The company I work for tends to hire people right after college; this comes with varying definitions of college.  There are a number of people, such as myself, who have entered after undergraduate, and there are also people who have completed graduate degrees and are a few years older.  Less common are the people older than that, who have worked for a while.

However, I’ve found a surprisingly large number of people, roughly my age, who are at significantly different stages of their lives.  There are people my age who are engaged, married, or even have kids of their own.

It introduces a little awkwardness in conversations sometimes.  The girls talk about getting pregnant and maternity leave, and the guys talk about their fiancees or kids.  Sometimes I’m not entirely sure what to say.

“Er… I’m single, live by myself, and still like to drink and be useless on the weekends like a college kid?”

I know that in reality, there’s no rush.  Everyone lives their lives differently.

However, it puts things into a completely different perspective sometimes.  I can’t always decide if these people have moved into other life stages early, or if I am running late.  It’s introduced a bit of artificial pressure sometimes; that I need to hurry up and move on with my life since everyone else is already there.

College students tend to postpone making advancements in their life like that, with school as the excuse.  But as a working guy, I don’t have that excuse.  And sometimes I just can’t avoid that nagging feeling in the back of my head.  How many more years am I going to spend getting drunk on the weekend by myself?

It’s kind of strange, because I’ve found it’s kind of changed the way I deal with people sometimes.  Being social is still something that takes some effort for me.  So sometimes in the cafeteria at lunch, sitting with a group of people I don’t know, I’ll just eat quietly and leave.  Other times, I’ll be the most talkative guy at the table, cracking jokes, which is something that has never really happened before.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that I don’t really have any friends in this part of the country, and I’m trying to make some.  But I think part of it is also this sort of artificial urgency that hangs around sometimes, that as a person who’s graduated and working, I need to find a girlfriend and move on to a different stage of my life.

I always remind myself that there’s no rush and it’s a non-issue, but I have to do so every time the topic of a fiancee, or marriage, or someone’s kid comes up.  But the fact that I have to do so is kind of frustrating sometimes.

I’m not going to say what company it is.  When I went to the interview I signed a non-disclosure agreement (Fucking NDA’s).  I don’t have a copy of the NDA anymore, and it’s possible that I’m not allowed to disclose things such as business practices of the company – leaving myself open to litigation if I name the company here.  Let’s just say that it’s a pre-IPO internet startup based in San Diego, California, that sometimes spams people and harvests personal information.

After beginning the interview process with this company and going through the phone interview and programming tests, I was asked to take a trip out to interview in person.

And pay for it with my own money.

At the time I was living in New Jersey.  They wanted me to fly out to San Diego, in less than a week, and pay for the plane ticket and hotel room myself for a couple nights.  A cross country flight like that by itself is not cheap, not to mention that prices rise drastically within a week of the flight.  The ticket would have cost me $700, and the hotel room would have been about $120 a night.  That’s not something I could afford at the time.  Not only that, but I’ve never seen any company lowball its interviewees like that.  You’re essentially gambling – you drop $940, and you have the chance to be rewarded with a job, and you have the chance to just lose the money by not getting hired.  So I declined, saying I didn’t have that kind of money.

Later, I got correspondence back saying that they would reimburse the ticket and hotel for me, up to $500 for the plane ticket and $100 a night for the hotel.  Supposedly they talked to the VP of Engineering and got special permission for me (which I later found out was a lie).  I explained that plane tickets less than a week in advance are never going to be that low.  Eventually, we managed to delay the trip a week and bring the tickets down to $500.  I was told that I would get reimbursed in Q3 2008 (July-Sept), when their recruiting budget cycled (which is also probably bullshit, as companies don’t really have “recruiting budgets,” they have a pool of money).

So I flew out for a two day interview.  The interview wasn’t an interview at all – they just put you in front of their codebase that you had never seen before, gave you a list of bugs to fix, and told you to fix as many as you could.  They told us the record up to this point was 14 bugs fixed.

It was a Windows shop that ran IIS and used .NET/C#.  I have never used C#/.NET, nor have I ever operated IIS, or used Windows in many years.  And I fixed 15 bugs.  So of course I got offered the job, because apparently I’m really awesome.

In the end, I declined.  I didn’t foresee their product being useful or taking off the way they wanted it to.  I didn’t like the company culture, the workplace was crappy, and the salary I was offered was really lowball, especially considering that it was in San Diego, one of the most expensive cities in the country.  Of course they kept trying, even going so far as to say that if I took that job I was absolutely guaranteed to become a millionaire.  Are you fucking serious?  What kind of idiot do you take me for?  There’s no way that is guaranteed – if it was, then why wasn’t I offered a salary of a million dollars?

September rolls around, and I get a letter from this company.  ’Oh good,‘ I think, ‘my check is here.‘

I was wrong, and I got screwed.  What I got in the mail was an IOU – saying that they owe me $700 and that they’ll pay it back in a year.

FUCK YOU GUYS

This is not what we agreed upon.  I have it in writing that I would be paid back in Q3 2008.  You’re supposed to get the consent of both parties before just issuing an IOU like that.  Not only that, but I have no idea if these fuckers are going to, in a year, just give me another IOU.

Suing them would cost way more than the $700 I’d get back, so it’s not worth it, and I don’t really have any other options.  They’re hoping that I forget about it in a year.  I, however, absolutely despise being treated like an idiot and fucking tricked like that, so they are going to be hearing from me if I don’t get my money.

I’m sorry I can’t give a more solid warning, but I don’t want to get sued.  If you are planning to interview with a startup in San Diego and you’re worried, you can contact me privately by email or other means and I can help you figure out if we’re talking about the same company.  I just don’t want to leave names on this website – internet startups have to scour the internet for mentions of their company name to determine their company’s reputation, and it could be traced back to me.

P.S. – any bored lawyers out there willing to help me out by reading the legalese on this IOU and telling me what I can do to enforce repayment of this within 1 year (as opposed to indefinitely being owed money by this company), contact me.

Update 9/30/2009: No, I never got my money.  Trying to decide if this is worth pursuing.

After finally hearing that my diploma would be sent out, I thought my problems with GW were over.  I thought I could completely forget about all the crap I went through, now that I had my diploma coming.

However today, two days before I’m scheduled to move to a different state, what I got from GW was a big shipment of fail.

I opened up my package to find a nice diploma in a hardcover folder branded with the GW logo.  The diploma had my name, spelled correctly, which was a good start.  It also had my major, Computer Science, which was also a good sign.

The degree was a Master of Science.  I have a Bachelor of Science.

As nice as it would be to have a degree upgrade for free like that, I’m pretty sure that they made a mistake.  Again.  Just because I spent an extra year at GWU making up some requirements I needed to fulfill doesn’t mean I was in the Master program.  Unless this is some sort of free gift for paying so much for an extra year at GW, which I’d almost believe.

Who am I kidding?  Nothing at GW comes free.  Except the rape of your bank account.

I guess it was too soon to assume my GW troubles were over.

We were required to fill out pre-graduation clearance forms back in January (essentially, right at the beginning of the last semester we were to take before graduating).  They are forms signed by your advisor, confirming that you have fulfilled all requirements and that you can graduate.  I had mine completed, signed, and turned in, and all paperwork completed.  I asked the person handling my records twice: “Everything is ok now, right?  I’m done?”  And got an affirmative answer.  Meaning I should have graduated.

Fast forward to May.  It was a Sunday, one day before a job interview I had out in Virginia, and two days before I was to move out of my dorm room and back home.  I get an email from my school’s undergraduate department, saying that I don’t have a pre-graduation clearance form turned in.

What the hell?

Knowing that my schedule was busy for the next couple days, and that I would not have the chance to do this later, I stood right up and walked over to the undergraduate admissions office that second.  I mention that I was told I’m missing the pre-graduation clearance form, so they pull my file and open it up.

“I don’t see it here…” they say.

Then they flip a couple sheets through the stack of papers in my file.

“Oh, here it is.”

How do you fuck that up?  Either someone is a fucking retard and sent me a false alarm by mistake, or someone is a fucking retard that didn’t bother to actually look through my file for the form – just saw that it wasn’t on the top and thought I had it missing.  Either way, someone is a fucking retard.

At that point, before I left, I think I must have asked about four times if I was done.  ”So that’s it, right?  Everything’s ok?  I’m all done now?  I can move back home now, right?”  Again, affirmative answers to all questions.

So I move back home in May, thinking everything’s ok.

June 20th.  An email goes out to my advisor from the undergraduate department, cc’d to me, saying that I’m missing two courses (an Applied Science course and a Math course), and one of my Spring courses as an humanities elective needs to be approved.

What the fuck?!

I actually beat my advisor to the punch on this, responding to the email and cc’ing my advisor.  I understand the confusion with the two missing courses; I explain that in the computer science curriculum, the Applied Science course can be replaced with a Statistics course, and the Math course can be replaced with a Philosophy logic course.  This is a common switch but is actually not publicized officially.  I also note that a music course I took was approved as my elective.  My advisor chimes in and agrees that the way I stated it is the way he remembers it.  Having the advisor’s word of approval straight from him, I assume everything is ok now.

Four days later, I get another email.  This time addressed to me, cc’d to my advisor.  It says once again that I’m missing an Applied Science and a Math course – the same exact thing that we just dealt with four days ago.  It also says, now, that I’m missing two humanities electives.

Apparently my last email four days beforehand was completely ignored, or undergraduate admissions can’t read, or something.  This time, I respond, again reiterating that the Applied Science and Math courses can be replaced.  I also do a full breakdown of every single Humanities and Social Science elective I have taken through all my years of college – showing that in fact, I have three Humanities electives, and three Social Sciences electives, fulfilling the requirements.  I also point out that if that’s not enough, I have taken THREE MORE Humanities and Social Sciences electives, meaning I have a total of nine H/SS electives taken when six were required.  There is no way I don’t have enough.

My professor sends both of us an email, saying, “I thought we’d sorted this weeks ago.”  I thought it was sorted too – four days ago, although it felt like it should have been weeks.

I get an email back, saying that the Statistics course (Applied Science replacement) I took was used as a Math Elective, and the Philosophy course (Math replacement) I took was used as an unrestricted elective.

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!

Considering the fact that the Statistics and Philosophy courses are required by my curriculum, why the hell would I take them as electives?  That would be like saying, “Oh, CS156 is required.  I’ll take it, but I’m going to take it as an elective.  Then, later on, I get to take it again!”

So I break down every single Math/Science elective I’ve taken, and every single unrestricted elective I’ve taken.  Essentially, through the course of two emails, I detail and categorize every single course I’ve taken in my entire college curriculum and what it’s classified as, and how every single requirement is met.

Finally they give up and send me my curriculum sheet to make the changes to directly.  The curriculum sheet is a spreadsheet that matches up every requirement with the course you’ve taken to fulfill it, the semester taken, and your grade.  The sheet is admittedly confusing, but after reading through it I swap a couple courses, fill in a course I took that was missing, and make everything work.  There are only a couple minor corrections so I detail the changes that I made to her.

My advisor tells them to consult with the other advisor on GWU’s campus for further questions, since neither he nor I am on campus at the time to work with them.

Six weeks go by, and I pretty much forget about it, assuming that no news is good news.

Then I realize something.  I’ve dealt with all my interviews, gotten my offers, and accepted a job already.

WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DIPLOMA?

So I send the undergraduate department an email asking what the status was, and if everything was resolved.  The email was sent out after office hours, so I expected to wake up the next morning with a response in my inbox.  So I sleep, wake up the next day, and check my email.

Nothing.

I call the Graduation Services department of the Office of the Registrar, to see if they got anything.  Guess what?  They did.  They got a fax clearing me for my graduation.

FIVE MINUTES AGO.

They explain that it will take three weeks to get the diploma to me, which I say is fine.  The timeframe is not important, as long as I know that I actually graduated.  But I come to the final realization:

George Washington University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Undergraduate Admissions Office FORGOT TO CONFER MY DEGREE.

Considering the fact that I heard nothing for over six weeks, then I send an email one day and they happen to contact Graduation Services about me the morning that they get the email, means they forgot about me.  The only reason they remembered is because of the email I sent spurring them into action.  If I never sent the email, I never would have graduated.

I hate GWU.

Fortunately for me, the diploma timetable is not important.  The fact that it’s getting here after I move away is not really important; it’s not like my diploma from GWU is something that I’m exactly proud of and would show off or anything.  If I really wanted it here sooner, I could just appeal to the wallets of the greedy bastards there:

“Oh, I’d like to donate as an alumni, but I don’t have my diploma yet, so I can’t…”

That would guarantee that I’d have my diploma on my doorstep ASAP, fucking next-day delivery or something.  I wasn’t even home a month before I started getting bothered to donate.  Hell, I got requests to donate after my fourth year, when I still had a year to go, under the assumption that I had graduated already.

Unfortunately for them, I clearly have absolutely no love for GW, so when they start daring to skip the mail requests and call me directly for money, I can tell the person straight-up that going to GW was one of the worst decisions I ever made as a CS student.

I’ve been writing my resume this past winter break, as well as thinking and planning out my course of action as far as applying.

The resume writing took a while because I’ve never officially written one before. I’ve informally written out resume-like things, but I’ve never taken the time to write a proper one out and get everything right – the formatting, the wording, the length, etc. After a lot of research on various websites to learn about the format of a resume and things to do and not do on it, and even more research about what computer programmer resumes should and shouldn’t have, I think I’ve gotten something that I would at least be willing to send out. It still requires minor tweaking, which is something I’ve been doing as I go along.

One person whom I’m very grateful to have the support of is Mike Pinkerton – you may know him as the project lead for Mozilla’s Camino project. I had him as a professor for GWU’s CS193, Development of Open Source Software, a year ago. It was a really great class because we got to learn all about open source software, which I like a lot (although, admittedly, I knew most of it already – I got over 100% in that class). In addition, he taught about many of the software design patterns (factories, singletons, decorators, etc) which I believe to be critical concepts of software design, but for some reason, are not required in GWU’s lackluster CS curriculum.
I think my skills and knowledge showed in that class, and when there was an assignment to present on an open source project, I of course chose the one I’ve worked on the most – Spring. I got to really shine by going into depth about the workings of the project and what kinds of obstacles I had to overcome when going cross platform, and I think it left a good impression.
Professor Pinkerton (he’s not my professor anymore, but I’m still in the habit of calling him that) has been gracious enough to be a reference on my resume, as well as write a letter of recommendation for me. Many thanks.
I think that will help me a great deal; a reference that works in the real world (especially a lead of a fairly high-profile Mozilla project) will have more recognition than a lot of the professors that suffer from academic inbreeding and haven’t had any real-world experience for decades, and are teaching ancient concepts and procedures that have long been surpassed and abandoned.
Can you tell I hate GW’s CS department yet? The senior design class is teaching archaic methods and programs that are very rarely used, and I’ve had long discussions with the professor and made clear my opinions, and I think he was at least partially receptive to some of the points I brought up – The Pilot System, the fact that the waterfall model is very uncommon these days in comparison to iterative development, etc.

I am going to post my resume on the site in case anyone (potential employers, anyone? anyone? Bueller?) is interested. Please note that it could be updated at any time and that contact information other than email is omitted from the web version due to privacy concerns. Also, due to the nature of HTML and Wordpress, a certain degree of formatting will be lost (and actually, due to the theme’s CSS, a certain degree of formatting is added. The real version doesn’t have colored headings). This finally gives me something to put on the “About” page, so that will come back. Heck, maybe I’ll actually write something about myself to add there, too.

As far as the actual application process goes – right now, I’m forming a list of companies to apply to. I’m probably going to split my applications into two tiers. My first choice of companies are video game studios. I am going to try to apply to a number of them, and hopefully they will see my past experience with Spring and take it positively. Unfortunately, the game development industry is very much a closed circle – they often require a certain number of years working in the industry already, and a certain number of published games. Now the problem is, if all the video game industries require industry experience, then how exactly does one enter the industry? What am I supposed to do, self-publish a game?

Fortunately, it seems that a small portion of the studios are a little lax with that requirement. For example, both Epic and Bungie, while still offering preference to it, don’t have a minimum requirement of experience or published games, unlike a lot of other companies (I’m looking at you, Valve and Harmonix). I am making a list of video game companies, and then trying to narrow it down by looking at the requirements.

As I have mentioned before, although video game studios are my first choice, they are also very hard to get into. So I am probably going to try to apply to these studios in February, as early as possible, to try and beat the college rush. That gives them about a month or two to reply, which is fine. By the time April rolls around, I will probably have heard from all of them, and will know the outlook and be able to decide whether I should start my second round in April of all the other companies that aren’t video-game related and therefore aren’t my first choice – Google, Mozilla, etc.

I am very nervous about these next few months of my job hunt. I’m going to have to do phone and on-site interviews, which I’ve never really done before. Plus, being on the spot and having to talk has never been my strong suit; I’ve always been a little awkward doing presentations and public speaking, or having discussions. I’m just not a talkative person. Plus, I’m probably going to get quizzed on programming issues – not usually a problem for me, but it still means I need to brush up. And inevitably, you get asked that one programming question that you’ve forgotten and don’t know off of the top of your head, but could easy look up with a quick web search.

But, well, I guess being nervous is normal.

Since a job is such a large turning point in my life, I’ll probably update if anything significant changes.

Wish me luck.