It has been a pretty hectic few weeks. I turned a year older, Maria and I visited Seattle for no good reason, I got a new job, and I told my current company that I'm leaving. Mainly I wanted to write about the latter bits.

I had a pretty solid idea that I wanted to go into the technology industry toward the end of my time at USC. By the time I graduated I had a pretty decent foundation in hacking code together to solve problems and a solid foundation and infatuation with clean Python code. I figured that this, coupled with a professional academic background in cognitive science, statistics and natural language would really make me stand out. I took a job as an ESL instructor to pay the bills, and set out to land a job doing cool stuff with data and code.

My first day at Local was the culmination of nearly 2 years of job hunting, resume writing, cover letter tailoring and interviewing. In that time I applied for hundreds of positions. At first I was optimistic, only applying for the more data-oriented positions that I really wanted. By the end I was literally applying for any coding position I could find, just trying to get the chance to prove myself and gain some experience. It was a pretty rough time.

There are myriad reasons that my attempt to break into tech was as hard as it was. For starters, the economy was pretty much in the toilet, and it was generally a pretty terrible time to be looking for a job. I was also painfully naive. I'd been in academia for literally 13 years, and had to deal with the culture shock of the private sector the hard way. If you're an academic looking to break into the technology industry, here are some things I've learned. YMMV.

Throw Away Your CV

If you're like me you spent a significant amount of time meticulously preparing an academic position application package. You may have one or more of the following things:

• A multi-page CV with every mildly interesting publication, conference talk and poster you've ever done.
• A tl;dr cover letter that expresses your research to date, future research interests, with mad-lib style sections for custom tailoring to the target department
• A more formal statement of research interests that looks a lot like a grant proposal
• A statement of teaching philosophy that reads like a course paper in education

With few exceptions nothing good will come of submitting this for a job. Put it all on LinkedIn, add it to your webpage, but do not send this to a job posting. Instead, start from scratch and write.

• A short 1-2 page resume, highlighting your skills, relevant projects and relevant work experience. Everything else is secondary. Publications, unless specifically relevant, should be left off. Education should be there (see the next section) but not prominent.
• Depending on the job posting, compose a 1 page cover letter which concisely answers:

1. Who you are
2. Why they want you
3. Why you want the job

In my experience reading cover letters, most people spend way too much time on the first point (a sentence or two and contact info will suffice), never really address the second point (lists of skills are on the resume, tell me why I want to hire you and what value you can bring to the company and the team) and don't say anything coherent for the third (Why did you apply? How does this position fit into your career plans? What do you want to learn and/or take away from the position?).

Coping with your Degree

If you spend any time interviewing in the tech industry with a Ph.D. you'll run into someone in the Degrees don't matter, only skills and experience matter camp. This actually came out of someone's mouth during one of my early interviews

Your Ph.D. doesn't mean anything here. We're looking for doers not credenitals. A lot of our guys are ex-Google.

Shit like this will happen. It will be frustrating, particularly because they're kind of right. Your degree is fundamentally just a piece of paper, it won't get you a job. In fact, if you don't plan ahead having a higher degree can be detrimental to getting a job.

• Don't hide your degree. You don't want that awkward moment when people find out you were hiding a Ph.D.
• Don't devote much space in your cover letter or resume to your education, unless the position specifically requires it. You don't want to hide it, but your education isn't going to get you the position.
• Do include skills, projects and experience that you acquired in your academic years. This is especially true if you have a MA or Ph.D, but even a BA gives you a ton to talk about if you sell it well.
• Do bring up and be prepared to discuss why your education makes you a good candidate. Prepare this speech and deliver it. You'll be doing it in every interview. Every. Interview.

The last one is really important. Very occasionally, you'll have the good fortune of speaking to someone who has some idea about what a doctoral candidate does. Most of the time your interviewer is going to assume one or more of the following:

• You spent 4-6 years literally just sitting in classes and taking notes (seriously)
• You are way over-qualified (despite having no industry experience)
• You are way under-qualified (despite having written the paper on the algorithm they're using)
• You're going to quit as soon as you land one of those swanky academic positions
• You have almost no common sense, business acumen or understanding of how the world works

They may ask about these things, but they may not. Bring them up yourself, and remove these misconceptions.

Every.

Interview.

It Is Personal

Let's be honest, rejection sucks. You've spent hours applying for a position, talking to people on the phone, talking to people in an office, writing stuff on a whiteboard for people, and doing random code assignments. Receiving that no thanks call is devastating. I've been on both sides of this, having hired and fired several people in my time as an ESL director. Here's how I look at it.

It is business, but it's not just business. Whenever you are turned down for a job it is because something about you made the business decide not to hire you. Maybe you were a bad cultural fit, maybe you didn't have the skills, maybe there was someone else with better skills, maybe they just hated your tie. Maybe they're right, maybe not. It doesn't matter.

Tell yourself it's just business to get over the initial disappointment. Then figure out you did wrong and fix it.

Here are some things I learned both hiring and trying to get hired.

• Ask for feedback. If you made it to an in-person interview then their hiring manager should know exactly why you were not selected and have the professionalism to give you a few lines of feedback. If you just did a phone screen or email exchange then you can still ask, but it's less likely that they'll have anything useful to say. Some companies don't give feedback as a rule, this usually indicates that they have terrible hiring procedures.
• Decide if you care. This is actually pretty important. You don't have to do everything. If you're turned down from a job because you don't have x years experience building websites in php, you need to decide whether that's a problem you want to fix or if your time would be better spent doing something else.
• Don't get angry at the company. If their interview process was terrible, then you need to figure out how to navigate terrible interviews better. If you actually do have a ton of experience at building websites in php, then you need to get better at expressing that to the interviewer.
• Fix it. If you don't have the skill, go get it. Take a MOOC, do some tutorials, start or participate in a public project on GitHub. Gone are the days when learning a new skill required sitting in a classroom or digging through a library.

Get a Recruiter

For better or worse, recruiters are basically a way of life in the tech industry. You will encounter a swarm of recruiters anytime you post any vaguely tech-oriented resume on any of the major job sites. I generally dislike recruiters, and you don't need them, but they help. They help a lot. This basically sums up my experience with technical recruiters.

• The vast majority are incompetent. They have no idea what anything on your resume means, and are just trying to fuzzy match strings on your resume with similar strings in a job posting. This is normal, just take a deep breath, be patient, and rest assured that they want to find you a job.
• A minority are actually terrible and should generally be avoided for your sanity and integrity. Some danger signs include
• Asking you to sign things
• Wanting you to send over your resume/cover letter in DOC format so they can touch it up
• Being overly vague about the job opportunity they found for you
• Requiring that you give them the contact info for your references so they can prepare them
• Being pushy about you exposing any other job leads
• Calling multiple times a day, even after you request to communicate via email
• There are way more recruiters than jobs, so be selective if you can hold out. At this stage if a recruiter contacts me and does pretty much anything in the list above then we're done. There are plenty of non-terrible recruiters out there with varying degrees of competence. I'd rather deal with an incompetent but well-meaning recruiter than a competent asshole.
• Competent recruiters are like unicorns be nice to them. Seriously. A recruiter that is professional, polite, doesn't call you at 10pm to ask you some stupid question and routinely sends you interesting and relevant jobs is amazing. Thank them. Tell them they're awesome. Add them on LinkedIn. Send your friends to them. Keep them in business and happy, so that you can contact them again when you are back on the job market.

It Gets Better

When I made the tough decision to leave Local, I updated my LinkedIn profile, started responding to some of the recruitment emails and was having good interviews with awesome companies in a few weeks.

Was every position a perfect fit? Not even close.

Did I get an offer every time? Absolutely not.

But I can't express how much better this experience was to my previous 2 year process. Why?

• The current market is better for people like me (and you). Data science and data engineering are super hot, and many companies are now looking for people with deep knowledge in fields like statistics, machine learning and linguistics.
• The hype won't last forever, so it's important to make sure you're actually doing things that provide real value, but it does make it a bit easier to break into the field or move around coming from an academic background.
• I have a list of things I've done in an actual data role and can talk coherently about how those things have provided actual business value. While I can't claim to have 10 years of experience, having a list of completed projects really helps.
• I am a waaaaaay better engineer than I was when I started. Continual improvement is the only way to stay relevant, and doing stuff is the best way to improve. There's way more to engineering than just syntax and algorithms. Working in an engineering team gives you a solid appreciation for things like proper version control, good documentation, project management and coherent team communication. Incidentally my code is also much better.
• Experience means you're serious. It's not that I wasn't serious 3 years ago, it's just that as far as anyone knew, I might be completely terrible and quit after two weeks to take a tenure-track position in Hawaii. With a bit of experience all of this seems less likely, and while I still sometimes have to explain why academic experience is relevant, it's much easier to sell.