Austin High Tech Career Fair

Austin High Tech Career Fair

Was great. Though I'm not actively looking for a job, it was interesting to see what's out there. I was glad to see that C++ seemed to be in demand, and C# / .NET even more so, as I happen to specialize in those technologies. I also took it as a good sign that some recruiters roamed the hall looking for anybody with a software developer's identifying green star on their badge. One of those ultra-enthusiastic recruiters touted the casual office culture as one of the main perks for working at that company; as a visual evidence whereof she spoke, one of the software guys in the company booth wore his jeans low enough to deliberately expose a sliver of his plaid underwear. :-) Hmm. I think even in the days of the first internet bubble you didn't get to see stuff like that in corporate-type events.

My interaction with recruiters and company representatives varied from brief exchange of resumes or business cards, to long conversations that resembled job interviews, in which they asked me about the details of my work. Later, during the networking part, I had a good conversation with an internet entrepreneur about my personal bootstrapping project. He was actually the first person I talked about this with. It's amazing how your pipe dreams suddenly start to take shape and not seem so unrealistic anymore when you discuss them with someone. Once you start talking, you are forced to put your nebulous concepts into words, and suddenly they crystalize.

Steve unexpectedly ran into his former roommate from his graduate school days, and we chatted with him a little. Then a door prize drawing was announced: door64 was giving away Chumbies. And what do you know -- Steve's ex-roommate won a Chumby! People swarmed all around him to take a peek. I was envious, but did not stay long enough for the second drawing. The crowd of people thinned out pretty quickly after that.