Career Search Log

11 September 2006

The past week has been very dramatic. I have received and "holding on" 4 job offers. One from Altera as a Product Engineer, one from Xilinx as a Product Verification Engineer, another one from Xilinx as a Test Software Engineer, and the last one from intel as a Post-Silicon Verification Engineer. The benefits are listed below.

  I was hired by intel on the phone on August 17th. Then the Human Resource (HR) people couldn't get the background verification done because they need to ask the lawyers whether they can hire an international student as a bachelor. According to them, I am the first international student who got hired as a bachelor in the intel history. So this and that, finally, I was offered the intel position on August 30th and I accepted the offer right there on the phone. Then there were background checks and drug test, so my first day of work at intel was Sep 5th (tuesday, because monday was the labor day).

  On Sep 5th, I attended the 7:30am New Employee Oritentain (NEO) by riding my $20 garage sale bike and taking bus 20 and bus 60 to the intel campus. The travelling time is an hour 15 minute one-way, so I got to go out every morning before 6am. After 5 hours of orientation on Sep 5th, I had a 30 minute lunch, and at 1pm, the CEO of intel announced the biggest layoff over the past 21 years of intel history. 10.5k people were laid off. As I continue to work at intel, Sep 7th to be exact, our group manager held a group meeting to address about the layoff. Seems like the layoff process is going to last for 3 months all the way until December. Some groups have started letting people go, and others are going to do so. Everyone in our group is wondering if they will get an email or voicemail in the morning about losing their job.

  Also on Sep 7th, Thursday, I failed to show my Employment Authorization Document (EAD), so I couldn't complete my I-9 form (work authorization form). Therefore, I was suspended from working at intel until I get the valid EAD forms. My Optional Practical Training (OPT) will start on 9/15. Once I get my EAD form, I can resume working at intel immediately.

  Ironically, as I called US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) today, I was told my EAD was approved on Sep 7th, the same day I was suspended. The EAD form is somewhere along the way to my friend Jaelen's house.

  Yesterday, I have declined the offer from Altera and the offer from Xilinx. Tomorrow, I will go for an on-site visit at Xilinx. If I really like the job at Xilinx, I would quit my position at intel. If that is the case, I would probably turn in my intel laptop and badge this friday (Sep 15th), and go to the Xilinx orientation on Sep 18th.

Here is an email I sent to my friends regarding my job offers.

Hi Friends,

I love this hiring manager, and I love the Xilix Group. Plus, Xilinx give me more money than intel. Therefore, I have decided to quit my job at intel after couple days of work there. The reason for quitting intel is, intel doesn't sponsor my H-1B visa, has lower pay, has no stock option, the intel job doesn't offer me opportunities to talk to customers, has no opportunity for grad studies, and no sponsorship to take the C# class at De Anza college.

Right now, I plan to turn in my intel badge this Friday, and end my days as an intel employee.

Bill Hung

This email was a response of the following email.

Hi Bill,

Tomorrow 1 pm is fine.

I spoke to Himanshu who had recently completed a graduate degree at Stanford. He had mentioned that a part-time program is possible at Stanford – by a combination of SITN and on-site courses. So you could speak to him as well when you are here.

Good to note that you are seriously considering the position in our group. I am confident that Xilinx will provide you with a great environment for professional and personal development.

Sincerely,

Chari

26 August 2006

Today is Saturday. Many things happened last week. I got 2 job offers last Wednesday, one from Intel and one from Altera. The intel position is an internship for 6 months, 60k per year, hourly-basis, does not sponsor H-1B visa, a graduate job position but accepted bachelor graduate like me. According to the recruiter, Intel never ever hire any international students with only a bachelor degree. I guess I am the first exception since the history of Intel.

Also on last Wednesday, I found a master bedroom near the place I lived before on Homestead and Hollenbeck. The landlords are a couple with a 9 yrs old kid. The landlady was teaching chinese somewhere. And I will have a new Japanese house-mate who has graduated from Waseda Univeristy, Japan. This will be a great chance for me to continue practicing my Japanese.

So, the interview process was this. Last Tuesday and Thursday, interviewed by 2 groups from Altera, product engineer, tested by 5 people for 5 hours; design engineer, tested by 7 people for 5 and a half hour. Wednesday, looked for houses and received the offers from Intel and Altera, Friday did the drug test in Oakland for Intel. Saturday, which is today, interviewed for Supermicro for the second time. Next Monday 9am will interview for Xilinx Software Engineer; Tuesday will interview for Xilinx for Verification Engineer. Then I will stop interviewing.

For Supermicro, they have 48 cars in front of the building that I am being interviewed for. Last Saturday interviewed  by two members of the hardware design team. Today, interviewed by the head of the hardware design team. Next week, going to meet the CEO, and probably will talk about the offer from Supermicro.

17 August 2006

Got passed the Intel phone interview at 9am, the interview was supposed to be yesterday 3pm. But that guy skipped my interview until today. Got passed another interview at 2:30pm from Xilinx today.

Saturday, interview with Micron, next Tuesday and Thursday interviews with Altera. Now, applying for eBay batch operations engineer.

Tomorrow is the Final Exam of my last class at Berkeley. Then I would officially be a Berkeley graduate.

14 August 2006

Applied to National Semiconductor again.

13 August 2006

 Got two interviews after the coming week. Because I have final next Friday and multiple gradings to do. Today is Sunday, and Final is on 8/18 (Friday).

Applied for six positions at Xilinx through Dennis today.

Applied for Applied Material Through their website.

Followed up on Spansion and Intersil today.

8 August 2006

 Yesterday, I got a call from the Vice President of Analog Bit. That interview was good at the beginning, he asked me tech questions right on, at 7pm. At the end of that phone call, I misunderstood the problem, and answered some non-sense. That bad answer cost me a job.

Today, I just finish the phone interview from a vietnamese guy named Andy Nguyen. He worked for Altera for 15 years, and he was working at Xilinx at the beginning. This guy didn't challenge me, he just asked me general knowledge questions. Well, I was good at bullshitting, and he bought my bullshits, so he decided to arrange me for an on-site interview.

Tomorrow, another product engineer from Altera will call at 3pm.

7 August 2006

Got a phone call from Altera for an interview 2 days later on Wednesday for a product engineer position. The thing is, I never applied for this position and according to my record, I didn't apply to Altera. The interview is probably from one of my old interviewers from Altera, probalbly Stephanie Tran because she responsed to my email today.

Emailed all my friend who got a job, and followed up for the email I sent earlier for my favorite interviewers.

Suddenly got a call at 7pm from Analog Bits. Asking me about 2-input NAND gate and 2-input NOR gate. Ask about the design implementation.

6 August 2006

Continue the second round of job search after two weeks of intermittence. Everyone started their conversation by asking whether I have a job, and I mean everyone, sucks. Today, email all the contacts I have that are associated to companies I want to work for.

25 July 2006

Started the second round of job applications. Emailed all the companies who interviewed me before.

7 July 2006

On-Site interview with Marvell today, got an email for on-site interview last week. Logic Design Engineer position.

28 June 2006

Interviewed by Tim Michalka from Qualcomm on June 26th. They are looking for someone who knows VNA and TDR. On top of this, the F-1 visa thing got in the way. The interviewer thought I can only start working on Oct 1st even I get a H-1B visa.

Anyway, got another interview from Marvell today. Scheduled the interview at next Friday, July 7th.

25 June 2006

Finished applying for applied material, and sent off the info to Jansen. Sent a resume to Chris's friend at Intersil.

24 June 2006

Saw my friend Jansen at kands.com, the company that manages my apartment. Talked to Jansen, who is working for applied material. My BA 103 TA is working for applied materials as well, and I applied for jobs at applied materials.

Jensen agreed to pass my resume to the recruiting department, so today I spent lots of time cooking up applied material related job applications.

21 June 2006

Got an email yesterday, got an interview with qualcomm (the one applied on June 14th, listed as #6 in the job search, bottom one).

Became a reader for EE 40 on the June 20th for UC Berkeley.

17 June 2006

Applied for Broadcom, Maxim, AVX corporation. In the evening, applied for MIPS technologies.

15 June 2006

Yesterday applied for qualcomm, today applied for Marvell through msn careerbuilder.

15 June 2006

Submitted Resume to Motorola, marvell, and national semiconductor.

13 June 2006

1. Yesterday emailed the resume and cover letter to Xilinx for a System Design Engineer position. Today, send the text formatted resume to the xillinx human resources website.

2. Submitted resume to Xilinx's biggest competitor Altera.

A BIG TIME GAP HERE

10 Jan 2006

Suddenly got a call on Jan 3rd at 9am in the middle of winter break. It was a hiring manager from Marvell. Noticing me of an on-site interview on Jan 10th for a position of "Wireless SOC System Hardware Engineer". I didn't prepare the most updated resume because I wasn't planning to apply for jobs quite yet. Interview starting from 12:45pm, 5 hours, with a lunch in Santa Clara. 3 hrs of public transport.

19 Oct 2005

Just finished a phone interview by a wireless embedded LAN group person from Marvell who specialized in marketing. The interviewer asked questions about Flip-Flops, and setup-time, hold-time. IP and Ethernet. What happen if you sample a 33kHz signal with 44kHz clock? What is the difference between X86 and PowerPC in terms of CPU architecture? What is the difference between IP and Ethernet? Do you know what is characteristic impedance? Do you know things about transmission line? Do you know what is QPSK (Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying)?

18 Oct 2005

My friend Peter got a phone interview with nVidia, and was asked about CPU pipelining (forwarding) questions, NAND or NOR is faster? how to u build a NOR gate? and 150 project stuff. If you have to violate setup time or hold time, which one do you violate?

17 Oct 2005

Being interviewed by Link-A-Media for 2 hours today. Link-A-Media is a start-up and is considering me for 3 positions. Today was crazy, 150 project and design review due tomorrow and they were not done. 1 Midterm, 3 classes and I skipped one class, 1 lab and I skipped that lab too, and a 3 page term paper are all due today. The midterm I had today was the only midterm for the semester, so the midterm is very important and I wasn't as prepared as I could have been.

Link-A-Media only interviewed 10 people and 2 of them are me, and I met Gary in career center. The first hour I was asked to discussed my 150 FPGA project with a digital design engineer graduated from Berkeley years ago. Lastly I was asked to construct the logic for a full adder. I didn't do so well for that one. Next hour was interviewing for the firmware and application engineer positions. I was asked the things I interfaced with like Ethernet and N64, what is the boot-up sequence, what is the processor design, and whether I have taken the Operation System class. In the last ten minutes, I was asked a simple Fibonacci number programming question. I had to write  recursive and non-recursive code for the Fibonacci number. It told me 20 minutes, and I should have done better than that. The person interviewing me had profound knowledge of the chips I used and different microcontrollers. I have a feeling that Link-A-Media has great engineers, but the company doesn't have a real product out in the market yet.

13 Oct 2005

Got a call at 9:25am today from Broadcom. The guy asked me what analog classes I have taken, what grades I got from my analog classes, what analog classes I will taken before graduation, what are the names of the books I had for my analog classes. Now I remember I had the Hambley book for EE 40, the Howe book for EE 105, the Gray and Meyer book for 140, and I bought Sedra and Smith book myself.

I think I need to prepare more info for analog positions. It seems like analog positions are more hungry for new grads than others.

2 Interview for Link-A-Media next week. And I missed a call from a hiring manager at Marvell, my resume was forwarded by Dr. Chen. Looks like I will get a second round for Marvell.

Just got a call from Link-A-Media at 10am. They signed me up for 3 positions and wanted me to go for 2 interviews, which will lasted for 2 hours next Monday. I will have to skip my CS 150 class for that day.

10 Oct 2005

Interviewed by Analog Device on Oct 7th, total of 30 people being interviewed by 2 interviewers. I got a guy from the power management division. A simple Op-Amp, 1 MOSFET, 1 resister question was asked, and I could answer so few of the questions. I think I did bad on this interview. Out of the 30 people, 8 of those were in the Analog device info session on Oct 6th evening. My first OCR at Career Center Room 344. This is a pre-screen interview, which is the interview to get the interview.

I called Across USA on 19 Sep 2005. They want someone right away, and wanted me to contact them again after graduation.

Marvell interview tomorrow at Cory 563.

3 Oct 2005

Phone interviewed by nVidia on Sep 29th. Rejected by nVidia today. =(

18 Sep 2005

Today is Sunday, and no calls from acrossusa, I will call them tomorrow. For this week, due to the career fair, I sent out 7 thank you letters with cover letters and resumes to Marvell and Cypress. Both are for full time positions.

16 Sep 2005

Received a voice message from Cypress for a field application engineer job I applied yesterday. I will call that guy this afternoon.
Today, I called the manager Mike twice, but Mike was not in the office both times. There was an operator who asked if I would be home during the weekend, I said yes.

15 Sep 2005

Uploaded OCR resume and applied for one CalJob position as Application Field Engineer at Cypress for acrossusa. That Cypress position only need a resume.

14 Sep 2005

Set up web pages for recruiters to browse my resume, cover letter, and course projects.  Marvell and Cypress got a special page.