CS and the City

The interview and offer round for my sixth and final co-op term has come and gone.

Summary: I wish all co-op terms were 6th round co-op terms.

I knew going in that this round would be different. With a year and a half of experience, and two “Outstanding” ratings from my last two terms at Business Objects, I was pretty confident I’d have some impressive offers. I decided to limit the number of applications to avoid being overwhelmed with interviews. This was a very wise move.

I applied to 13 companies (15 positions in total)

Amazon (Seattle)
Apple x2 (California and Vancouver)
Christie Digital Systems (Kitchener)
Google x2 (Both in California)
IBM (Germany)
Infosys Technologies (India)
Kaleidescape (Waterloo)
Microsoft (Seattle)
Nortel Networks (Ottawa)
Oculus (Toronto)
Pacific & Western Bank Of Canada (Saskatoon)
Pandora (California)
Sydus (Singapore)

Note: Pandora was not through JobMine (University of Waterloo’s co-op system)

Pandora didn’t actually have a co-op program when I approached them and I couldn’t get them rolling in time sadly. I didn’t hear back from Apple California, one of the Google positions, Infosys, and Nortel (probably because I got too frustrated with Nortel’s application site and didn’t submit my resume outside of Jobmine).

I had interviews with 10 of the companies. Some of them went better than others. I did better than I had hoped in the technical ones, which is always a nice sign.

Ironically, when it came to offer time, I got an offer from every company I interviewed with except Apple. This is ironic because Apple was by far my first choice and one that I had spent significant amount of time smoozing with.

I also had a few great compliments over the process:

• One of my interviewers said that I had “the most beautiful resume he had ever seen”
• This was the first term that one of my interviewers had offered me the job straight up in the interview
• After an interviewer had quoted their co-op weekly wage during an interview, they emailed me to offer me a substantial increase on that number if I took the position
• A company strategically revoked an offer to me after they explained that “I was a highly desirable candidate,” and that I was “unlikely to accept the position.” Which, although the company was very interesting, was ultimately true.

Each of the companies had a lot offer: Very interesting products and technologies, opportunities for travel, relocation to exotic locales, more than generous compensation, on and on and one.

I’d like to say it was a tough decision, but to be absolutely honest, once I knew what companies were giving me offers, there was only one choice:

Google

Even when people found out I just had an interview with Google, I had people coming up to me and congratulating me. Google is the tech company right now. To be honest, I don’t have any expectation to return after I graduate (though I don’t rule it out). I would really like to work for a smaller company or start-up come graduation time.

For me though, I need to see what all the fuss is about. Not just at Google but Silicon Valley, San Fran, everything. Though these things change quickly in my industry, right now, Google is my Mecca, and I got offered an all expense paid pilgrimage.

Just like to announce that UW has started a team to develop a competitor for the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge (UW DARPA Team Page).

First recruitment meeting will be Thursday, July 13 in RCH 301 at 6 pm.

Larry Smith is one of the best lecturers the University of Waterloo has to offer. The great thing about Larry is that he’s a bit of a geek. Even though he’s teaching economics, he gives the whole thing a CS-Engineering treatment that tends to result in a few increadible gems of insight. The following is a few I’ve caught over the past few weeks.

“The technology sector is driven by the market place, not by cool technology.”

Inventory control isn’t sexy, but it built Walmart

[on the creation and eventual adoption of computerized inventory control in the 70s]

The technology market place is inherantly chunky and if it continues to develop products that require massive investments, it will be more and more volitle.

[on investment cycles and capacity planning]

Look at VoIP. Vonage shares are dropping like a stone and Skype is giving it away. Too many railways, not enough demand.

[on market saturation]

“Companies institutionalize ambition.” Waterloo co-ops are some of the cockiest kids out there and cocky is synonymous with self-confidence.

[on the importance of "animal spirits" in investment]

Two weeks ago, my friend Jarrett and I participated in the "A.I. Battle" put on by the University of Waterloo's IEEE group and sponsored by Microsoft. Most of the programming competitions hosted by the university are usually algorithm-based and solo, so the change of pace of the 'battle' was very well received and ended up attracting a ton of participants.

The competition consisted of a set of standardized game logic and a basic player class that each team had to extend in order to build their player. The goal of the game was to create a contiguous path from on side of the board to the other (top to bottom or left to right), while the other player tried to do the same. A pattern of squares on the board is already allocated to each player such that it advantageous for the first player to attempt to create the path vertically and the second player to attempt to create the path horizontally [IEEE contest page].

Our bot "Zaphod" was basic in the sense that it did not try to pick blocks with the intent to block the other player. Instead, we worked on creating a dynamic path-finding algorithm that would judge the advantage of picking each square that it possibly could and then choose the one that gets us closer to our goal. This made it relatively resiliant to attacks as it tended to walk around most blocking attempts [more about our development process].

Yesterday, the IEEE group announced the winners and our bot Zaphod placed fifth out of 44 entires. Only 9 points behind the winning bot. That makes Jarrett and I the proud recipients of one of the five prize packages (though we just get which ever package is left, ebay here I come) and our names forwarded off to the Microsoft recruiter for possible co-op terms. Hopefully they won't be too turned off by our poorly documented code. A big thanks to the guys in the IEEE group for putting on the competition, I'd really like to see this become a common thing.

I have a supervisor from a previous co-op emailing me to let me know that he is now working for a startup and that they are interested in getting me to help do some development part time, with the option of a full-time position in an upcoming workterm.

At the very least, the offer is quite the compliment. Though I have been working with Java since first year in Waterloo, this particular job was my very first workterm developing 'professionally' with Java. I felt confident that I was able to make the leap from academic to real-world during the workterm, but I'm glad to hear that my employer felt the same way. In fact, he was impressed enough to do a bit of a sell towards the end of the email. The more I look over his 'Why?'s, however, the interested I become.

• Money – It's nice, but I'm increasingly finding that my time is much more valuable. Plus, it's a startup, the amount and frequency could be spotty.
• Resume Fodder – Yes, another development position on the ol' resume is good, but how does the addition of this position to my resume make me look to an employer. More may not necessarily be better in the case. If I took the position, I would be doing part-time development in my free time from my full-time job. A prospective employer may get the feeling that I don't actually commit myself to my job if I'm also working for some other company in the evenings.
• Fancy Job Title – If I accept a fulltime position for an upcoming workterm (which would be September to December 2005 at the earliest) in addition to my role as a developer, I would also be put in charge of any co-op initiative, a relatively ceramonial positon. A large number of co-op employers take advantage of current co-ops to hire the next term's group.

I've been saying that I am really interested in working for a startup, but I think my expectations may not actually be representative of what's out there. Then again, it may be that it's the ideas that startups pursue that interest me and I don't find the idea of this specific startup that magnetizing. Are co-ops in a position to negotiate terms of employment with startups?