Hi. I am Shweta. I graduated with a MBA Degree . My dream is to work for Goldman Sachs. Can you help make that happen? Click 4 resume.

While an unconventional approach, the ad linked to a resume hosted on Adobe’s cloud. I won’t link to it here because it contains personal information, but it reminds me of the Google Please Hire Me websites that popped up a few years ago. These were mostly gimmicks which attracted some attention, and typically led to nothing.

On the other hand, Youtube Instant generated a spontaneous job application. Perhaps the better approach is to build something awesome and let the job offers pour in?

The federal government sued a suburban Chicago school district Monday for denying a Muslim middle school teacher unpaid leave to make a pilgrimage to Mecca that is a central part of her religion. [...]

Khan wanted to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia which every adult Muslim is supposed to make at least once in a lifetime if they are physically and financially able to. Millions go each year. [...]

Berkeley School District compelled Khan to choose between her job and her religious beliefs, the lawsuit said.

Interesting stuff. As an employer, I believe that you should make every possible effort to strike reasonable work-life balance for your employees. Unpaid time away to get married, look after family, and fulfilling religious obligations are all the sorts of things that you would reasonably expect accommodation for. In more civilized countries, you would be accorded sufficient paid holidays to do much of this. Unfortunately, in the United States, by law, there is no requirement to offer any holidays at all!

Ignoring the religious and racial overtones in this news article, what I found interesting was the comments thread. Check these high-rated gems out:

• “they want, want, want but don’t want to give. Special treatment! Whatever happened to the (former) American work ethic?”
• “Contract, obey the rules and live with them or dont sign up”
• “Whoever hired her should be fired.”
• “This is a sham on the american way of life”
• “Seperation of Church and State. Take a Religous Holiday when everyone else does.”
• ” She signed a contract, then did not like it. Tough. Think I like paying my credit cards? No, but I have a contractual relationship to pay .”
• “What a bunch of bull. This should not even go to court. She should be denied time off for this. Try this at a real job and they will tell you “no”! Here is why, if you want the time off then use your vacation time. That is what it is for. Your employer is not obligated to give you any more time off then what you have accrued.”

It’s an interesting fact that Americans have the least paid vacation days in the world (0 by law), some of the most mediocre students in the world, the largest wealth-gap between the rich and poor, etc. Yet when confronted by an individual who is trying to improve the American standard of living (by advocating for improved time-off rules), American internet commenters essentially say, “I don’t have this right; why should you?”

I don’t understand this.

Do you want America to suck? You should be cheering this woman and the ALCU on, because they are fighting for your rights. (If you feel like commenting that I’m an elitist foreigner who should shut up and work harder, please don’t even bother to leave a comment.)

Update: It’s nice to see Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want – and it works come out today.

Here’s a real invitation I just received (censored to protect the guilty):

Raspberry has indicated you are a person they’ve done business with you at Orangutan Syllabus Technologies:

Hey Elliott,

Being both Crasselnach alumni and in the same industry, I thought we should connect. Also, would you be up for a chat in the coming week sometime?

Thanks,
Raspberry

My reply to this was brief:

I don’t think we’ve met–why do you think we’re in the same industry? I am not interested in discussing career opportunities with you at this time.

Why is this a bad way to make an introduction? There are three reasons:

• I have never worked at or with Orangutan Syllabus Technologies; to say that “Raspberry has worked with me” is a lie.
• The message tries too hard to connect at a personal level. I currently work in finance; Raspberry is a recruiter. We are absolutely not in the same industry. We both went to Crasselnach, but Raspberry was a Business major, while I was in Computer Science. We never met. Trying to draw up false connections is just condescending.
• The “let’s chat” is excessively vague. Most recruiters I know spam you with job descriptions. This is OK, because it’s honest and up front, and also very detailed. When I get one from companies I like, I express some enthusiasm, and add them on LinkedIn for the future!

When building your professional social network, keep things professional.

I noticed that many universities post the results of their alumni employment surveys online, and gathered them into a spreadsheet. I will be looking at Cornell University, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU and UoA. I want to treat each university as a kind of asset, and categorize their volatility and average return. I imagine that the kind of university a prospective student, interested in maximizing his first-year earning potential, would choose would offer the most resilience to downturn, and the highest absolute salary.

Salary over Time per University

It’s clear from the above graph that the University’s ranking is a factor in first-year salary. The cluster of “top private schools” pulls away from the University of Arizona in earnings potential, and maintains an average of 23% more salary dollars in the last 12 years. That’s a significant spread.

Given the downturn during the tech crash of 2001, and the recent financial crisis, it’s worth asking which University will give you better returns than inflation on your salary (all of them), but without too much volatility (standard deviation of returns). As it turns out, there’s only one university in that sweet spot: Cornell University (disclosure: my alma mater).

While Stanford/MIT/UC Berkely have average salary growth of 4.5% per year, they also have an average standard deviation of 8.5% and took a whopping -12% hit in the downturn of 2001. Cornell got by with a -7% return, but has a much more respectable standard deviation of 5% and average salary growth of 4%. Carnegie Melon has a similar deviation in returns, but only with a 2% growth rate.

This is informal analysis; if you have any comments or questions, please drop a note on this post! One obvious shortcoming of this data is that it only records the starting salaries of undergrads, which isn’t a good indicator of total earnings potential for undergraduates of various universities. In the longer view, there may be no difference between undergraduate universities.

Appendix of Data:

• Inflation data from Consumer Price Index – All Urban Consumers – (CPI-U) – U.S. city average.
• Cornell University data from Annual Starting Salaries 1985 – 2006 and 2008 Employment
• MIT data from their salary survey (only three years, WTF!), and graduating student survey.
• Stanford has a pretty good index page 1997 to 2008.
• UC Berkeley’s What Can I Do With a Major In…?.
• CMU Post Graduation Survey Results from the School of Computer Science.
• University of Arizona’s Career Destinations Results page.

Data is based on mean starting salary. Data is linearly interpolated to form smooth curves where knots are missing. I was unable to find data for Columbia or Princeton, so if you have a source, please let me know and I will update my spreadsheet!

If I feel like pop, picking Danity Kane explodes more pop:

And an Ice Cube song brings the hilarity:

iTunes 8 is definitely psychic!