How to interpret being asked about graduation year?
I know theyre just reverse engineering my YoE by asking that. Is there anything I can do about it?
Discussion
(9 comments)- 4
5 months agoStaff Eng @ Google, Ex-Meta SWE, Ex-Amazon SDM/SDEI think Ryan has given strong ideas already. I will add what my knee jerk reaction: ageism. Maybe this is strictly about years of experience, and get that you want to “get credit” for the impressive work you did. Things like “when did you graduate high school/college?” Or “when did you leave <hometown>?” Or “we have a great 401k match, have you started investing in yours, yet?” all scream to me “red flag” and trying to see if you are too young or too old or too child-having age, whatever they want to discriminate toward or against.
Don’t mean to instill paranoia, just sharing things I learned not to do, even out of curiosity, and something I look out for.
- 3
5 months agoEngineering Manager at MistplayBased on your phrasing of it I would focus on achievements before graduation in the same sentence. Like maybe, “I graduated in 2022, and for context I launched my app in 2016 got X users by 2019, turned it into a business during college in 2020 and interned at Y two summers of 2020, 2021 accomplishing Z.”
- 35 months agoEngineering Manager at Mistplay
I just want to add that as a hiring manager I would probably toss a resume where I can’t tell how long the candidate has been at each experience or which ones are full time professional roles. However if it is clear that someone has 0.5 years professional experience but also clearly states their own app has 50k users, or they interned at FAANG, or they have some relevant but non traditional accomplishments then that would work too.
- 05 months agoSoftware Engineer [OP]Taro Community
This is very interesting to me. I have 3 years of experience part time as a paid student researcher (I led and published 3 1st author ML papers) and about 6 months full time. In my resume I just didn't list the graduation year. All my experiences are clearly labeled on how long I spent there. Is that a red flag?
- 25 months agoEngineering Manager at Mistplay
If your part time paid student researcher experiences are labeled with that phrase and start and end dates, and then you have another job that says Data Scientist start at some point I think that would be clear. If they are labeled “ML Researcher” then that doesn’t seem great. Someone who is part time vs full time has a different amount of experience over the same amount of time. Personally I listed “Parallel Programming Lab Intern” on my resume for this kind of thing.
Note I’m not hiring on a domain where people often have research experience so can’t really comment there.
- 25 months agoEngineering Manager at Mistplay
Being the first author on three papers is also super impressive, but I would argue it is almost more impressive if you did it part time as an undergrad. Otherwise they might be trying to understand if you were in a phd program for three years writing one paper a year and dropped out.
- 35 months agoEngineering Manager at Mistplay
The main point is that everyone phrases what they did in a very positive way on a resume, but the underlying facts should be obvious not a guessing game.
- 25 months agoSoftware Engineer [OP]Taro Community
This is super helpful. Thank you, I will call it "Graduate ML Researcher" which is clear that it was done in grad school
- 25 months agoEngineering Manager at Mistplay
Glad if this helped! With all the context I have now I think another top level question thread to start could be: "Grad school experience - how to count this towards YoE when applying to jobs and talking to recruiters"
I personally am not sure, but I've heard of it indeed counting 1 to 1 in some cases. Probably it varies if you're focusing on more of a production or product SWE focused role or a more research focused exploratory R&D role.
