Ben J. Christensen » Personal

My Job Hunt – How I Ended Up At Apple

Ben Christensen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:12:41 +0000

I started working for Apple in their iTunes Store division on December 14th 2009. It’s been a great 6 weeks so far and I look forward to a long and interesting future here at Apple.

Considering the state of the economy and job market I consider myself blessed to have gotten such a great new job – but I worked hard in my hunt and thought it might be of use or interest to others what it took to find a new job.

So, my job hunt “by the numbers” …

Time on Hunt

14 weeks (4 1/2 months)
August 11th to November 18th

Job Boards Used

7+
Dice, TheLadder, Monster, Jobirn, Indeed, CyberCoders, SimplyHired

Cost (in money, not time)

$1000+
$700 on resume
expenses that weren’t reimbursed during interviews I traveled to

Friends or Colleagues Notified

6 (It was a private affair for the first 3/4s of the search)

Cities I Looked At

Virtually anywhere in the US with a big city ….
In particular I was pursuing cities in the following order…
- Denver (cause that’s where I lived and own a home)
- Austin
- Dallas
- Phoenix
- Las Vegas
- Southern California
- Northern California
I considered East Coast and that direction (New York, Virginia, DC, Chicago etc) after finding opportunities out there.

Jobs Applied or Responded To

59 or more not counting the many emails I received and ignored outright

Outright Rejections

Companies Who Ignored Me

30+ whom I never heard from even after attempted followups

Advanced Interviews

Source of Leads (for those 6)

2 – recruiter found my resume on a job board and contacted me
1 – I responded to a posting on a job board
2 – I submitted to job postings directly on the company site
1 – friend referred me to a job at his company after seeing me post on LinkedIn that I was looking (in the last 1/4 of my search when I made it public)

Number of Engineers that Interviewed Me at Those 6 Companies

30+
- 12 at one company, 10 at another

Flights to Onsite Interviews

4
- Chicago
- Cupertino
- San Francisco
- Carlsbad (San Diego County)

Offers Received

Rejections After Advanced Interviews

All in all it was a great experience. I learned a lot about myself, my worth, what I’m interested in and what opportunities are out there for me.

I had been at Etilize for 7 1/2 years and NEVER gotten a job via a resume before, so this was a significant experience for me to go “out of the blue” searching for a job and get one without having connections before hand.

A few things that I found significant in the process:

1) Get a Professional Resume

Paying for a professional resume writer to redo my resume made a HUGE difference. It made me feel much more confident about sending it off, but I also got much better feedback and callbacks once I began using it. It was completely worth the money and I’d recommend it to anybody serious about their job hunt.

As for the high cost — don’t go cheap is my opinion. Think about how long it takes to do a good job, the hourly rate you want to be paid and you’ll see that it’s impossible to have a proper job for $150 – which you’ll see advertised. I paid $700 and it was deserved.

2) It Takes Time

Plan for it to take longer than you want or expect. It all takes time.

3) Study

The questions I was asked are things that NEVER get asked or come up in the “real world” and are things I’d typically Google.

Sometimes that’s a valid answer … “I’d Google that” … but it won’t get you far on most interviews.

I had to dust off my understanding on a lot of computer science theory, algorithms, data structures, and other such things. In fact, the one major set of interviews I went through and ultimately got rejected from was the first series I went through and I believe 3 things caused the rejection (not my lack of skill):

a) questions about things I hadn’t studied (and studied thereafter and was prepared for in subsequent interviews)

b) I was over-dressed … a suit and tie for an engineering position set the wrong tone

c) I was not myself and stressed (this was more to do with the fact that it was my first real interviews in a decade … ok, ever…)

It was really frustrating at times and absolutely exhilarating at others … a real roller-coaster all the way through. By the end though I had a better sense of value and who I am and an exciting new career path.

Good luck to anyone else reading this and doing their own search!

Some Favorites

Ben Christensen — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:59:08 +0000

Smitten

Ben Christensen — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:44:00 +0000

I know this isn’t my personal photo gallery — that lives elsewhere — but my wife sent the following picture to me yesterday while she was out with my baby girl and I admit, I’m smitten. She’s my little girl and I’m wrapped around her finger.

Micro-Blogging with Twitter

Ben Christensen — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:39:13 +0000

I started using Twitter about 2 weeks ago. Before that I thought Twitter was a silly thing. Why would I want to post “what I’m doing” at any given moment?

However, a handful of people whose blogs I follow began migrating more and more of their commentary to Twitter. In fact, one of them retired from blogging and only uses Twitter now. Thus, I started an account so I could follow these few people.

I soon came to recognize Twitter for what it can actually be used for – micro-blogging. It’s not just “status updates” as used by teens, tweens and soccer moms – but a viable communication platform for short thoughts and messages that would often go un-written, un-shared, un-communicated (pardon the poor grammar) because traditional blogging (if a 5 year old concept can be considered traditional) needs more content than a single sentence to be bothered with.

To post a blog entry it needs at least a title plus a paragraph.

With Twitter, you just need the title.

Thus, the sharing of thoughts, ideas, quotes, links etc all become more natural because there is less friction in doing so.

As I commented in an earlier post on “Speed of Thought“, if something has friction, it it less likely to be used or performed. The same with sharing of thoughts and ideas.

Blogging reduced the friction greatly from the techniques before it, and Twitter (or micro-blogging more generically) appears to be doing the same for a realm of communication previously not very feasible to attempt.

I have posted 83 messages in 18 days since starting – some benign, others more thoughtful. A mixture of personal and professional.

I do not see Twitter as a replacement of blogs. I see them as very compatible mediums that mix together to create a stream of thoughts and ideas – to be shared and create dialog. In fact, I have mixed them now on this blog as shown by the Twitter feed in the right column, providing a single place to find my thoughts – both those well thought out and edited as blog entries, and those more “sound bite” sized from Twitter.

Despite my views on the subject just 3 weeks ago, I now think Twitter is a valuable addition to our communication toolset alongside email, RSS and blogs.

If you’re still questioning the significance of Twitter and think it’s just celebrities, teens and tweens, check out some of the following which are a few I follow:

(CNN Breaking News) https://twitter.com/cnnbrk
(Reuters News) https://twitter.com/Reuters
(Al Jazeera News) https://twitter.com/AJEnglish
(Application Architect) https://twitter.com/martinfowler
(Enterprise Architect) https://twitter.com/mcgoverntheory
(Data Center) https://twitter.com/Rackspace
(USA White House) https://twitter.com/whitehouse
(Muse – a great band) https://twitter.com/musewire

The fact that companies, news agencies and governments are using the medium for instant communication – not just personal friends – is an amazing convergence of parties making the medium that much more powerful and useful.

Communicating and staying in touch with so many diverse parties has never had as little friction as this.

Another typical Microsoft experience …

Ben Christensen — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:35:02 +0000

For the rare scenario I need to use Windows I have XP installed in Parallels 4 on my Mac.

I got a new machine today so copied everything over and in doing so had to re-install Parallels.

XP needs to be re-activated again, but it won’t do so by the internet for whatever reason. I have to call Microsoft.

So I do so … and after speaking to a computer ALL of the digits in the screenshot below it says I need to talk to a human. I get somebody in India who then tells me their computers aren’t working and that I’ll have to call back in 20-30 minutes.

Not only does Microsoft make their software stop working for me, the tech support I call doesn’t have their software running either.

Lovely.

I’m an INTJ

Ben Christensen — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:31:00 +0000

My sister-in-law had me take the personality test at http://humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

I’m an INTJ.

Introverted: 11% Intuitive: 88% Thinking: 50% Judging: 44%

Usually these things seem silly to me … but the descriptions of the INTJ type is eerily representative of me.

http://typelogic.com/intj.html

I hate Word.

Ben Christensen — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 13:30:58 +0000

I hate Microsoft Word tonight.

I put columns in my document, so it creates a new “section” around each one.

That then means that page numbering is all screwed up — and even though I tell it to continue page numbering from the previous section it still doesn’t do so — so I either can’t have page numbering correct in my TOC and footers, or I can’t use columns.

I HATE WORD.

Wordperfect had this all working properly like 15 years ago in version 5.1 … and it let me actually see the stupid codes instead of hiding it all behind a useless GUI.