-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Nash [mailto:paulnash@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 4:02 PM
Definitely please feel free to forward my mail wherever it might help. In
anticipiation of the many great resumes we will be mining out of UIUC, I've
had a special alias setup to keep them separate from all the normal mail we
get. Please encourage people to send their responses to
careers-UIUC@xxxxxxxxxxxx instead of the normal careers alias. Available
June is great. Available sooner, even better. -Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Nash [mailto:paulnash@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 4:59 AM
To: 'acm@xxxxxxxx'
Cc: 'Corporate@xxxxxxxxxxxx'; 'pbristow@xxxxxxxx'; 'Bennewit@xxxxxxxx'
Subject: Please help me hire people
Hey guys,
I'm an ACM@UIUC alum running a software team out here in Seattle. My friend
Paul Watts (also at Wildseed) and I started WinDevils back when we were in
school there, and are happy to see it still alive. I am now the Software
Development Manager at Wildseed Ltd., a startup that designs software and
companion hardware for cell phones that are characteristically unique in the
market. For starters, they have much more power, and typically are
customized in feature set for a particular market segment, rather than being
designed for "the generic user." Our phone is basically about half of an
iPaq PDA, running Linux. When I say half, it's the same CPU but half clock
speed, same flash and RAM but half as much, half the screen dimensions, and
overall half the volume and board space. It's a blast to work on.
We have more business than we can support with our team. A great position
to be in, especially in this market. Every time we put a prototype in a
target customer's (youth -- teens and MTV crowd) hand, they walk away
groaning that they can't buy it yet. We have several major manufacturers
working on making versions of our product for carriers and markets all over
the planet.
Bluntly, however, I have found that recruiting basically sucks. We get a
pile of resumes every day from people that have had previous jobs, but no
truly useful experience, if you catch my drift. People with "expert" C
experience that can't use pointers, people with "expert" C++ experience that
don't know what a virtual function is.
So, ACM guys -- help us out! I'm contacting you because in my experience,
the best and the brightest in CS and ECE always hung out at in the ACM
office, or were direct friends of people who were there. I'm looking for
those types of people. Young people with lots of energy and experience
working outside the classroom on cool projects. People who love computers
and electronics. People who know how to use their tools to create awesome
things. (We're especially fond of former Microsoft interns, not because we
once had the brain chip implanted though that's also true, but because we
respect their campus hiring process).
First of all, I'd love to get a resume book, and can certainly arrange a
donation in return. However, what I'm really looking for is word of mouth
from you guys and the people you know that are like you. People who care
about computers. Not necessarily zealots, but people who care. :-) They
generally have to be good at software, but people who only do C and assembly
microcontroller stuff but are otherwise great circuit design, PCB layout, or
digital design people are also appealing for certain roles. I have a bunch
of somewhat specific job descriptions up on our recruiting page
(<http://www.wildseed.com/careers.htm>). Please feel free to float them
around, look over them, and see if you know anybody with those types of
skills. I only care if they're good people who have done *something*. I'm
not fixed on years of experience, possession of a college degree, or tools
and knowledge required if they're good people who learn quickly. I mean,
literally, here's how depressing the job market is for recruiters like
myself. I'm looking for people who can at *least* pass these simple tests:
? Write a (C) function to reverse a linked list
? Write a (C) function to reverse a string of words ("ACM is the best" ->
"best the is ACM")
? Talk intelligently about how hash tables work
? Define a C++ virtual function and why you might use one
? Define an abstract base type
? Describe how C++ member protection levels (public, private, protected)
work
I hope you're laughing (crying?) by now. The sobering thing is, of the 1 in
5 to 1 in 10 resumes we get that I decide are good enough to even phone
interview, only 1 in 5 of those can answer more than one of these questions
adequately, let alone with ease. And these are the simple ones. If you
know someone you think is qualified, either in Illinois, in school or out,
or elsewhere in the industry that you think is good (and might be
interested) I would very much appreciate either/or a name, a forward, an
introduction, or blatant selling. :-)
I'm crossing my fingers that you guys can help me expand my team. I have
some really cool things I need to do, and not nearly enough people to do
them. In the near future we'll be working on things like: online gaming,
local gaming, MMS (Multimedia messaging service), MPEG audio and video
technologies, 2D/3D graphics, WAP browsers and protocols, other cellular
protocol standards, and a variety of interesting other UI features (um, and
a pile of bugs that just need muscle power to fix...ahem). If you can help
me in any way, I'm definitely in your debt. Thanks very much in advance,
-Paul
SW Development Manager,
Wildseed Ltd.
P.S. -- I know there are other things we can pursue like information nights,
technical talks, interview schedules, etc. However at the moment, all of
these things would require me to fly out there, which much as I like to, I
probably can't do for at least a month or two. But I'm still interested in
doing things like that at some point in time.
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