🏅 Top traders

Congratulations!

Taking my bronze medal to the party.

@Eliza 4th place here, but I think Robin's the big winner

How have you performed previous years?

I have an interview for a local unpaid IT internship tomorrow :)

@Robincvgr I think it went really well!

got my comptia a+

Second time in one day I'm seeing a CS student's resume with no mention of Claude Code or Codex.

You haven't graduated but you're already obsolete. And you're probably paying some good money for that too.

Edit: looked at your github, you are using Claude Code. So put it on the resume. That's basically the only thing that matters today.

@MaxA What they are searching for is skills and adaptation. Showing that you can do difficult things with a good level of understanding (especially without agentic AI) is way more valuable than having done things with agentic AI.

Especially among companies that produce critical IP, or critical code

@notbayesian At my work, if we had an internship program, a person like this one would report to me. I know exactly what I would be looking for. Most of what I see on the resume and most of the github repos are irrelevant to today's devops/IT. claudearchinstaller is the only thing borderline interesting.

Understanding is orthogonal to AI usage. However, productivity directly depends on it. If I have a choice between two people, but one of them can do 5x in the same amount of time, I would choose that one. With interns, verification would be mine anyway, and you can be sure I'll do it with Claude myself.

Robin should get some docker containers going on the cheap, like at Digital Ocean, and learn to control them with Claude Code. That would be a start.

@MaxA Good luck debugging 5x vibecoder AI slop from an intern whose only skill is to deploy a container on Digital Ocean

@notbayesian Interns do stupid shit with or without AI. But you can be sure that someone who only knows how to work with containers would be much more useful to me than someone who wrote a text editor or played with some ASCII art (good old times haha).

And I debug my own vibecoded slop every day anyway. It's much easier than debugging my own hand typed slop was in the first 35 years of my career.

@MaxA Someone who would have proven he had good skills/adaptation by doing difficult stuff in the past would have no trouble setting up a container using AI, and will be better at understanding and debugging it's own AI slop.

@notbayesian You're somewhat correct in the abstract (you're undervaluing the verification layer complexity but ok).

However, in practice, where I am, I want someone who has already done what I want them to do. At least in some rudimentary form.

Sub-market: Will Robin get an IT internship based on a lead that comes directly from another Manifold user?

I haven't taken a market position yet. I do not have any special knowledge of this landscape but it seems to me there should be a pattern something like:

• The most sought positions in whatever field would have earlier recruiting windows like "last fall" and have probably filled up by now. You're probably not getting some crazy internship with an international company. I assume you can't even apply for stuff like that anymore.

• Some internship applicants already knew they missed out on that stuff and have been frantically applying for many things for several months. They might be your direct competition right now.

• Many businesses (and internship applicants) are just as disorganized as you can imagine, and are only getting around to figuring out what they need or can support right now.

• The later you go, the smaller the places you should be targeting. It is absolutely without a doubt the case that very small places will realize they would love to have 250 or 500 hours or whatever of extra grunt work for the summer, but won't know they can support that until like May or whatever. Do. Not. Give. Up. Until some very late target date, at least.

@Eliza Yeah, I was admittedly asleep at the wheel until recently. I'm still applying to whatever I can but it's a good idea to target smaller places. I'm gonna start trying to reach directly out to people and applying on company-specific websites instead of staying on the big job boards too

@Robincvgr That seems like a great tactic. Also appropriate at this time would be contacting people that you have known in the past, people that your parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles know, places that you have had tangential relationships with before, etc. The concept of "we need some extra general IT work" seems like something that could happen at almost any type of establishment.

I would put way more technical details in your resume

I would throw in way more technical skills ... the bar is pretty low here - I assume you could put bash/another shell that you're comfortable with?

Hell, Pacman/makepkg are valuable skills that AUR probably requires?

Your projects explain "what" but not how - e.g. you should include how you are developing a language (what tools/libraries are you using? What language are you writing the language in?) How does the project showcase your technical abilities?

I would also highlight a public PR, if you have one that you're proud of and is more than just a typo fix (even if it was a simple bug - how did you find it, how did you figure out how to fix it, how did you verify your fix?)

E.g. https://github.com/izll/plasma-claude-usage/pull/3

@Kire_ Thanks for the advice.

@Robincvgr Disclaimer: I am an idiot and do not trust anything I say on its own unless some other human being thinks it is a good suggestion.

If you do expand the open source and technical information into something that looks more like regular, continuous work experience rather than a side note, perhaps ship some fraction of these without listing the unrelated customer service roles in Donuts and McDonald's.

It seems to me that including those could in some situations act as a shibboleth or class signal with negative connotations depending on who is reading it. (Although in other situations it could actually be positive! So don't necessarily skip it in all lottery entries.)

@Eliza I'll think about it; I've gotten very conflicting advice on whether to include those "meaningless" jobs, and if so, how much detail to provide on them. I think I might just A/B test that.

Yeah, I have no idea how to navigate the class thing. Both my parents have made minimum wage their whole lives, nobody I have a personal relationship with can give me advice on breaking into the medium-status :P

@Robincvgr I wouldn't worry about that part too much. It is absolutely the case that some people (or automated systems????) that look at information like this would consider it a positive signal for a person interested in an entry level or internship type position. As long as you look like someone who will be useful for whatever the role is.