| Heh, man I wish I could be anonymous and post this... I've gotten offers from most of those companies you've mentioned and worked/interviewed/resume sorted for one of the ones with a higher bar. Here's some tough love, but hopefully it'll be helpful. This is what goes through my mind as a dev helping out the recruiters at one of these places: 1. I've never heard of your University. It's not from the US and isn't Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT or Berkeley, so it isn't an immediate forward to a phone screen. Not an IIT or Waterloo either. 2. The GPA system I don't understand, but doesn't seem particularly high. I'm not a stickler for GPA, but it seems to be close to a 3.0. At that GPA, even if you were from a top CS school, it'd be a tough sell for a phone screen. 3. I don't see a class schedule, have you ever written an operating system from scratch before? Written your own network stack? 4. Have you done something amazing worthy of recognition? Amazing top coder results? IOI Medal? ICPC World Finals? Again not necessary for a phone screen, but given that nothing else is a signal for a phone screen, this would be it. 5. Expected 2016. Ok, at least if we hire him as an intern, there's a good chance he'll come back as a full time. Sophomores are risky since most will intern elsewhere next year and you won't be able to hire them back. 6. No evidence of work (OSS contributions, intelligent blog, etc) to judge you by. I sometimes go through 3-4 interviews a day, and the fact is, most people with perfect resumes and 4.0's from Stanford fail my interview anyway. Nothing here signals to me that having a dev spend an hour in a phone screen with you isn't a waste of everyone's time. You're going to need some hook to make it to the next step. If there's a referral from someone internal that says to interview this guy, we're giving you the benefit of the doubt. Admittedly, these are snap judgements I'm making and are very likely completely unfair. There aren't enough hours in the day to give everyone applying a shot at a phone screen, so we need to weed out 99% of the resume's immediately--even if that means throwing away a few that would have passed. |