Bristol Meetups

Meeting #12: How To Get Your Dream Developer Job

For our first meeting of 2014 we welcome Peter Howard, who will be sharing some insights from his extensive experience as a development manager. Having hired an estimated 300 developers over his career, Pete says:

I wanted to see what happened if I tried to turn inside out, all the stuff I've learned from hiring developers. Turning it round to match the applicant's frequency spectrum if you will. This talk is the result.

Here's a flavour of what we'll cover: Some reality checks, the pain vs gain equation, celebrating the chaos, randomness, subconscious, and psychological factors. Defining "dream". Job-finding methodologies and craft, CV engineering, interview craft. Tests. Rejection. Personal (yuck) brand.

You won't come away clutching a party bag with a silver bullet inside. But maybe with an extra perspective of the "protocol stack".

About our speaker:

Pete's clocked up a fair amount of experience as a software engineer and a manager of software engineers over 28 years. Always where the development has been interesting by being novel, or difficult. It's been in several different sectors and with an eclectic mix of technologies. He's had the opportunity to study the closed-loop feedback you get by not only choosing people, but then also being responsible for the collective development results. For the last 6 years, he's been leading a group of around 35 in a consultancy/services firm, using mainly C++, Python and Java.