And when I say “sign”, I mean it literally. This is what Silicon Valley looks like at the moment:

Those signs are everywhere. Mountain View. Palo Alto.

I hear that in other parts of the country, a depression is still going on. Europe is gloomy.

Not here. If you are a software developer and are not making $100K/year in salary, you should know that it’s the going rate today for junior engineers in the valley. I’m not promising you it will last forever, and you probably will be shocked by the cost of living, but you deserve to know and make your own choice.

Looking at the Google Analytics stats, I can see another lesson: twitter only brought less than a hundred visitors (0.49%). For all the buzz (:-), I’m not feeling the twitter love. Good old discussion groups seem to work better.

And so yesterday I bumped into a post on Hacker News about interview questions for Google product managers. Call it timely.

One interview question specially triggered my interest. I have been advocating doing the job rather than talking in empty generalities ever since I was educated by Nick Corcodilos in the late 90s, when I was interviewing tens of C++ developers. It sounded like a very reasonable question that a future Gmail product manager would want to answer:

If you are the product marketing manager for Google’s Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?

Oh, and what would my answer be? I might as well walk the talk. Let me think.

First, I’d notice that reaching 100M customers means I have to think outside the US. The US market is just not large enough. What else could I target, hopefully cheap? What about India? That sounds big enough.

Ok, how much should I spend? Let’s shoot for $10M. I’d spend a million to get endorsements from Bollywood stars. Did you notice how Google never uses emotions and star power in their ads, and tends to focus on logic, reasoning and arguments? If you want to convert 100M customers quickly, you’d better appeal to their emotions, not their IQ.

I’d spend the other $9M on a TV ad campaign. In the US, you can get an ad at the Superbowl for $3M and reach 90M viewers. Hopefully, India is cheaper, and while of course not everyone will convert, you should get pretty decent results.

How would you do it (bonus points if you are a Gmail product manager)?

It’s 2010 and that idea has not graduated to mainstream yet. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product.

How do you go from one of thousands of resumes, to the one person the whole Analytics team is dying to bring on board?

By doing the job.

What does that mean, really? Look at the product and share your insights. Do you have smart suggestions on how to improve the product? If not, you may have picked the wrong dream job.

After all, if you got that job, what would happen after HR issued your Google badge? You’d expect a deep dive on the product, its features, and what improvements are planned in the upcoming roadmap.

Why not role-play that job today and see what you can come up with?

And then publish it where it has a chance of being seen. Usually, product teams like to google for their own products, so there is a good chance that your post will eventually make it on their radar. Mission accomplished.

Let’s go back to the Google Analytics example. I’m sure you can come up with many good suggestions such as these:

• The “Compare to past” feature is broken: if I want to compare the last 14 days with an arbitrary date in the past, I need to enter the exact start and end dates. If the interval I specify doesn’t have the exact same number of days as the current one, I get an error. That’s not friendly at all. A quick fix would be that you can leave the end date blank, and Analytics would figure out what the proper range should be. Except if you do that, you get another aggressive popup that tells you blank is an invalid date…

• 

  Setting goals: you can look in the “Goals” menu for a while to try to define goals or change their value. It’s not there. Where is it? It’s buried in the settings, but not the “Settings” link on that page. No, it’s in another page which is very hard to find (you get to it via an “edit” button on a page that you are not likely to ever look at – seriously?). Compare this to Facebook, which lets you change ad values in-line, by just clicking on them.

Does that approach work? Yes! Just last month, designer Rodrigo Galindez wrote a blog post where he showed how he would reformat Twitter’s new landing page. Within a week, Zendesk offered him a job. Why? Because he showed he could do the job, by doing it.

How far can you take this hack? A while back, I went to an event called “how to become a VC.” It was packed, and I couldn’t help but notice the irony: the discussion focused on career paths, maybe starting as an associate and climbing the ladder.

How would I become a VC? By being one: pull some of my own money, invest it in startups, and build my track record. That’s how. I can’t imagine any other way.

Great. Now try this: write an iPhone app and put it on the App Store. What will you learn? Marketing, customer support, economics, PR.

By the time you graduate with your CS degree, that little App Store adventure may well be what sets you ahead of all the other candidates to land your dream job.

What does it cost you? You need to pay $99 to Apple to become a registered iPhone developer. And you may even recoup some of that investment if someone buys your app.

Strike that. You will know that you passed the class when you recoup that investment tenfold. How many other classes you took offer such direct, undisputable grades?

What you will learn:

• Marketing: How do users hear about your app? How can you create some buzz to attract more people? You will learn that having an amazing technical product is nothing if you can’t communicate its value.
• Customer support: You will be forced to look at your product with the eyes of your end user. Is the app really intuitive? How come every user seems to be making the same usability mistake? You will learn to respect your end user and project yourself to code for what they need, not what you think is neat.
• Economics: By now you should be having fun. Some money is coming in. You’d want more. How can you manage that? Maybe it’s time to bring on board another student to help with support or graphics. How much will that cost you? Is that a good return on investment? You will learn to make your own business decisions.

Granted, an MBA teaches more than what I just listed above. But nothing beats hands-on experience and the App Store today is the quickest way for a CS student to get it.

I know the pain. I was a new grad once. It was horrible: it took me 10 months to find my first job.

Back to 2009. One student showed me her resume: it showed perfect GPA, lots of classes with impressive-sounding titles. But no summer job, no internship, no side project.

Another student showed me a less than perfect resume, but it had all kinds of extra-curricular projects and activities, showing exposure to technologies, people and business challenges.

I have been a hiring manager long enough(1) to tell you the one thing we look for: relevant experience.

Which by definition, being a new grad, you don’t have.

We don’t care much at all about GPA or extra-curricular activities. In 20 seconds or less, we decide whether to discard the resume or not.

Don’t get me wrong. You need a good GPA. Think of it as a pre-requisite. But you need to go the extra mile. For an idea of how far you can take this concept, check out this post from Jason Calacanis. While I don’t agree with all of it, it should pour enough fire in your belly to get you moving.

Experience for the Inexperienced

So what can you add to your resume within a few months, that will make a difference?

A favorite is joining an Open Source project. Go to github or Sourceforge and pick up an existing project. It will prove that you can contribute to a large piece of code and work with others.

The Mini-MBA

But there is an entire dimension that is usually ignored by both university curriculum and open source projects: Business. Will anyone spend money on this product? Who is my customer? Being business-aware and customer-centric is a major skill that you might as well acquire early.

Allow me to suggest one example of a slightly different kind of project that will give you such exposure. Join one of our Fair Projects. Even going through the list of projects and figuring out for yourself which ones are likely to succeed commercially is a worthwhile exercise.

Alternatively, write a $0.99 iPhone app. Those 99 cents make all the difference. Will someone buy your product? That’s exciting but it also teaches great business lessons. Can you triple your number of customers? How? Then go ahead and try. The beauty of the iPhone store is that you can iterate and learn extremely quickly.

I am not a big believer in MBAs, but early exposure to business issues is very important. Think of this as earning your mini-MBA.

Resume Help

I’ll be happy to provide free feedback on the first 100 students who e-mail me their resume (PDF please). I won’t find you a job, but I’ll tell you how you fare on the side-project-o-meter. Contact me ‘Alain’ at SoftwareBillofRights (dot org).

(1) My advice applies to small and mid-size corporations. There are still a few very large corporations (IBM, Google…) that hire quotas of new grads with 0 experience, because they are willing to train them internally.