Blinded By His Brightness
by Alex Papadimoulis
in Tales from the Interview
on 2007-10-08
Jay was excited: he finally landed a job interview for a developer position. While for many of us such an event registers pretty high on the “big deal, that happens to me all the time” scale, it was pretty rare for Jay. Like many of his young peers, Jay lacked experience in the industry. But unlike his peers, Jay did not have a college degree. And he lived in Mississippi, a state not exactly known as a hub for things high-tech. Or really even tech.
“Just work with what you’ve got,” a friend told him, “and you’ve got a damn good GPA from a damn good upstate New York public school. I mean, compared to the schools down here, that’s practically a college degree!”
Forums
Sep 07Fresh out of college, and used to being the only woman in my engineering and computer science classes, I wasn't quite sure what to expect in the real world. I happily ended up finding a development job in a company which was nowhere near as unbalanced as my college classes had been. The company was EXTREMELY small and the entire staff, except the CEO, was in one office. I ended up sitting at a desk next to the office admin, another woman who was hired a month or two after me.