Last week two other Twilio engineers and I went to the Columbia engineering career fair. We had a great time and talked to a lot of really smart people. However I was surprised at some of the naive mistakes students made when we were talking. We're there to try to hire students and students are there to try and get internships and jobs, so we desperately want it to work out. As a student, here are some things to avoid when you are talking to a recruiter.

• Are you hiring full time software engineers? I am looking for a full time position, here is my resume - This question demonstrates a high degree of naïveté. First, the market for programming talent is absolutely on fire right now and everyone is looking for talented people. It's also safe to assume we are at the career fair because we are trying to recruit people for full time positions.

  Second, especially as a small company, we are looking for people who are passionate about what we are doing. It's good to talk about cool things you've done, but at some level you have to express interest in what we are doing, or tie your skills back to how they'd fit in at our company.

  Maybe fifteen people asked me this "are you hiring" question during the fair and most of them were ESL students. I know these students are very bright, and I understand it can be nerve wracking for them to speak to recruiters, but it was very difficult for us to get a read on whether someone would be a good fit, based on how the conversations went. For us, that translates to a "no phone screen".

• I love programming Java - This is a red flag for us. There is nothing wrong with Java per se, but it's a language that's hard to get excited about. It's also the language students have been using for class, which tells us that you might not do that much programming/learning outside of class (another red flag).

  The other big problem is Java probably has the worst signal to noise ratio of any language on students' resumes nowadays; a higher ratio of students with, say, Haskell experience are good candidates than students who mention Java. Two people who have covered this topic in much better detail than me are Paul Graham and Yaron Minsky.

  The one exception to this rule is if you have experience with advanced Java programs like Hadoop or Asterisk (we are a telecom company and use Asterisk extensively). In this case definitely tell us about your Java experience.

• You're wearing a suit At some career fairs almost everyone is wearing suits so it's not a big deal if you are also wearing one. That said, I went out of my way to talk to people wearing jeans because a) it indicated they're not interested in jobs where they'd like to see you wearing a suit, and b) it indicated they were confident enough in yourself and your skill set to ignore the vast numbers of people wearing suits. So at least if you are looking for a job at a small tech company, don't be afraid to wear something more comfortable.

• I don't really know what I want to do - Like the suits, you are young and it's fine if you don't know what you want to do yet. The problem is that we have three specific teams and while we are talking, I am trying to figure out which team you would be the best fit for. Sometimes this can be hard and good people will fall through because we don't know where to put you. It really helps if you express a strong preference that matches the skills on your resume, then I know what team to have you interview with and have a sense you'll be happy.

  If you are not sure, one good strategy is to rotate - tell one company you'd like to do frontend work, tell the next you'd like to work on mobile and tell the third company you'd like to work on big data. Next summer (or in your spare time) you can try out something different.

• Here's my resume, looking forward to a phone screen - Even if you are an exceptional candidate, this will not get you a phone screen at most small companies. Here is the deal. The Google, Facebook and LinkedIn recruiters have little say in whether you get an interview or not. They are there to hand out pens, collect resumes and answer basic questions about internships/full time opportunities. You'll be encouraged to apply online.

  When you talk to smaller companies at career fairs, the engineers you are talking to are actively evaluating you and making decisions about whether to advance you through the screening process. The stakes are much higher and you should consider it like a culture fit interview. You should do your research, try out the company's product, read through blog posts to figure out what sort of stack they use, etc. Then when you are talking, be sure to bring up parts of your experience that match up. For example, green flags for us are when students mention experience at hackathons, experience using Twilio in the past, or experience with HTTP/API's/writing web applications. So don't expect you can just drop a resume and get an interview - at a small company that won't fly.

Hopefully these help somewhat. Two things to keep in mind are, these are things we look for as a small Internet company - if you want to work at an Internet giant, or in a different industry, my advice would be much different. Second, I might have sounded critical above, but we all really want you to do well - we love talking to great people, and it makes interviewing and screening much more pleasant. Third, we're hiring! I hope you found this article helpful, and I hope you check us out - twilio.com/jobs.

I was fascinated by this article in Esquire about Teller, half of the magic duo Penn and Teller, because of its description of how Teller thinks about his craft. I especially liked this story:

When Teller was in high school, [a teacher] read a short story to those few students before him, including an enraptured Teller: "Enoch Soames," by Max Beerbohm, written in 1916.

In the story, Beerbohm relates the tragic tale of Soames, a dim, hopeless writer with delusions of future grandeur. In the 1890s, Beerbohm recounts, Soames made a deal with the devil: In exchange for his soul, Soames would be magically transported one hundred years into the future — to precisely 2:10 P.M. on June 3, 1997 — into the Round Reading Room at the British Museum. There, he could look at the shelves and through the catalogs and marvel at his inevitable success. When Soames makes his trip, however, he learns that time has almost erased him before the devil has had the chance. He is listed only as a fictional character in a short story by Max Beerbohm.

Thirty-four-and-a-half years after that snowy reading by his satanic-looking teacher... Teller flew to England ahead of June 3, 1997.

As it turned out, there were about a dozen people in the Round Reading Room that afternoon... And at ten past two, they gasped when they saw a man appear mysteriously out of the stacks, looking confused as he scanned empty catalogs and asked unhelpful librarians about his absence from the files. The man looked just like the Soames of Teller's teenage imagination, "a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair," and he was dressed in precise costume, a soft black hat and a gray waterproof cape. The man did everything Enoch Soames did in Max Beerbohm's short story, floating around the pin-drop-quiet room before he once again disappeared into the shelves.

And all the while, Teller watched with a small smile on his face. He didn't tell anyone that he might have looked through hundreds of pages in casting books before he had found the perfect actor. He didn't tell anyone that he might have visited Angels & Bermans, where he had found just the right soft black hat and gone through countless gray waterproof capes. He didn't tell anyone that he might have had an inside friend who helped him stash the actor and his costume behind a hidden door in the stacks. Even when Teller later wrote about that magical afternoon for The Atlantic, he didn't confess his role. He never has.

"Taking credit for it that day would be a terrible thing — a terrible, terrible thing," Teller says. "That's answering the question that you must not answer."

Now, again, his voice leaves him. That afternoon took something close to actual sorcery, following years of anticipation and planning. But more than anything, it required a man whose love for magic is so deep he can turn deception into something beautiful.

Years of preparation for something only twelve people would see. Read Teller's account of the day in 1997, or the full profile of Teller in Esquire

I finally got my Simple invite. Simple is an online banking startup that wants to make the experience of using banks much, much better. As far as I can tell they are delivering on that experience - their site and iPhone app are a joy to use. They also focus on the whole experience - the ATM card that came in the mail was delivered in a beautiful package, and the signup process, which requires gathering a ton of private information about you, was painless.

That said, I realized shortly after signing up that I'm going to be sticking with Ally Bank for one simple reason: they refund ATM fees. I used to hate ATM's. The option I had with ATM's was either a) look up the nearest in-network ATM online, then walk three blocks, all the while wondering why I are doing this to save a measly $3; or b) go to the liquor store ATM and hate myself for spending money to get at my money.

ATM fee refunds turned an experience I hated into something I can brag about ("It doesn't matter, I get the money back at the end of the month"). I get about $120 in ATM refunds every year, as well as the time and stress savings trying to find an in-network ATM saved, easily worth two or three percentage points of interest. I don't know how it makes business sense for Ally to pay for my ATM fees, but it's their killer feature.

I appreciate what Simple is doing and wish them the best. If you are still saddled with a card from a bank with physical branches, switching to Simple is one of the best things you could do. However at the moment Ally's ATM fee refunds (a better ATM user experience) over Simple's awesome website and iPhone app (a better web experience).

On Saturday my post on how not to ask questions at a conference was the number one post on the site for a solid six hours, between four and ten PM. Here are some raw stats from the last day.

• Since the post was submitted, I've gotten 31,787 pageviews to my site; 14,478 in the nine hours between post submission and midnight, and another 15k on Sunday. One post can bring in amazing amounts of traffic, and justify all of the effort you've put into creating quality blog content.

• In just the last two days I've gotten 50% as much traffic as I did in the whole previous year.

• Of those pageviews, 30,807 were for the article itself. 414 people visited my homepage (1 in 72 people) and 253 people visited my about page (1 in every 130).

• 8,142 visits (roughly 27%) came from mobile devices. I am really glad I added a mobile/responsive view for smaller screens earlier this year, as this makes the content much more consumable on a small screen.

• 69% of mobile visits (18% of the total) came from an iOS device.

• Roughly 10,000 clicks came from Hacker News and 8,700 came from the Programming subreddit, where my post is still on the frontpage a day and a half later. If your post is doing well on HN, it probably makes sense to submit it to Proggit as well, as there's a large contingent of people that use Proggit exclusively.

• 1,479 people have clicked on the aggregate Bit.ly link and 97 people have Tweeted the post (roughly 1 in 300).

• I added 18 Twitter followers (about 1 in every 1800 visitors), bumping my total to 418. I added one new Bitbucket follower and zero new newsletter subscribers.

• 23 people left comments on the post (about 1 in every 1300). 156 people left comments on Hacker News, off about 10k clicks, and ~160 people left comments on Reddit, off of 9k clicks.

I've posted my "conversion rate" in all cases because I don't feel like it's amazingly high. This is probably the nature of this sort of traffic though; there to read an article and learn something and then move on to the next thing. I suppose if I can reach the frontpage a few times in short succession, people may start to recognize my name and there would be a snowball effect, in terms of the number of people signing up to follow me or posting comments.

I don't have the tools in place at the moment to be able to test my "conversion rates" and see whether they can be improved. All in all though, the low rates at which people are clicking through to other material on my site suggests that I should put any information you'd like readers to know about yourself on the post view page, or in the footer of the post itself.

Via Tyler Cowen, an author from the Wall Street Journal interviewed the head of admissions at the Harvard Business School. The whole article is good, but this particular line stood out:

The best recommendations have a lot of verbs. They say, "She did this," versus adjectives that simply describe you.

I remember in 5th grade that we had to write Show Not Tell stories. The idea was to get out of the habit of writing "Kyle is in 3rd grade and he is really kind" - style stories and instead writing "When Joey's mom couldn't pick him up, Kyle walked him all the way home, even though it was two miles in the wrong direction."

I don't know why later teachers dropped the Show Not Tell agenda from the curriculum, but apparently people still write in this style. Maybe recommenders are lazy and it's easier to write "Shannon is a hard worker" than it is to come up with a concrete example. Maybe the recommender doesn't know the student very well, which is discussed in the article, and a problem.

The other possibility is that the person being recommended hasn't done anything interesting. It's easy to tell, because if you have done things, people tend to mention them when they're introducing you to someone, like "This is Jeff. Jeff wrote the entire billing system." You can also tell because the bullet points on your resume will have really bland verbs in them that don't really say anything, like "Developed marketing skills" or "Monitored social analytics tools for Company X".

One day you are going to have to wake up and decide to be Someone that Does Things. The World of Doing can be scary at first because there are lots of things that need to be done and no one is there to tell you how to do them.

So: what verbs to people use to describe you? Which of the versions below would you rather someone used to describe you?

• "He's really good at finding tips and tricks to save time."

• "He built a replacement for the school's calendar system and got 550 people to sign up."

• "She is a really fierce competitor."
• "She won the regional finals for her team by making free throws and getting a key steal in the final minutes."

• "She's a hard worker."
• "She rewrote the website to make it 100% faster, which boosted signups by 50%."

• "His code is always reliable."
• "While he was in charge, the API was down for a total of three minutes in two years."

Related: See Be Specific at Less Wrong.

I went to Pycon last month (my first conference ever!) The conference was totally awesome and I met a lot of cool people. But I was also pretty appalled at the question asking at the end of each talk. Here's some stuff you should keep in mind before you ask a question at a conference.

• Ask questions that you believe would be relevant to at least a third of the people in the room. Otherwise, avoid the temptation to show off your specialized knowledge to the room and just ask the speaker afterwards. Most of them are approachable on Twitter, email, or just in the hallways.

• Ask only one question. If you have more than one question, pick the best and ask the other one in private later. Or ask your first question and then go to the back of the line. Other people have questions to ask as well and may not get to ask one.

• Avoid buzzword bingo. It feels like lots of people walk up to the microphone just so the room can hear them mention some buzzword that indicates they know something about the topic. If I am running a Scrum team should I use Soak testing? How does Node.js influence the development of the PyPy project? If you wouldn't ask the question without a room full of people present, then don't ask.

• Ask a question, don't make a comment. Talk time is for the speaker to be the expert, not you. Write up your comment as a blog post and post it for everyone to read later.

• Be brief. After a talk, time is precious and many people may have questions for the speaker, so don't ramble about how nice it is to finally see the speaker in person, or how enlightening the talk is, even if those things are true. It's a matter of courtesy to everyone else in the room.

There is an easy solution to bad questions that no one has bothered to implement yet. Have people submit questions anonymously and have the speaker or a moderator choose which ones to answer, or have the room vote using a tool like Google Moderator. This will solve the problem of the question asker-bragger asking a trivial question.

The other solution is to charge money to ask a question, which could go to whatever cause you want. If enough people in the room have the same question they can contribute to the fee to ask the question and have it asked.

Update: There's some good discussion on Hacker News. "If the question you're asking makes you look smart, there's a good chance you're being a douchebag."

Also my friend Alan Shreve wants to know if it's appropriate to push back if the speaker dodges your question.

Inspired by a great post on why college students choose consulting I decided to re-post my series of posts on consulting, written in 2008 when I was considering a career in consulting. I was also looking to write a more focused series of blog posts so a blog on consulting was a good fit. Not knowing anything about consulting at the time, I also thought it would help me get a consulting job. Ultimately I decided not to do consulting and doing the blog was part of the reason why.

I looked at why people hire consultants, whether consultants actually have value, why it's a good decision for you personally. Here's the full list of posts:

• Why consulting?

  Information transfers slowly; despite what economists say, firms aren't efficient and lots of times they can do things better. Consultants have expertise about how to improve management and become more efficient, and when this knowledge is shared/diffused to companies, everyone is better off.

• The evidence for evidence-based management

  The authors use evidence, and numerous case studies, to explain that financial incentive plans often don't work, developing a comprehensive long-term strategy isn't that important, most mergers only work under certain specific circumstances, and company culture can be more important than hiring the best workers. In each of these cases, studies have shown that the conventional wisdom is often wrong, and companies, schools or hospitals that implement evidence-based programs do better than those who don't.

• A disastrous tale from a young BCG consultant

  I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual.

• What skills should you learn for a career in consulting?

  A lot of your job as a consultant is selling your services and acting knowledgeable. Many people are stuck in Dilbert-like situations and will look at you as a knight in shining armor. For this you’re going to need to be friendly, personable, and high status; you’re going to need to sell yourself as an Answer Guy.

• Is it true that to do the best work, you need to hire the best people?

  As Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer point out, it’s a myth that the best companies are best because they have the best people. Usually the best companies have great systems that bring out the best in people.

• Save the planet by hiring better managers

  A one standard-deviation increase in management correlates with a 38 percent increase in sales per employee...smaller firms with better management out-grow other small firms with bad management...better management is associated with improved health care outcomes, employee satisfaction, and energy efficiency...Managers are not well informed about how good their own management practices are and which areas need improvement.

  Another experiment by the same group took a random group of textile firms in India and provided them with free management consulting. Not only did performance grow in the firms provided the consulting, but they also said the reason that they didn't implement the changes sooner was because they were not aware of good management practices.

• Why firms don't experiment

  I've often tried to help companies do experiments, and usually I fail spectacularly. I remember one company that was having trouble getting its bonuses right. I suggested they do some experiments, or at least a survey. The HR staff said no, it was a miserable time in the company. Everyone was unhappy, and management didn't want to add to the trouble by messing with people’s bonuses merely for the sake of learning.

• What's the downside to hiring a consulting firm?

  There’s a selection bias at play...it’s likely that consultants provide firms with value in excess of the costs of hiring them. Smart firms realize this, and want to hire consultants. But because they’re smart firms, they’re probably ahead of the curve and consultants can only provide them with limited amounts of profitable advice. The firms that need consultants the most are unlikely to hire them.

• Why do firms hire consultants?

  Consulting firms can reliably signal authority and intelligence; bosses may hire consultants to confirm that they’re correct. To cite one recent example, the US Postal Service hired two consulting firms so that they could go to Congress and implement a restructuring plan.

• There's hope for consulting

  I have seen some serious analytical firepower (maybe not always with quite the rigor of an academic paper but for sure at several orders of magnitude the pace those are developed at) being thrown at what originally seemed like simple problems – generally things turn out to be neither simple nor elegant in the end. The art of the trade is to come up with a coherent story in light of that.