Software Engineering and Masters Degree

[general]

"I'm sure "all" is too big of a generalization. Every interview I've been involved with has worked that way, just the same."

They likely didn't have much interview training. Most companies are using behavioral interviews nowadays. What you say in terms of technical skills or working with a team is not necessarily the case. Using questions to find out what a candidate has done in the past is the best predictor of future behavior.

I'd still advocate to the OP to get at least 2 years of actual working experience.

 

[mikeblas]

They likely didn't have much interview training.

Nah; interview training was a pretty big deal at most of 'em.

 

[The Resident]

For what it's worth, here's my experience 5.5 years after graduation...

As others have already said, if you let yourself get entrenched in "real life," the prospect of going back to full-time school becomes really difficult. The best way to keep a graduate degree option open is to find an employer that will pay for part-time grad courses.

(Such employers also tend to have the "graduate degree == instant salary upgrade and optional fast-track route to management and/or tech lead" feature. The drawback is that when you clock out at the end of the day, you have to clock right back into school and homework. Gruelling, but it pays off after the however many years it takes. Depending on the degree, you might open up other exclusive opportunities too. I had a coworker that got a EE grad degree specializing in sensor systems and DSP. He now works on could-tell-you-would-have-to-kill-you projects.)

For recent grads, my employer (a huge engineering company) requires a transcript as verification that you weren't "confabulating" about your education. I think there are regulations regarding this and your school's accreditation level if your company competes for government contracts and your job title includes the word "engineer."

As for GPA, if it's below a certain level, my employer instantly ignores the rest of the resume. It's not the best practice for sure, as they can certainly miss some great talent, but they get such a volume of resumes, they basically have carte blanche. Their minimum is 3.0 for the most part.

 

[TheSpook]

Skimmed the thread -- I'm a third-year CS/Math major(s) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Here is my input:

Places that asked for transcripts:
NSA
IBM
APT (link)
CATTLab (link) (campus lab)
Google
Microsoft

Places that didn't ask for transcript, but did look at GPA:
Northrop Grumman
Booz-Allen Hamilton

I can honestly say that every one of these places put more weight on my past experience, skillset, coursework, and responses to their silly brain teasers than my GPA.


Edit: I've always heard that it's nice to have a 3.5+ going into an internship/job interview, and almost impossible to get a good internship with a GPA below 3.2. That's just . . . just what I'm told. Take it with a grain of salt.

 

[mikeblas]

Google
Microsoft

For what positions? Was this the screening HR folks?

 

[Tytalus]

I had phone interviews with both Google and Expedia... neither of them even asked me about GPA's and mine isn't listed on my transcript.

BOTH of them went immediately in to asking me about my scholastic experience with RDBMS and software language expertise. From there it went in to some job-specific, non-job-related questions (i.e. "you have a stapler that just finished the prototyping stage, as the tester for this product describe the mental process you would go through for testing the stapler.")

If you can pass these on a phone interview without the person hanging up then you get to the REAL questions where (typically) the person begins hinting at what your final position might be if you were to get hired. With Expedia they stressed RDBMS skills again and then went in to Globalization concepts, along with some questions regarding "what do you feel the best on-screen layout is for a small screen" and "contrast your ideas for a small-screen layout with the large-screen layout you described earlier" kind of stuff. My impression from the interview (which was later confirmed by a friend who works there) was that they wanted me to help design and build a new web interface, which depended heavily upon databases.

Sadly (for my Expedia interview, at least) I wasn't an ideal candidate (3+ years experience and a shipped product), otherwise they would have flown me out for a face-to-face. For Google I had the language knowledge, but a lack of scientific background due to my focus being "practical" CS vs. theoretical CS. It is a decision I stand by today (especially since I have a great job now) but at the time I was swearing up and down about not taking Calc3 and DiffEq and getting a Math minor. It was quite amusing to the observant outsider, I'm sure.

I still stand by my original thoughts: going after the Master's Degree now is the better option--you are motivated to be scholastic and the time will fly by! An additional item that I omitted in my last post would be to find a beneficial internship that is in your area of interest. I didn't do internships, choosing to graduate earlier rather than take time out over the Summer sessions to go out and find the job. BIG MISTAKE, and it cost me over a year of my life because I had no "real world" experience.

 

[nameless_centurian]

here's another opinion, as if we needed another one here.

i've recently been accepted to a graduate school on a teaching assistantship. i've also recently started an internship at a defense company (if you get the chance, try working at one of these places.. this one pays their interns outstanding).

i've learned in this short time with this company what work experience is. it's not about learning how to code better. it's not about learning tool x to write an amazing widget. in graduate school, you'll learn all this and more much faster than you can at work.

what work experience IS about is learning other things like how to prioritize your work. it IS about learning to planning your work so that when you get on a big project (which, even as an intern, i am on a big project!) so you have plenty of time to test everything and also won't get behind other people. it is also about learning how to interact with the people around you so as to give yourself the best chance to look good, and then proving it when you get the chance. work experience is about learning to follow company procedure.

work experience is about learning how to work. graduate school doesn't offer this.

edit: that being said, there's always time to get work experience.. i.e., the rest of your life.

 

[Wingy]

Just this morning, I was made a good offer by a company I've been looking into. I'd be a programmer, not necessarily a software engineer, but I figure I'll workt here for a year or two, make some bank, and reevaluate my situation. I can always make some money and come back to be a fulltime student in the future, and make my life financially easier when I'm doing it.

Soooo I think I'vemade my decision, I appreciate all the responses everyone, and please keep going this is a good thread.

 

[AMD_Man]

I haven't yet seen how the job market is after graduation (doing a CS degree at the University of Waterloo atm), but I've found if you're in third year, in the top 10% or 20% of your class and you're applying for a coop/intern position, chances are you'll get interviews (and usually accompanying job offers) with all the major tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, AMD, NVIDIA, PARC, Intel, Apple, etc) whereas if you marks aren't top notch, you're a lot less likely to score a job with these companies. Also, it's pretty much a given that companies favour hiring previous interns over random people (assuming they did their job well of course). So, marks do matter during school as they get you good internships and from there you build up connections when you go to apply for a job after graduation. If you didn't get an opportunity to get a good internship during undergrad, a Masters' degree gets you a second chance. Work hard, earn good marks, take 4 months or so off at some point during your degree and apply for jobs. If you land a good internship during that time, then you've made a valuable connection and your graduate degree has more than paid off.

I'm planning on going all the way with my education (PhD hopefully) because I love the field of computer science, I love doing large independent projects, I love trying out new approaches to problems, and I love researching what's been done to date. As someone previously mentioned, if you're doing a grad degree purely for a higher salary, then it'll be hard to go through the degree. IMHO, I think you need to enjoy the field and wish to continue your education of it to go through grad school.

 

[ameoba]

I'd be a programmer, not necessarily a software engineer,

Job titles are mostly worthless - at best they're good for comparing positions within a single organization (or between government agencies with shared pay scales). Depending on where you are in the industry a "Systems Analyst" can be a gussied up description of a sysadmin or v.senior software developer.

 

[TheSpook]

For what positions? Was this the screening HR folks?

Basic "software engineering" positions -- an algorithms one for Google, and a "software engineering internship" for M$. Google asked after the second phone interview, M$ right away.