Two things learned from Bill Payne on the Damsel’s Den on Tuesday night:

1. When VCs are approached by entrepreneurs, they DO NOT want to know about the product, they want to know about the business. My interpretation: unless you figured out how you might turn your great idea into a business, don’t waste your time. Coz product means nothing if it won’t generate money
2. Young people starts from solving engineering problems or fight world disease. It’s all wrong, they should start from creation of jobs and wealth.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been busy with expanding our development team. After going through quite a few round of interviews, I have something to get off my chest. Hope fellow developers who are out there hunting for a job might find this useful.

Groom your CV. Big surprise there!!! You would think it’s such a trivial thing to turn on the grammar and spell checker in any word processor. But you would be shocked if you see the amount of CV with limited grammar and spell check.

Be human. If you think having all the technical key words clustered in your CV will increase your chances to be picked up by some screening software, you might be correct. However, it won’t work for companies that screen CVs by human.

Cover letter matters. It’s the first and foremost opportunity to let your potential employer know who you are, so make good use of that.

It’s not just a job, it’s you life. You spend most of your life working. So please make sure you do enough research of the company and aware what you are getting into.

DO NOT try to drive the interview. If you think tricking the interviewer to ask certain questions will increase your chance of succeeding, you are wrong. The thing is, no one is stupid and it takes 5 minutes for people realize that. and once they do, you will have 0 chance.

Please, please make sure you can write code. Some candidate can really talk to talk, when the time comes, some people even have trouble with coming up a method declaration. Isn’t this a developer job we are talking about?

Chemistry is more important than skills. Accept the fact every organisation has it’s own culture which is most likely different from any others. if the chemistry doesn’t fit, move on and find something works for you. After all, it’s your life, you should work in an environment in which you feel most comfortable with.

Be honest. I know it’s really hard to admit that you don’t have the answer for the question you were just asked. But sometime, “I don’t know” is a far better answer than pushing it and get it wrong.