Here’s what you need to land America’s best jobs

Marco della Cava and Eli Blumenthal | USA Today | 30 May 2017

“SAN FRANCISCO — The nation’s best jobs boast salaries that average $100,000 and up, offer generous company benefits, and promise to have recruiting suitors fighting for your hand.

But they are highly technical roles carrying job descriptions like DevOps engineer and analytics manager that demand an alphabet soup of computer skills as well as incessant on-the-job learning.

So do you have to be a math genius with a spare PhD in physics to get one of these great gigs? What we found might surprise you.

USA TODAY conducted a series of interviews with people in the nation’s top jobs, as well as with those recruiting and training candidates for these roles. Our mission was to see just how obtainable these plum posts are, whether you’re a student looking for a profession or a career-changer seeking better pay in a booming field.

The market for tech talent is so hot that technology jobs now rate as the best type of employment opportunities in the nation.”

Read more here.

 

Inside Sonos’ Seattle office, where the music is bumpin’ and the team is growin’

Nat Levy | GeekWire | 28 May 2017

“Sonos, the high-tech connected speaker maker that opened a Seattle office about two years ago, is turning up the volume on its local presence.

Sonos established its Seattle presence at the Bullitt Center, a six-story, 50,000-square-foot structure on Capitol Hill that bills itself as the “greenest commercial building in the world,” in 2015 and started with just 10 people. Today, the company is up to 70 people in the office, with another 35 or so open positions locally, and it has outgrown its initial space. Sonos recently picked up another half floor, giving it two full floors in the building, totaling about 13,000 square feet with room for about 100 people.

GeekWire got a tour of the space earlier this month. Music blares in every nook and cranny of the office, naturally, and walls are lined with various Sonos speaker models signed by musicians. Strewn throughout are guitars hooked up to speakers and amps, what looked to be a karaoke station, and a central living room area, complete with a fully stocked bar.”

Read more here.

 

Tech: CEO lists 3 traits you need to succeed

Anne Stych | Puget Sound Business Journal | 25 May 2017

“Success traits. What does it take to succeed in the tech business?

Padmasree Warrior, CEO at autonomous vehicle start-up NIO U.S. and former U.S. Cisco Systems CTO, lists three traits that have helped make her a tech success and that she thinks apply to anyone trying to make it in the business:

1. Ability and hunger to learn. She calls curiosity to learn “extremely important” and encourages tech innovators to work together with “people from different domains.”

Read more here.

 

Is a coding boot camp right for you?

Michelle V. Rafter | ComputerWorld | 25 May 2017

“Andrew Sorensen got a degree in classical music in 2013, but he didn’t want to perform or teach. After finishing college, he tried his hand at sales and worked for a while at a Bellevue, Wash., car dealership, where he sold Audis, many to software engineers.

Today, Sorensen is one of those software engineers, thanks to three intense months at a local coding school, Coding Dojo. The training landed him an entry-level job at Expedia where the 26-year-old makes around $70,000 a year, which is more than he made selling cars. Now he can pay off the $12,500 his mom loaned him to go to the school, and he can start saving so he can move out — and one day buy his own Audi.

“It was definitely one of the best decisions I’ve made,” Sorensen says. “My career is set.”

Nonstop demand for software developers and other IT professionals is leading to boom times for coding schools and boot camps, with career-changers like Sorensen signing up in droves.”

Read more here.

 

Didn’t get hired by Amazon yet? Here are some other options

Debbie Cockrell | The News tribune | 25 May 2017

“Not one of the applicants Amazon snapped up this week?

With all the hoopla about the company’s on-the-spot hiring events, we reached out to WorkSource Tacoma-Pierce, the state Employment Security Department and Goodwill for more hiring events.

Pierce County’s jobless rate compared with neighboring counties reflects recent demand for those Amazon jobs.

Local unemployment for April was 5.3 percent, compared with King County’s 2.8 percent and Thurston County’s 4.8 percent, according to the state’s latest numbers.

If this week’s Amazon push didn’t work out for you, there are other avenues to explore. You can find local hiring events online at WorkSource’s site: bit.ly/2qXMKPG. Just add the ZIP code and radius for searching.”

Read more here.