In the meantime, to be or not to be ... productive!

Question

I just moved back to Europe from the US after living there for 7 years. Apart from major adjustment issues, I'm currently looking for a job over here. I'm mainly interested in (IT) Consulting and, since these jobs typically require programming knowledge, such as Java, I'm trying to think of something productive to write (perhaps to demo my skills) while I'm waiting for my interviews (starting in two weeks. Folks here are a bit slower than in the US apparently...). I graduated from college about a year and a half ago and have a 4 year degree in international management/economics and about 3/4 of a 2 year degree in computer science finished. I've written my fair share of web software over the years, but nothing concrete that I could show, especially not in Java.

Now, I've never had the problem of not having any idea what to write. Basic games I could write, but I'm not sure how well that'll come over when I walk into my interview and say "hey, I was bored. Take a look at my multiplayer space invaders game! Wanna try beating me??". Any thoughts? I browsed SourceForge the other day to find a nice little project to contribute to, but decided that I don't want to commit to someone else's project at this time. Any ideas, perhaps from someone who has been, or currently is, in a similar position would be much appreciated.

Oh, and lastly: Instead of developing a program or two to demonstrate my skills, I could spend my time brushing up on UML and Perl. Any suggestions regarding that? Writing a demo vs. learning something new?

Answer 1

Inspiration for hobby projects:

• Somebody make this Reddit
• Detecting text in an image

Answer 2

What about this:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/stack-exchange-api-contest/

Answer 3

I got my first job by indeed writing a demo.

It was for a multimedia developer position, so I wrote a small flash game based on the the corporate branding of the company. The company logo was made of square and it was about moving a ball on these squares, plus a few rules to win and lose points. I then sent it directly to the senior dev. who interviewed me in the first round.

That was a one week work, nothing really complicated, but it was tailored for the company. That showed my motivation and made a good impression.

Answer 4

In the past I've hired people for IT consulting. When reading CVs I looked for:

1. Good evidence of technical accomplishments. If I don't find the evidence, the CV goes in the bin.

2. Good evidence of the accompanying (mostly soft) skills that an IT consultant needs above and beyond the technical ones. I'm looking for evidence that the person has worked in multiple teams, probably in multiple industry sectors, at the levels within organisations they've worked in, at the sizes of teams they've worked in, at the roles they've played. I'm fierce on grammar, spelling and presentation: if you can't put out a decent CV what are the odds that you can write well enough to impress my clients ? I want evidence that you can manage your own time, that you can get results without authority, and I could go on and on ...

In other words, for IT consulting I'd be interested in a lot more than technical achievements, and I suggest that you concentrate on making sure that your preferred employers know that you have all of this and more. Rather than contributing to some hobbyist open-source project that no one has ever heard of and that isn't used in any business, polish up your writing skills, do some public speaking, go networking at the local branch of your favourite IT professional organisation, bone up on project management,

Java programmers are ten-a-penny (or ten-a-eurocent if you prefer), Java programmers who can be trusted at client site without close supervision are gold dust.