If I were to give some advice, it would probably be to focus on the craft rather than on the job. Work to become the best engineer you can, and treat each job as an opportunity to gain more experience doing that. The jobs will come naturally, once you've gotten the first couple to take a chance on you.

Also, nobody knows what race you are on the Internet unless you tell them, so it's a little disingenuous to play the race card.

You need to think about your objectives for the jobs you're considering.

The idea that you're going to leave school and fall into the perfect job is, if you think about it for a moment, kind of silly.

For most of us, it takes several jobs --- each eating as many as a couple years of our lives --- to figure out exactly where our careers are taking us, and what kinds of roles we should be occupying.

What is it you want to learn to do? What career problem do you want to start on first? Think about it like a role playing game character sheet, but instead of "Charisma" and "Constitution", you have "Earning Potential" and "Responsibility" and "Technical Skills" and "Business Skills" and the like. You get a certain number of points to spend each (serious) job you take. Have you thought about which stats you want to boost?

You'll have to hack your own path. Here's a good read on getting your Elevator Pitch right, Prospecting, Networking, and Over-coming Objections > http://www.amazon.com/Little-Red-Book-Selling-Principles/pro...

They don't just not teach it, they teach engineers to be actively hostile to it.

(1) secure, with good pay and benefits and (2) something you enjoy doing or at least not hate

My wife has a "good" job in the sense of (2). She's self employed teaching children to ride horses. In terms of (1) she could certainly get better benefits but not better security or pay doing anything she is qualified to do.

The economy is fundamentally opposed to (1), particularly the security part. The only realistic retirement plans today are to be a government worker or to start a corporation that goes public or otherwise gets sold. As time goes by voters are going to taste the blood of both of those populations.

As for (2) it is a challenge too that you're going to have to work hard at.

Credentials: I've had a multi-decade unbroken streak of jobs where I looked forward to going to work every morning. I've also never worked on anything but new products.

Here are my "Secrets to Developer Job Happiness":

Work for a small or tiny company that makes money with the software you create. If you can't work for a tiny company, work for a tiny team.

Don't work for asshats. Ask around. If it's a big company, look on Glassdoor. A job interview is a date - remember to interview the company right back. Try to talk to the people you'll be working with. Are they trying to see if you're a good fit or are they more interested in trying to prove that they are smarter than you are?

Don't be afraid to ask (seemingly) stupid questions. A lot of your colleagues will be afraid to admit they don't understand something (esp. in meetings). Don't think that just because no one else asks the "stupid" question, that you are the only one who doesn't understand. Fear of looking stupid interferes with communication and forward progress. Once you say: "I hope I don't sound like an idiot, but could you explain that part about the chromatic aberration but slower this time?" You are stupid. Get used to it. ;-)

I then wrote an e-mail to her and that data-mining team, after reading all public papers, and figuring out where I could try to help. In this case I a) complimented them on their work b) showed I was enthusiastic and c) came with ideas on what I could contribute. So they offered an internship, which I loved. They where cutting edge with large scale data-mining over complicated data using the then just new java 1.5 on varied hardware and infrastructure. i.e. hibernate when it was still cool, K/V stores and lucene together with lots of classical datamining algo's such as C4.5 and SVMs on large clusters. (Sure my final report could have been better)

Came back to finish my Uni, graduated while working for a year on GPU computing (using BrookGPU) to get protein domain detecting working for some comparative potato genomics work. Which I loved as well.

Then I joined a large IT firm as a trainee for 1 month and then 9 months on one of the more interesting government IT projects dealing with tracking health of children. Funnily enough I went to industry to learn how to run a project, and ended up on one which looked like the ObamaCare roll out in the small :( So I quickly started looking around.

My internship group offered me a position but could not get the paperwork done in time for me to be snapped up by their collaborators.

Now I am lead developer for the uniprot.org website and sparql services. Which I love, because I have so much freedom and responsibility and great bosses who are a pleasure to work for and are absolutely dependable, as well as a very diverse team who respects each other talents and quirks.

So to summarise. Luck and networking got me the job, but those where only effective because I had the knowledge and applied it.

So join a professional club (IEEE or Rotary or something) network and learn to find interesting people, because interesting people often have the interesting jobs.

Working hard in school doesn't entitle you to a "good job" right away. I assume that very few people get the perfect job out of the gate. It takes time to learn what kind of environment you like, what kind of company you want to work for and what kind of people you want to work with. Do a good job with your current position and use it as a stepping stone to something better. You will cultivate relationships with people and build a reputation over time.

2004 - Got a new job at another federal contractor and it was a good job for what it was. 9-5ish, no dress code (big deal for east coast .gov contractor), good benefits, vacation, salary, etc. The work was moderately interesting, but the people were good and while the environment wasn't conducive to shipping a lot of product quickly we did get to do some interesting work. Moved to SF in 2008, saw what I was missing, and in

2011 - Joined a small startup that was great for most of 2 years. There were ups and downs, but the work was fun, the team was small and mostly in sync, I got to learn a whole lot and was responsible for basically everything. At the end it kind of went bad, but it was 20ish months of a good place to work. And with the exception of about 3 months in the middle it was a pretty reasonable work/life balance.

2013 - Got a job at another startup. Good people, interesting space, good work environment, decent benefits. I like getting up and coming into the office. I generally work 9-630ish and things look good for the foreseeable future.

TLDR - Yeah, there are plenty of good jobs out there. You aren't guaranteed to find them, so some due diligence will be required, but they are definitely out there.

The first thing you need to understand, is that you are not a "new grad without a network". From now until the day you retire your main job is cultivating, maintaining and growing your network. This needn't be seen as some sort of soulless MBA exercise in ass kissing. Spending all night figuring out how to write a Scheme compiler for lego robots, getting in a screaming fight about Scala implicits, and figuring out how to make Flash programmable before it was supported by Adobe are all ways I've done this.

If you've really been at a tough engineering school you already have a phenomenal network to exploit. Think professors you've impressed, grad students you've done favors for, and other students you've worked on group projects with.

You mention that you have an internship you hate. Is there not a single person there who seems to have interesting habits or hobbies?

If you are thinking to yourself, "no, I don't have a network that sounds like that". Your very first duty to your career is to build it. Find a professor who is doing something weird and interesting to work with. Do some favors for grad students and work your ass off at your internship. If you can't find something interesting to work on when you are young and studying engineering you aren't trying hard enough (or maybe you should do something else).

My biggest piece of advice is to always work on new and interesting things. The money/career will come from that.

I can't think of another career I would rather have.

* It was right after 9/11 a brutal job market, and even then, I learned a ton and met friends for life so I don't regret it at all.

At least they did for me. Luck could have been a factor as well.

This is absolutely true and excellent advice.

It applies, often, even if the thing you're working on has no immediate practical application.

I've spent 18 years making drama films in computer games.

As a result, I built a reasonably successful .com which I then sold, I've traveled all over the world, and I have both a primary and ancilliary skillset which people are interested in spending significant chunks of money to gain access to.

The only addition I'd make to the advice is this:

Tell People About It.

Doing fascinating work and never talking about it works significantly less well. Work with people, post your creations on HN, start a blog, and generally talk to people about what you've done.

> But that's kind of a chicken/egg situation for new grads without networks.

Is fundamentally false since you are in school. There's a lot of alumni and classmates. Your peers have internships, potentially with companies they like. They may not want to join on full-time afterwards for any number of reasons, but those companies may still be hiring for graduation. Those companies may also be hiring more than one person. The Alumni network can also help in identifying positions available with good companies.

You may also have peers that recently graduated, and have internship positions. It's your last year so this probably isn't applicable to you, but they're also a good source of info and jobs. Don't restrict yourself to your graduating class.

Another good networking idea is to start going to meetups and the like for tech people. We have a regional one called Tech After 5 that meets in a fairly upscale bar. They hands out nametags so you get names and usually places they work.

Talking to really high level people, and just asking them about the state of the industry, general pointers as a new person, and such are great ways to grow your network. Try to meet a couple of new people a week who are in better positions than you are. A cup of coffee landed me more than a couple jobs.

I found one this January that I absolutely love, with the smartest team I've ever worked with. One of the reasons - the company wants every employee to think like an owner with the ability to make some decisions, plus profit sharing; they walk the walk.

There are great places to work out there. Don't settle.

I have found that everyone feels differently about different types of jobs. Much like some people are cat people, some people are dog people, and some people are fine with cats and dogs living together, some people feel great working for start-ups where you are constantly burning it at both ends, some people are happiest working for a big established company with lots of policies and procedures, and some people like working for companies that are changing from being startups to being enterprises and have projects that fall into both camps. If you figure out what kind of person you are and you target companies that are of that type, you will probably be happy.

Your first job or two is probably going to suck. Much like the first couple of 100-series lecture courses at university, you will wonder why you are there, you will struggle to find meaning or joy in the material, and you will work hard simply to get through it. Your main goal here is to not screw up while you're figuring out what kind of person you are and where you fit in the management/technical tracks and in various teams. You should make sure that you stick your neck out as much as possible in these jobs without totally screwing the pooch. It's anxiety inducing and the sole purpose is to build your resume a little so you can level up. It's ok, it gets better.

Your third or fourth job, which you will get by finding out how to sell the experience and skills you gained in your first job or two and by networking with peers and generally being (or at least appearing to be) a smart person, will probably be joyful. Your focus here should be finding your boundaries and pushing them. You should try all kinds of weird new technologies and push the envelope. You should bend your brain until it breaks, have a beer, and bend it some more. You will probably create some amazing things, and you should keep track of them by frequently updating your resume. My only advice in this period is to take some time off frequently. It's exhilarating to be in this phase, but you can break yourself permanently. This is a marathon, even if you're sprinting all the time.

At your fifth job (or by about 35 years old) you might find your opinion about certain kinds of places and certain kinds of tasks and certain technologies solidifying. This is comparable to your third and fourth year of college. You know where you are, you know who you want to be, and now it's time to focus. This is where you will probably make your most important contributions... Even if you're me, working Ops, and your most important contribution is "Ah wouldn't do tha if ah wuz you."

After that period, you might find yourself in one or two places. But generally, at about age 40, you'll start to slow a little and might lose your ability to hop between companies. This is part of the focusing trend. Some people end up in management because they're technologically burnt out a bit. Some people double down on the technical track and go on to become graybeards. Some people quit and become hermits or police officers or consultants or bricklayers. This phase is comparable to grad school: instead of spending most of your time working with peers, you're spending most of your time teaching to those junior to you... And at the same time, you're still expected to be productive on your own. But you should have developed a plan for when you hit this phase, because grad school is not for everyone.

Hopefully that clears up a few things for you. It's not so much enjoying a job as it is enjoying what you get up and do every day, and changing what you do if you find you don't enjoy it.