that hasn’t changed is this blog, I’ve been neglecting it. Work has slowed down a bit before christmas, so now seems like a good time to post an update.

Leaving Spark Ventures

I left Spark Ventures after working there for a year. They supported me in the first full time role as a software developer that I’ve ever had, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunities they gave me, and I’ll miss the team and the work. I left on great terms and (if it’s in the cards) I look forward to returning in a more senior role. Before I left, my team was working on continuous integration and deployment. We successfully transitioned Bigpipe from a completely manual deployment process to an automatic one. It was a really enjoyable task, and once it was complete, I wanted to keep doing that kind of work.

Enter Healthlink, stage left.

I was made aware of an opportunity at Healthlink to continue doing work like the work I did for Bigpipe. The situation here at healthlink makes the Bigpipe automation simple! Healthlink runs a product that enables health practitioners to send documents - referrals, letters, medical certificates, test results and so on - digitally between providers. It’s the reason that you can get a non-funded drug approved by Pharmac in three days rather than three weeks. It’s behind your rural doctor getting results back from that specialist lab in the big city as soon as the results are done - without having to wait for the rural post service to deliver the mail.

It’s an complex system of java applications, web servers, auth servers, databases and APIs that have got loads of tightly coupled moving parts. I’m helping them work through that system with a view to achieving CI/CD - completing this process will hopefully reduce the degree of coupling, consolidate technologies and generally refresh the tech too. It’s the biggest job I’ve ever attempted, and I’m glad that I’ll be working alongside some incredibly clever people - all of whom will be able to teach me a great deal.

Overtime Season 2

Overtime season 2 has launched!

We’ve completely rebuilt out tech stack! There’ll be another post coming with the specifics on what we did and how we did it, as well as some challenges we had to overcome. We’re looking at returning to the NZ eSports scene bigger and better then ever before, and I think we’ll start to see some traction this season. We’re more organised, more experienced and have better technologies behind us. The team is expanding - more people working on more things mean we can just do.. more!

Watch that space, season 2 is going to be excellent!

Toby has started crawling!

I’m pretty proud of that little guy. He’s ahead of schedule for all of his developmental milestones, he was born on the wrong end of the scales for average head size, body size, body weight and a bunch of other stuff. At 8 months old, he’s now in the 97th percentile for head size (aka big ol’ brain) and is above the average for his other growth indicators. My wife is doing a great job being a mum while I have to leave for work every day. I’m very proud of them both.

Things are looking pretty positive.

I’m in the proess of writing a whole bunch of posts, and will be hopefully publishing a bit over christmas. TTYL. Beer to drink.

Let’s be clear right at the start, I have used maybe 15% ~ 20% at best, of the knowledge I learned at University. Most surprising of all is that most of what I have used, came from a stage one course. Yeah that course in HTML that everybody turns their noses up at because it’s for plebians who can’t into C? Take it. You’ll earn dollars with that course.

Speaking of courses, I’m in my second year of Uni, when I started with Summer of Tech I was the second semester of my first year, by the time the program wound down and internship offers were out I had completed my third semester - which brings me up to date as of writing this (I’m not taking any summer school papers - I’m not smart or beautiful enough to get away with that).

I’m doing a double major in Geography and Computer Science, and for those of you at the start of your studies, I would recommend picking up a second major, it gives your more flexibility in your degree, looks better on a CV and to be honest, it lets you avoid the courses in each school that don’t interest you or have bad reps for being poorly run. My degree consists of courses that I 100% love and am interested in, which makes it a lot easier to learn the content. Don’t hate your study, change it.

For those that want the nitty gritty of how useful each particular course has been, here’s a breakdown for you. Please note that I’m trying to keep it institution agnostic, so people who aren’t at the same place as me can still understand the topics I’ve covered and hopefully still get some value out of this post.

On the CompSci side of my degree, I’ve studied all the level one papers available, they are pretty generic so they don’t get named individually - they contained the basic theories of CompSci, the history of the field, an introduction to Java (though I understand they have now changed from Java to Python) and an introduction to data structures.

At stage two, so far I’ve taken courses in Discrete Mathematics (I was tricked into it, the course code said CS but should have been MATH), Algorithms and Data Structures, Software Construction, and Low Level Programming.

Software construction focussed on Java GUIS and threading, which haven’t been so useful for me here thus far, there was a small module on testing and a small module on version control though, and both of those were invaluable. Many people turn their noses up at testing, but it’s actually one of the most critical aspects of shipping software. If your code doesn’t work, you don’t (or shouldn’t) ship and you don’t get paid (Except if you’re a Triple A Game Publisher - I’m looking at you BF4 / AC:Unity).

Low level programming covered computing from Transistors up through to the C programming language. It’s a useful course in that it gave me a background in how computers actually physically compute, and therefore how to make things as efficient as possible, and why that’s important.

Algorithms and Data structures is a hard course, but also valuable in it’s own way. the knowledge there is the kind of knowledge you forget you need, and then you look at your code one day and think why is this so buggy and horrible and slow? Oh wait it’s because I somehow have made a triply nested loop where each iteration of each loop calls a recursive function. That’s probably hyperbole. But I am certainly much more aware of the way I structure code and solve problems now. So that’s something. I also learned search, I haven’t used it for work yet, but in one of the games I’m working on in my spare time, I use search, so that stuff is good to know.

As I alluded to earlier, discrete mathmatics, although billed and coded as a CompSci course, was actually

taught by math staff and was a maths course in disguise. It’s one of those courses where you don’t notice yourself using it until you find yourself trying to prove that some graph has some property and therefore is a better choice as a data structure than some other structure. I’m loathe to admit that it was a decent course because I don’t like, nor am I good at math. I’m probably in the wrong industry, I know.

Learn a version control system and become very familliar with it.

It’s an unwritten prerequisite that you know Git or some other version control system before you get into the workforce. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, at Ventures here we use Git . I also ended up learning Bash . Linux users you should have no issue with this, OS X also has bash. Windows users, it’s a bit wierd at first but once you get used to it, it makes life a lot easier (I actually find that I can do things in bash via command line faster then I can do things using a GUI now.)

Take the time to do your own projects, it’s a great way to learn something new. It was probably my dabbling in Javascript and html - and the projects I did - rather than my somewhat incomplete knowledge of University level Computer Science that helped me more in getting this position

Don’t forget to go outside. I’m real bad for that.

=================================

I have loved technology ever since I was a wee nipper. I confused a lot of people when I joined the Army after college but that decision was key (more on that another time though). I left the Army in time to enroll in Semester Two 2013 at the University of Auckland. I sit here now, on the top floor of Spark City in Auckland, and I feel very, very fortunate.

I’m Alex, an intern Software Developer for Spark Ventures over the Summer of 2014 (and hopefully after that also). It’s a tough job breaking into a new industry, but worry not, I’m going to tell you how I did it, and how you can do it too.

The work here at Spark is awesome, just this morning I designed and implemented a web page that leverages social media to increase engagement with customers. I’ve dabbled in web stuff before but this is an actual product that will may go live at some stage, it’s a cool feeling. A fellow intern is working on automating some work processes we have here, to save time and tears (a lot of tears in my case) and this is only our second week. I’m looking forward to the rest of summer and the sweet projects we’ll be working on.

I got involved in an excellent program called Summer of Tech , they run boot camps and workshops on all sorts of stuff that industry needs but Uni doesn’t teach you. They run meet and greets and interviews with companies, they organised a day long hack-fest where teams of students get together and work on projects to win prizes and impress industry reps, it’s a great program. If you are in Auckland or Wellington, get involved ASAP.

It’s not the only way, but they certainly took a lot of the leg work out of the equation for me. Summer of Tech made it about my skills and experiences, and how I interacted with companies, rather then how good I am at cold calling or finding opportunities. Summer of Tech put the opportunities in front of me, all I had to to was grab them.

Plenty of big companies offer internships, those not involved in Summer of Tech often have their own programs, I went to a few of those, you should too. Friends of mine have got internships with Deloitte, PwC and the Wynyard Group, they did it through company recruitment events, not Summer of Tech.

Put yourself out there, if you see an opportunity that isn’t quite what you were after, who cares? Take it anyway. Learn something new. Apply for everything you can, be greedy, say yes. People remember those positive types who say yes to everything. Managers want to look good right? Well managers will remember you if they think you’ll make them look good, and if you make them look good, they’ll remember that and repay you the kindness.

Work hard, strive for excellence, again, make your manager look good, or make that potential manager think you’ll do such great stuff that you’ll both look good.

Know your field. It’s hard to make your manager look good if you don’t know how to do your job. You want a role in the IT industry, you need to know about the tools and procedures that get used in the industry, it’s that simple.

Be a decent human being. Arrogance, Rudeness, Idleness, these traits will make you stand out for the wrong reasons. Be mindful of that. I’ve spoken to people who feel that if they have an 8 or 9 point GPA, industry should be seeking them out, not them seeking out industry. Grades are important, but it’s more important to be able to function in a team environment. You need not be party central, you need not be a superheroic extrovert and the center of attention (I’m certainly none of those things!) but you do need to be able to form meaningful relationships. You need to be able to leave the right impressions on people, for the right reasons. So when you meet people, wear deodorant or anti-perspirant. Shower. Clean your teeth. Dress appropriately. All those good things mum and dad told you.

Your ability to form relationships and communicate, and your ability to learn new skills will get you a job. Taking your waifu pillow (Dakimakura?) to the interview will not. I’m not saying don’t be into that stuff, what you do at home is neither my business nor an employers’. All I’m saying is be professional while meeting professionals.

Seriously guys, I can’t stress this enough. You can have a ridiculous GPA, but if you can’t communicate or form relationships, it’s going to make your life a lot harder then it needs to be (Summer of Tech does workshops on soft skills like interviewing and meeting people by the way). If you take nothing else away from this post, take the above two paragraphs.

TL;DR, How do I into internships
1 Join Summer of Tech or go to Company Recruiting Events
2 Be cool, be good at what you do.
3 Put your hand up. Say yes to every opportunity that comes your way, the worst that can happen is nothing.
4 Follow up with recruiters
5 ????
6 Profit (Literally, they pay you to do what you love)

I got where I am today with hard work, a bit of stubbornness and some luck. I can’t implement Djikstra’s algorithm in assembly language, but I can interact with people -ish. You can too. The results are always worth it and there is never a better time to start then now. If you have any questions you feel free to hit me up on twitter (@4lexNZ ) or this website, either by email on the main page, or by dropping me a comment below.

This time I’m going to be looking at it from the Employer perspective. I’ve been handling Spark Venture’s Summer of Tech efforts this year as well as dealing with sponsorship stuff, running bootcamps and of course, running the Hackfest (that we held at the awesome Spark City Conference center)

The Meet and Greet is competitive. Students want to impress the best employers, and likewise, employers want to imprint themselves on the minds of students as “The place to be”.

Last year, I would have found it useful to know my way around the process, in the end I just drank beer and talked shit, and that was good enough - depending on who you ask :P

Firstly - Talk to everyone. Talk to every single employer in the room, regardless of whether or not you want a job with them. For one, it’s great practice. Communication sklls are the API that all of your other, more technical skills are exposed via. You can’t expect employers to spend money on you (onboarding is expensive!) without them being confident that you have the skills needed. If they can’t see or verify those skills, you may as well not have them. I beat students last year who were a lot more talented, hardworking and conscientious then me, because I could more readily communicate. It’s not fair, but it’s how the world works (there are always exceptions mind you).

Secondly - Don’t get too drunk. If you’re as fond of the gin as I, it might pay to watch your intake. It’s exciting, it’s fast paced, it’s a competition. It’s easy to lose track of the little things (by that I mean, it’s easy to lose track of everything that isn’t related to talking to employers). If you’re the type of person that can’t stretch a drink out over a few hours, consider banning yourself from it until the end of the night. Personally, I thought of it as a reward system, Every time I did a circuit of the employers present, after having had meaningful 5m+ long conversations with them, I would reward myself with one low alcohol content beer. Another way to think of it is like this, if you’re drinking enough to feel more then a good buzz, your lips are spending too much time on the end of a bottle, and not enough time on the end of a conversation.

TL:DR - Be cool, manage your intake, don’t be that guy. You know the one.

Finally, enjoy it. When dealing directly with people who could give you a job, it’s easy to feel the pressure. Try to focus on having great conversations, and enjoy the time with your fellow students, and employers who are passionate about the industry they are in. Without fail, every single employee in that room is there because they want to be, because they love what they do, love the industry they work in and love what Summer of Tech does. Enjoy yourself, the best conversations happen when you’re happy and comfortable, not when you’re forcing yourself to say words for the sake of somebody else. It’s about you. Own it, enjoy it. I can’t stress that point enough.

I also bought a great book today with a bunch of coding exercises in it. I might again take time off the scrambler in the future to work through those programs, as they are waaay more likely to help me in interviews than that program (at least when it comes to answering technical questions).

Also, started reading ‘Cracking the Code Interview’ - this book makes me appreciate how little in know about interviewing! I’ve got a lot of work to do if I want to bum rush the bigger software firms!