Day 10 - Bizo, Moovweb, Financial Planning

Today was one of our busiest and most diverse days yet as far as meetings go as we met with three different companies here in San Francisco.  Our first meeting of the day was with a company called Bizo who does business to business internet marketing.  We met with a large group of their development team and one of the things that they talked about that intrigued me was something they said when talking about their interview process and what they look for in a candidate.  They said that although they do look to make sure their interviewees have a basic set of technical skills (in this case programming skills) what they are most looking for is not "do you know it" but "can you learn it" and they said that one of the biggest places that they find this is in a candidates cover letter.  In fact, one of the employees even went as far to say that aside from checking a few technical skills on the resume he said that he could care less about it and relied almost exclusively on the cover letter.  Now although I believe that there is more importance to a resume than checking a few skills, I had never really thought about how important a cover letter can be in communicating an applicant’s passion, interests, and even personality, all which (as I am learning more and more out here on the west coast) are very important in determining the necessary job-person fit.

The next company we met with was a semi-established startup called Moovweb who did mobile web development.  Our meeting with Moovweb was a lunch meeting on the wharf so we got to sit in the warm sun, enjoy some lunch, and have a fairly low key yet informative chat with some of their front-end developers.  One thing that we talked about that got me thinking was about how many talented people (as far as computer science and development goes) live and work here on the west coast.  It’s a little daunting to think about, considering that I am going to be entering the job force and potentially competing with these people but at the same time this abundance of talent has a positive side effect for me.  Because there are so many people that are talented programmers and CS majors I have really been thinking about what makes me different from those masses and how I can distinguish myself to potential employers and to myself.  Now I haven’t landed on anything concrete yet but I think it’s going to involve leveraging my combination of CS and Management, my time in Sweden, and my desire to always do better and learn more.

Our last meeting of the day was with a financial planner named Sara who had some good advice about career paths in general.  She told us her story about how she graduated with an English degree, worked at MPR, then moved to a big financial institution and then finally settled into her own financial advising firm.  Her talk reminded me more than anything that one shouldn’t get fixed that you will end up in one and only one career path or job.