If you are a student you need to do the following now, regardless of whether you are a freshman or a senior:

  1. Go to HandShake and create an account for yourself.
  2. Write your resume. Our Career Center has guidelines.
  3. Take your resume to our Career Center so they can check it. If it is good enough they will let you upload it and give you full access to all the job listings.

Other Job Sites

Local jobs boards Companies with Jobs Listings for SC Local Resources National Job sites

Also, read Hacker News.

If you are a member of the ACM (you should be) then you can use the ACM Career Center.

General Employment Information

If you just want to learn about the job market in general there are several resources that I can recommend.

The Association for Computing Machinery (our professional society) has a very good website on computing careers. It should answer most of your questions about what computing professionals do and what our jobs entail. You might be especially interested in their FAQ.

We also have an ACM student chapter were you can meet other students interested in computing careers. They are very active so please, attend some their activities. It will be fun, and you might learn something, or not.

Another good website is payscale.com which has a lot of data on salaries for different titles and in different parts of the country. It is a great resource to use when deciding on a major or entertaining various job offers.

If you want hard data on how many CSE majors graduate each year, the salary of new PhDs in CS, their citizenship status, etc. you only need to read the CRA Taulbee Survey.

If you are wondering how the (smart) employers look at the problem of hiring then you need to read Joel Spolsky's series on hiring good programmers.

  1. Finding great developers
  2. A field guide to developers
  3. Sorting resumes: what you should put in your resume.
  4. The phone screen: how to handle the phone interview.
  5. The guerrilla guide to interviewing: how to handle the interview

Interview Questions

All good companies will ask you programming questions to make sure you can, indeed, program. You'd be surprised to learn that 199 out of every 200 applicants cannot program. This is largely because the ones that can write code already have jobs, and many people from other Majors apply for software jobs because there are no jobs in their major. So, these people get weeded out using simple programming questions. You should be prepared to answer programming questions.