My 2011 job hunt
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...I was asked by my dad to “send him a few links about prospective hi-tech companies” to pass a long to a friend who is looking for a job. Instead, I decided to blog about my experience from recent “job hunt” I did, and concentrate it into one post.
I decided to look for a job on February, posted this fact on my blog, and sent my CV to a two placement companies – SeeV and Pinzzeta. I was relatively selective in choosing companies to interview at, because I knew I’ll probably go work for Google if they accepted me anyway, and I wanted to try a few other companies both to see if I could find something that excited me more, and to practice my interviewing skills. Before going to any interview, I formulated a list of things I wanted to know about my future employers, and decided what my next job would be about – working and learning from great people, and being part of a team that has a bright future ahead of it.
Finally, I would like to end with a short list of some of the companies that I found more interesting, in no particular order:
- Delver – Some of the brightest people in the industry work there (I know, I spent 3 years working with them!)
- Snaptu – A leader mobile app platform, Facebook just signed a big deal with them. Their sheer scale was amazing (I don’t recall the exact numbers, but they have a shitload of hits every day).
- Soluto – I was impressed by the people and vision of Soluto. They make a downloadable client that “makes your frustrations go away”, and they already a lot of users. Note that user counts of a desktop client should be counted differently from user counts of webapps – users are way more reluctant to download apps.
- Waze – even though I only had the chance to do one interview there, it seems like everyone I know uses their software! I always wanted to build something that’s very wildly used, and Waze looks promising in this aspect.
- TypeMock – one of the world leaders in TDD, and with impressive people in its current & former ranks, TypeMock seems like a great company to work for.
- I’ll finish this list with a few stealth-mode startups that caught my eyes. It was really hard turning you guys down – I would keep my eyes open for both Yotpo and MashLife
(I’d like to add that if I interviewed for your company and it isn’t on this list, this does’t mean I think of it negatively – just that it wasn’t a good fit for me, at this time. I deliberately wanted to keep this list short.)
Update – it appears that only one day after I posted this, Facebook announced that they’re acquiring SnapTu for $70 million. I wonder if that would have meant anything for me if I had just signed there two weeks ago.
Asaf:
Ron,
Why these two placement companies?
How many of the interview opportunities hot to you via the placement companies?
Asaf
21/3/11, 9:13ripper234:
These two companies “seemed good for what I was searching for”. It’s nothing more than a gut feeling, really.
Actually, Pinzzeta never return my original email for some reason … got lost I assume. I hadn’t bothered pinging them about it.
SeeV supplied me with several more companies, but it’s interesting to note that about half the companies on my list I found myself, either via personal contacts, or by simply reading about their product on the web. This is almost interesting enough to consider creating yet another website for job searches (but with a few tweaks that would make it better than the existing sites). Almost.
21/3/11, 15:36