There are a lot of good reasons to choose one company over another, but a company having a significant decrease in employee count during only 1 of the past 20 years would not be high on my list. In 2013 Google’s employee count decreased by almost the same in percentage in IBM did in the past year. Does that mean everyone should avoid working for Google? In any case, it was an arbitrary example. You can replace IBM with most large tech companies and get the same conclusion.
As I touched on earlier, different companies favor different types of applicants. At some companies, different hiring managers within the same company focus on completely different aspects. For example, I know one guy who is involved in hiring for a Silicon Valley tech company. He mentioned the first thing he does when evaluating resumes is looks for persons who served in the military and moves them to the front of the pack, especially ones in who have served in the marines (he is a former marine). When I was interviewing at another small SV company, one of the persons I interviewed with seemed be bragging about the huge portion of employees at that company that shared the same first name as the company’s founder. It was far too high to be random. They appeared to give strong preference to candidates with a particular first name.
While there are companies that focus candidates being from an “elite school” and various other criteria, in the survey of hundreds of employers I posted earlier, college reputation was ranked as the least important aspect of evaluating resumes of new grads, and relevant work experience related activities was rated as most important. This of course was not a uniform opinion across all employers. For employers that aren’t especially concerned with hiring from “elite colleges”, it makes sense to emphasize closer colleges for a variety of reasons including reduced hiring costs, candidates being more likely to favor living in the area, employers being especially familiar with the college, etc.
@Data10, note, however, that people say and what they do may be quite different.
I saw an interesting piece on tv today about a program to teach coding to a small group of inmates at San Quentin Silicon Valley employers are involved. The inmates are not getting college degrees, learning all the theory, etc. but they are being taught basic skills. There are articles online about it.
@Data10 - only 1 in the last 20 years? IBM has been many more than one and they refuse to state their US based employee head count over the years. And there is a reason.
IBM’s SEC filing employee count by year is graphed at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-24/ibm-employee-count-falls-for-second-year-in-transition-to-cloud . Only 1 year since 1994 has had a notable decrease in employee count. The article also discusses the reasons.
It seems as though the answer to the question of where to apply is the same as for any major- the best fit school.
Do not overthink this. Look at all sorts of factors, not just the one department. There are many good schools out there as posters have indicated so concentrate on the whole package.
From what I’ve read on indeed.com, at the lower tier colleges, the candidate needs higher GPA. For example, if the candidate is from SJSU, he/she needs higher than 3.6 to be hired at some desirable companies. Even one candidate claimed he went to a USC but with low GPA like 3.1, he was interviewed and came very close to the offer but in the end, the job was not offered because of his low GPA. I don’t know how much truth there is to believe, but that’s what I’ve read on a small samples of people on some job boards.
@Data10 - You have got to be very careful not to buy the IBM spin in that article. They only report headcount globally, not by country. The reduction in US Jobs at IBM in many years has been staggering as the work has been sent offshore. Only in the past couple of years have the cuts been hitting hard enough offshore to show a decline in total headcount. The smoke and mirrors is catching up.
This is an excellent example of why CS Majors also need to add business/project management/soft skills to their education. Anybody can code anywhere, but with the additional skills, the jobs are less likely to be offshored.