Life in Tech | Fall 2021

Copyright

This is a repository containing course information for Life in Tech. Kofi Forson, Kyrhee Powell and Curtis Hite Jr. assert copyright ownership of this repository and all derivative works, including courses and material derived from this course and/or repository. This copyright statement should not be removed or edited.

Description

A course designed to get students prepared to conquer the job market.

Why?

According to CNN, students are currently entering the worst job market since the Great Depression due to the pandemic. We have recently successfully navigated the tech job market to land various positions (Software Engineer, Test Engineer, Program Manager) in the following companies: Apple, Microsoft and IBM.

Life in Tech is a collection of all the information we wish we knew when we first entered the market. It's a 16-week curriculum split into two sections: technical and non-technical. The technical section is meant to teach students how to ace technical interviews and the non-technical section is meant to teach students the skills needed to build their professional network and land job interviews.

Deep Dive: Technical

Week 1: Intro
- Intro professors
- Syllabus
- When to use a language?
  - Use the easiest language to solve a problem
- Programming Language Documentation
- Problem Solving Approach
  - time yourself (45 minutes/problem)
  - break problem down
  - clear ambiguity
  - reviewing code (edge cases)
  - Go through real world problem that is not related to coding
  - Write the steps down as student goes through their approach
- Have students write pseudo code for practice problem
Week 2: Search/Sort
- Binary Search
- Merge Sort
- Selection Sort
- Teach the behaviors and tradeoffs
- Transition into Big O
Week 3: Big O
- Intro to Big O (runtime and memory)
- Time/space tradeoff
- When not to worry about Big O
- Give real world examples of how an industry algorithm was improved and its Big O runtime and/or memory
Week 4-9: Data Structures
- Week 4: Lists/Stack/Queue
- Week 5: Linked Lists
- Week 6: Hashmap
- Week 7: Graphs
  - Transition into Trees
- Week 8: Trees: autocorrect/filling text (prefix tree)
  - Tree traversal
- Week 9: Heaps
- Give concrete examples on why to use certain data structures
- Give real world examples of how data structures are used in industry
- Each data structure will probably be its own lesson
Week 10: Object-Oriented Design
- Could teach clean code during this week as well
- Clean Code
  - Naming
  - Functions
  - Comments
  - Formatting (indentation, line spacing, etc)
  - Error handling
  - An example of clean code vs. spaghetti code
- Ask Rasamny for his slides
Week 11: Testing/Code Coverage
- Unit tests
- Test plans
- End-to-end testing (going through workflow process)
- Performance testing
Week 12: Recursion*
- Base case
- Conditional logic
- How to approach recursion? SKIP!
Week 13: Dynamic Programming
- Teach after recursion
- Backtracking/storing data to be used later
- Shortest path
- Find a solution and store it for later
Week 14: Backtracking
Week 15: Threads & Locks (CTCI section is sufficient)

Deep Dive: Non-Technical

Week 1: Intro/Resume
- Intro professors
- Template
- Formatting
- Layout
- Autofill applications
- Situation, Task, Action and Result
- Metrics
- Show one of our resumes
Week 2: Elevator pitch
- Who are you?
- Be concise
- Use resume as a guide
- Give my elevator pitch as an example
- Look at AKB elevator pitch resource on site
Week 3: LinkedIn Profile
- Use elevator pitch in headline
- Headline (what you do/what you want to do)
- Bio
- Job/volunteer experience
- Education
- Media
- Skills (related to jobs that you're looking for)
  - copy skills from job posts
Week 4: Leveraging LinkedIn
- Make posts and enagage with other posts (like, comment, share)
- LinkedIn Learning
- Udemy, Udacity, coursera (online learning certificates)
- LinkedIn Assessments (skill badges)
- LinkedIn premium (see who viewed your profile and message credits)
Week 5: Cold contacts (recruiters)
- Template for LinkedIn and email
- Builds LinkedIn network (make sure to try to connect)
- Show examples of cold contacts in my LinkedIn DMs
Week 6: How to apply
- Research the company culture
  - Go to company website and their careers page should have a section dedicated to culture
  - Visit company LinkedIn profile
  - Talk to alumni currently working at company
  - Connect with people on LinkedIn that work at the company
  - Attend company events, if possible
- University careers section
- Search by content (could be a filter for programming language too)
- Follow up with cold contact to recruiter
- Leverage alumni network if they're at the company
- How to maximize chances of application being seen
  - Buzzwords on Resume/LinkedIn
  - Skills on LinkedIn profile
- Go through exercise searching for job openings on LinkedIn and explain how I would apply to the job
Week 7: What the interview process looks like?
- Initial convo with HR
- Phone screen (could be technical)
- Take home assessment (due in a couple of days/weeks)
- On-site (multiple rounds of interviews technical and behavioral)
- Offer
Week 8: Framing answers/Storytelling
- How do you articulate your answers properly?
- Turn the interview into a conversation
- Situation, Task, Action and Result (always show value)
- Beginning, middle, end (tell an actual story)
- Always end on a positive note regardless of the question
- Go through an example behavioral interview question
- Ask a random person a behavioral interview question
Week 9: Interviewing your interviewer
- Ask about company culture
- Ask about day in the life of position
- Ask about management style
- Ask about why the interviewer is at the company and not somewhere else
- Ask about promotion opportunities
- Ask about how the interviewer has impacted the team (culture, process, etc.)
- Is there anything about my resume or anything I mentioned that may make you feel like I'm not a good fit for this position?
- Ask for their contact info (email, LinkedIn)
- Ask what the rest of the interview process looks like
- Post Interview
  - Send a thank you email to your interviewer and recruiter
Week 10: Negotiating an offer
- Know your market value (use levels.fyi)
- Always good to have multiple offers for leverage
- Never make the first offer
- Always say a range
Week 10: Understanding your offer
- Understand the difference between offers in big tech vs. government vs. startups
- Salary
- Stock bonus
- Signing bonus
- Benefits
  - Health, vision, dental insurance
  - Gym reimbursement
  - Company discounts
  - Travel reimbursement
  - Relocation
  - Tuition assistance
  - Student loan refinance
  - Education allowance
Week 11: Navigating a conference
- Conference travel scholarships
- Have several resume copies in hand
- Dress professional but also comfortable (a lot of walking/standing)
- Know your elevator pitch/who you are statement
- Research the companies that are at the conference
- Ask what the company is hiring for
- Connect with as many recruiters as possible on LinkedIn and stay up-to-date with posts
- Example: Research NSBE conference and its career fair documentation
Week 12-15: Guest Speaker

Resources

Repos

Books

Cracking the Coding Interview (include PDF in resources folder)
Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10
Decode and Conquer
Swipe to Unlock
Clean Code Handbook
Introduction to Algorithms

kof-f / Life-in-Tech

Life in Tech | Fall 2021

Copyright

Description

Why?

Deep Dive: Technical

Deep Dive: Non-Technical

Resources

Repos

Books

Websites

Articles

Videos

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