Bitwacker Associates

As an “old guy” who has interviewed his share of CS, CE and EE’s over the years (and hire and/or managed more than a few of them), here are my thoughts from an “outcomes” perspective…

• It’s really exciting to work with a developer who groks the concepts to such a degree that specific languages and language boundaries simply don’t matter. Seeing a prototype done in Erlang because it was perfectly suited is SO much better than listening to whining over how it is hard to do it in Java or C# or Visual Basic N. They are usually curious about everything; the dude that coded a prototype NoSQL-style data store for our team in Erlang had been playing with it for a few months, “just because…”

• Methodical problem solving matters. Which some would equate to Engineering(tm). But really it’s about gaining a ton of experience attacking problems. The number one thing I’ve looked for over the years is actual experience — through project work, interesting course projects, and esp. internships — in completing cool projects. And please, don’t wait to be assigned; always look for problems, and just do them.

• Join the software ecosystem. The most impressive developers I’ve met over the years — some are currently undergrads at the Tetherless World Constellation at RPI — understand how to contribute to software ecosystem(s); usually this is through the open source community. They understand the tools, they understand how to engage with other developers, they understand how to analyze and improve other people’s code.

  Here’s one way to think about it: if you aspire to be a professional musician (or artist), chances are you’ve participated in the “music ecosystem” in a wide variety of ways for many years, even before entering college. The best developers I’ve met — and those “computer scientists” who are developers at heart — have done the same (one guy I know built his first Linux kernel when he was in middle school).

• Understand systems end-to-end. Now we’re back to the topic at hand 😉 The best contributors over the years have been those who had hands-on experience with absolutely every aspect of the “system.” This doesn’t mean going From Relays to Twitter in 10 Weeks, but it does mean understanding the relationships between all system elements.

I doubt very much that this is a problem for anyone on this list, because the very nature of PKI work requires one to have just this sort of broad and deep knowledge; plus, your professor and I have had a few conversations about this over the years…BTW, my daughter’s now at Southampton working on her Ph.D in numerical relativity and writing code on a supercomputer cluster 😉