<p>Two of the companies that he had phone interviews with last week have schedule three interviews with him for this week (one of the companies has multiple positions in multiple facilities). The other two companies that he had phone interviews with last week are working on scheduling in-person interviews. He’s expecting one for this week and one for next week.</p>
<p>Another position showed up in his university email for a summer internship project forwarded from one of his favorite professors so companies are still looking for people; even at this late date. Son said that he’s interested in applying but I suggested that he slow down a bit as he already has quite a number of things in play.</p>
<p>One of the problems is that the interview tomorrow is for a summer internship while the interviews on Friday are for permanent jobs. The latter company sent him a benefits book which is hopefully a good sign.</p>
<p>Well, still premature. He still has to receive an offer. Hopefully several.</p>
<p>He thought that he had a job last fall - they asked him when he could start, what he wanted for salary and gave him their benefits book - then he never heard back from them. That was why he stopped looking - he thought that he had the job given the signals that they sent. The in-person interview went overtime by an hour too. So this time we take nothing for granted. This happens where I work all the time. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to hire someone and windows of hiring can open and close and sometimes delayed paperwork or someone being out for a while results in a lot of inconvenience for candidates.</p>
<p>FWIW, S did not have any security clearance when he did a summer internship with NASA, but of course it can vary by company & even what the person will be doing/have access to at job. Jobs in DC vary all over the place–public vs government, training/experience, major, what the person was hired to do, etc. You may want to start a new thread with more info rather than hijacking this thread.</p>
<p>Good luck to all jobseekers. There ARE jobs out there; persist and something will turn up!</p>
<p>I’ve been watching this thread with interest. As of last Friday, my S is a senior. Gulp. I know he will make his way in the world, but I don’t have any illusions that a poli sci major will have job offers lined up before he graduates. Grad school might be in his future–maybe even right away, but I hope after a year or so. I’ve worked in nonprofits for my whole career, so I know that he does have marketable skills and interests if he wants to work for an NGO. I also know that the job market is scary. Good luck to all of your graduates!</p>
<p>I had a look at the division of the company that our son is interviewing at in five hours. The company is very well known in a competitive business but what I found is that the particular division is staffing up very quickly and their product is selling well. They are adding functionality and support and marketing. It appears to me that they are hiring about 250 people - technical, writing, marketing, support, consulting, etc. It’s like staffing up an entire business unit. He went through their white papers and promotional literature last night and related the readings to his operating systems classes. Unfortunately this position is only for a three-month summer internship but the technical area looks very promising.</p>
<p>This is a high-tech company where the working environment tends to be much more flexible than in the other companies that he will be interviewing for. This means that you can work at 4:00 AM if you feel like it (I couldn’t sleep).</p>
<p>She left Cornell University with a degree in architecture and six summers of internships at top firms in New York, Milan and London.</p>
<p>“I thought getting a job would be a snap,” she said.</p>
<p>But after graduating in December 2008, just as job losses in the economy were reaching a high point, she was confronted with a very cold reception into the labor force.</p>
<p>She followed her boyfriend to China for a year, and found architecture work plentiful in the building boom there. But when she returned home at the end of 2009, not much had improved, and no one was hiring. </p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Brittney Winters, 23, graduated from Princeton University in 2009 and can’t find a teaching job, despite graduating from a top school.</p>
<p>“When you go to an Ivy League school, you figure this degree will mean something – that it will guarantee you a job,” she said.</p>
<p>Winters has taken on other “survival” jobs to get by, including working at a video rental store.</p>
<p>[In a news release that went out late Monday, HP did not provide a reason for issuing its earnings report a day ahead of schedule. But the announcement came just hours after reports surfaced that Apotheker warned his executives in a May 4 memo that HP was bracing for “another tough quarter” in the May-July period, and that management needed to “watch every penny and minimize all hiring.”]</p>
<p>Hewlett-Packard (bought out Compaq which bought out Digital Equipment Corp) used to have over 6,000 employees in the Merrimack Valley region of Southern New Hampshire. They sold off the Merrimack facilities to Fidelity Investments (a very good corporate citizen BTW) and they’ve sold-off their Spit Brook Road facilities which now house a bunch of small companies. HP moved their employees to Andover and Marlboro in Massachusetts to consolidate facilities.</p>
<p>Apotheker is a “nice-guy” CEO. The previous CEOs, Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd, were penny pinchers working on the cost and results side. HP was quite successful under Mark Hurd but he was forced out recently for reasons that aren’t entirely clear - at least to me. I am hoping that these problems are specific to HP. There are other tech companies out there that are taking HP’s business (my company is one of them) and they clearly aren’t reacting quickly enough.</p>
<p>Needless to say, I have not found any job postings for HP. I have found job postings, however, for their competitors.</p>
<p>The interview today went so-so (this is as it was reported to me). The first part went well, he was able to answer the quiz questions. The second round didn’t go well - he was able to answer questions and then the interviewer added conditions so that his solutions stopped working. I asked the nature of the questions and he told me what they were about.</p>
<p>The questions involved an area of computer science that isn’t particularly popular in undergraduate programs (it’s not a hot area). I took a course in this area back in the dark ages. It’s something that you could do a concentration in or something that you would more typically take in a graduate CS program. The problem with undergraduate CS is that you don’t have enough time to hit the important bases in CS - you usually go to grad school to do that.</p>
<p>They asked him about his previous internships and he went over that. His research into their products last night was useful as he knew their product lines - he had a chance to demonstrate that knowledge. He also took a look at the interview schedule (it was conspicuously posted) and he knows how many he will be competing with along with a rough idea as to when they will make a decision.</p>
<p>If another candidate has taken the specialty are course, then that candidate will most likely get the job. Our son is in the running only because he has a very good general CS background. My personal opinion is that a summer internship at this company would be worth at least as much as a permanent full-time position at another company that isn’t doing cutting-edge and challenging stuff. So we’ll see how he does, most likely on Friday.</p>
<p>Another of the companies got back to him with an in-person interview schedule for next week. It’s the least desirable job (IMO) though it pays quite well.</p>
<p>BCEagle91: Will you be able to elaborate what area were you talking about? Generally any job requiring specialized post graduate knowledge will emphasis for a Phd in that area.</p>
<p>Not in computer science. There are a bunch of project sequences at my son’s school in areas such as communications, compilers, GUIs, graphics, databases, parallel computing, data mining, artificial intelligence, robotics, software engineering, network security, etc. These are undergraduate courses and are basically the area of specialization and they are usually two-semester sequences. Students can also use their electives for these areas. Graduate courses open up additional areas like computational [fill in the blank], visual analytics, etc. There are far fewer jobs in compilers than there used to be with the standardization of hardware architectures and operating systems. In the old days, every company had their own architectures and operating systems so each company would need compiler teams. A lot of the foundational preparation work for compilers is math theory so this course is usually taken as a senior or graduate course. I think that CS grads should build a compiler but that’s my own bias - clearly the ability to build a compiler isn’t a skill that is in big demand in the marketplace.</p>
<p>BTW, the unemployment rate for NH came out in the paper today. For April, it was 4.9%. I guess that explains why traffic around the malls has been so heavy.</p>
<p>^^^: I think Compiler construction is now part of “Automata Theory” type of “Theoretical Computer Science” courses. DD wanted to take compiler construction as an elective during the senior year of her high school but with the said expert teacher of CS leaving the elective was never offered.
A good course anyway from learning perspective itself.</p>
<p>Automata Theory is taught in Foundations; usually with Sipser. Sometimes it’s called Theory of Computation. We used Papadimitriou and Lechner in grad school.</p>
<p>There are various aspects of Automata Theory that can be taught to pre-kindergarten children.</p>
<p>Compiler construction over a period of a year would make things a lot easier than the typical college approach of doing it one semester. I suppose that you could get rid of the architecture requirement by just generating intermediate code (as is done at Vassar). In my son’s course, you had to have a fairly good understanding of the x86 architecture and all of the little gotchas. I think that x86 is up to 1,000 instructions now.</p>
<p>Any update, bceagle? What kind of engineer is he? Do you mind sharing his GPA? Do you have a sense of what the threshold cutoff (minimum) GPA is that employers will look at for engineers?</p>
<p>He is waiting to hear back from the company that he interviewed at yesterday. They are interviewing four other candidates and they will be finished on Thursday. I suspect that they will decide on Thursday, offer the job to the first candidate and ask for an answer by Friday. If that candidate declines, then they will ask the second, and so on. So I expect him to hear by Friday. If someone else has taken the specialty course, then they would have the inside track. His GPA is nicely above 3.9. In general, the cutoff is 3.0.</p>
<p>He has an interview with a company on Friday. He had two interviews but one of the hiring manager had something come up. The recruiter told him that they would schedule another interview if needed (I’m assuming that means if he doesn’t get the job that he is interviewing for on Friday). I’m not completely sure what the jobs are in that company as I couldn’t figure them out from son’s description and the company is pretty secretive. He has another interview next Wednesday with the Japanese conglomerate and we’re still waiting on the coop job which is excellent work. The recruiter said that she’d contact the hiring manager and get back to our son.</p>