College hackathons - disruptor in Career Fairs.
College hackathons will be better than career fairs, marketing tool and sales. They are going to replace them in Universities. Companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and start-ups want students that can think on their feet and be able to explain why they would use this particular design pattern (Design Patterns) than another or why they used Go instead of Java in doing multi-threaded programming or why they would use NoSQL than SQL.
They want students that can design architectures, decide on the best software architecture on the fly, work well with a team and know how to write Clean Code.
These are essential skills no matter where you work - big, small and medium. As I’ve talked to a former extraordinaire VT associate professor in CS that now works in Google as a developer relations - Tony Allevato. Hackathons have a bad rep that gets students to just code code and hook-up a js library to another - without teaching them tips and advice on how to do a better job in designing your project to make it sustainable in the long-run. Coding is easy but teaching software design is a hard task.Â
A possible solution for this: get a professor to do a tech-talk on a particular topic in software engineering, whether that is to present the ideas behind Scrum/Agile or discuss about the mechanisms of concurrency programming in current trends in Tech or present a talk on how to work well with a team - a talk on team dynamics or design. These are good tech talks that I highly encourage any potential sponsors to pursue, I would suggest for potential sponsors to pick a topic that you wished you knew when you were starting out as a junior developer.
