I’ve been thinking a lot about careers and how people can succeed in today’s job market. As a computational physics professor, students would sometimes ask me about how to find jobs that use programming, math, and physics. Now, working for a startup company, I get to interview job candidates who have physics, math, and programming backgrounds. When I come home, I see my three teenage boys, and I think about what kind of jobs they will get. I have a lot of thoughts about programming and science careers, and would like to devote some blog posts to developing job skills.

To start, I’d like to repeat some simple advice I heard from a recruiter at Dessert Code Camp in Arizona. That is a great (and free!) community event that brings together programmers, students, recruiters, and businesses to help build up the computer culture in the Phoenix valley. Some programmers were there eagerly seeking tools to land a job. I listened in on a job recruiter’s talk at the end of the day, feeling a little guilty to be there with a cushy tenured-professorship, but very interested to see the real world that my students have to face. The recruiter said two things that I have repeated many times since: get a GitHub account and get a LinkedIn account, and really use them.

GitHub seemed a bit obvious to me. Everyone needs a portfolio: my brother was an art student and had a collection of his best work, I was a Ph. D. physics student and had my collection of published papers, my daughter is a journalism student and has a large portfolio of her work. If you want to get a programming job, people need to see your work. GitHub is great! You put together a public profile of the open-source projects you contribute to, and your source commits are logged. Employers can see how you distribute your programming work among projects and how long you have been active. They can look at your code style and how your individual contributions interact with collaborative efforts. They can even see which days of the week you contribute the most code! Employers who really understand programming can quickly identify talented people.

LinkedIn was a bit more of a puzzle to me. I always viewed it as a social-networking pyramid scheme. The recruiter instantly pointed out its real value. You can post your resumé, professional network, and other credentials online, and it’s all perfectly acceptable! It used to be that you had to conceal your efforts to shop around for jobs for fear of being punished at work. Sites like Monster were like dating sites, focused on people aggressively looking for jobs, either out of desperation or with insatiable career ambition. With LinkedIn, the majority of us who are happy with our jobs suddenly have our credentials always online. It can help provide some extra job security and helps us be ready when the opportunity or need to get a new job arises. The best appreciation I have for LinkedIn was after I joined Stone Ridge Technology, when my boss insisted that all his employees have active and impressive LinkedIn pages to help him recruit new talent.

I told these things to students when I was a professor. I tell them to my kids. I wish more professors and university departments would promote this professionalism. There is a lot of talent out there, and if more people used GitHub and LinkedIn effectively, recruiting and hiring would be more efficient.