The Silicon Milkroundabout: a Bootcamp Grad’s Perspective

4 min readDec 3, 2019

After checking in, we were greeted by an hour long talk hosted by several of the attending company’s reps. However, many people used this time to research how they’d navigate the fair (with 200 plus companies attending) for the next 5 or so hours.

Silicon Milk What?

If you haven’t heard of the mouthful that is the ‘Silicon Milkroundabout’ (the peculiar name is a combo of two precursor recruitment events ‘the Silicon Roundabout’ and ‘the Milk Round’; hereafter I’ll write SMR): it’s a tech recruitment event held in London and Edinburgh. What follows is some insight I picked up my first time around.

SMR’s first little novelty (novel for me anyway), is that they give you a large lanyard to wear around your neck, advertising both your name and your tech skills (the latter communicated by some lovely clear and colourful stickers they provide). Whilst exploring the fair, the lanyard proved to be a great timesaver, as the more proactive recruiters could see at a glance if your skills fit, and so might actually approach you! So, I’d recommend that fewer stickers is best: just include the tech that you’re actually hoping to work with (instead of covering your lanyard with everything you’ve ever touched!):

Getting Invited & Recommended Preparation

To get invited to the SMR you have to apply, and unfortunately you can fail to get an invite! Here’s a link to some info on SMR’s application process. Obviously I succeeded in applying, but I do know people in my bootcamp who applied and failed (and they have more or less the same experience as me), so do put some effort into crafting your image as a quality employee.

I would highly recommend that you use SMR’s website to research the attending companies in advance. Being able to filter companies by Skills and Job Title will save you a lot of time on the day! (There were over 200 companies attending this time around). You are provided with an excellent booklet and map on the day. But, as we should know well, searching through a book feels like riding a horse to Timbuktu when compared to the wonders of a web app! And please don’t presume that you’ll have good web access on the day; network issues are nearly always compounded by the heavy traffic at such events.

Another key piece of preparation I would’ve struggled without is knowing exactly what I wanted to communicate to each company rep when I approached them. Given that I’d be repeating myself a lot, I tried to cut my pitch down to a few sentences that would prevent any time wasting:

Approaching Companies — the “Elevator Pitch”

It’s a busy place, and getting distracted is easy! Use the supplied map to cut through what’s not for you.

I think I approached over 40 companies in the 5 hours I was walking around SMR (it ran 12:00 till 18:00, not including breaks!). That’s 7.5 minutes a company… let’s say it takes 2.5 minutes to travel between stands, that leaves 5 minutes to introduce yourself, hear their pitch, ask questions and exchange contact into. That’s not much! So getting the introduction down to an art is a must.

I should highlight here that the majority of companies at SMR were not looking for ‘Junior’ developers; at least a few years experience was on most of their wish lists (another reason to do your research beforehand!). However, there were companies there that I loved the sound of who weren’t soliciting juniors, and “don’t ask, don’t get” as they say! So, I started my elevator pitch by making it clear I was junior (“I’m a bootcamp grad and this will be my first Role”), and asking if they were currently interested in hiring juniors. This may sound like a bit of a negative introduction! But it stopped people from getting the wrong impression and wasting time thinking I had years of experience. For those that were still interested, I followed up with “…although it will be my first role, I do have experience in building 6 web apps (5 full stack), each spanning thousands of lines of code, in both groups and solo projects”.