I just got an internship there for the next 6 months.

Figured if any of you worked there, I'd introduce myself.

MECOP?

yup

What school?  I'm wondering if I know you....

Oregon St.

Comp Engineering

Junior Intern

Jordan Edgar

OSU?  (My brother and I are ME's)

I was a mentor and also went to do the selection a few times.

Quoted: OSU?  (My brother and I are ME's)

Yup.

Freightliner hired a few today (Engineering and IT)

I've interviewed the past three years.  Very cool program.

Congratulations.

One of my Foreman has worked their doing an electrical upgrade.
He said everyone he had contact with was top notch and great people.

Quoted: One of my Foreman has worked their doing an electrical upgrade. He said everyone he had contact with was top notch and great people.

Glad to hear

Quoted: Freightliner hired a few today (Engineering and IT) I've interviewed the past three years.  Very cool program. Congratulations.

Small world I guess.

Were you at the MU?

That's cool, I'm not MECOP, but I am a Sr in ME at OSU right now.  I might have seen you over there for the interviews tho, I had an unrelated to MECOP interview in the front sitting room at the alumni center yesterday morning.

I did MECOP....it made me some $$$$

Mentor Grafics....are you a woman?  Good luck getting hired there.

I had a job there offered to me...then they took back their offer and gave it to a chinesse woman.  They are ranked the best place to work for women in Oregon I believe.

Quoted: I did MECOP....it made me some $$$$ Mentor Grafics....are you a woman?  Good luck getting hired there. I had a job there offered to me...then they took back their offer and gave it to a chinesse woman.  They are ranked the best place to work for women in Oregon I believe.

The places definately pay well.

And I'm not really interested in becoming a software engineer for a living... least not yet. If I like it then maybe. I'm going for more of the hardware side of things in circuitry. Won't get much schooling experience with that till next year. So next years internship should be more hardware related.

Quoted: I did MECOP....it made me some $$$$ Mentor Grafics....are you a woman?  Good luck getting hired there. I had a job there offered to me...then they took back their offer and gave it to a chinesse woman.  They are ranked the best place to work for women in Oregon I believe.

Mentor Graphics was the company that I moved to the US to work for.

In a nutshell, it was the worst job I ever had.

Not to pry, but until now I haven't heard a thing bad about this company. From interns to employees.

What was so bad about it? And what did you do exactly?

I have a neighbor whos worked there for like 15 years that can't even say 1 bad thing about it.

Quoted: Not to pry, but until now I haven't heard a thing bad about this company. From interns to employees. What was so bad about it? And what did you do exactly? I have a neighbor whos worked there for like 15 years that can't even say 1 bad thing about it.

It's run totally by women.

Well, it wasn't run by women when I was there, but the trend was picking up steam...

I went there to guide them through the process of moving from their old original Apollo based development system, and move them to Unix -- basically to get them into the 20th century before it finished.

There were so many issues that I could write a book - but lets just say that they had a product written in C++, before C++ was standardized. Apollo, and HP after them, bent over backwards to make all sorts of unreasonable modifications to the compiler, loader and even the OS to support some of the rather odd ideas that some of the engineering staff there  had -- sort of reasonable since Mentor and its customers wrre probably 90% of Apollo sales.

Moving to Unix they wanted to cover a whole range of wierd and wonderful hardware and OS platforms (Sun, HP, DEC, NEC, Sony ... and a few more that I forget).

Of course, none of these had C++ compilers which were anything like standard (because there was no standard), and they didn't support the strange dynamic loading options that were present on Apollo.

So there were problems with bending code to make it work ("But it works perfectly on Apollo!! Its this Unix crap thats broken!!!"). There were endless "discussions" with different OS/HW vendors about the varying levels of brokenness in their C++/loader implementations.

Now all this was sort of expected, and could have actually been an interesting challenge.

But, there was on director who's group had already made the jump to Unix. They had actually done a pretty good job. the problem was the way they had done it just wasn't going to scale, and would have been a royal pain in the future if we had tried to generalize it. This person was pretty upset when I didn't adopt his solution.

I had a discussion with the VP about it, and he basically said "too bad, screw him!".
So I just went ahead.

Then that VP left.

Guess who got his job?

It was too late to back out what I had done, and I think he actually had come to accept the deficiencies in what they had done -- very reasonable and appropriate for a smallish group, but just not right on a larger scale.

Anyway - he made it his job to make my life as unpleasant as possible.
He deliberately screwed up every chance of promotion -- I basically had an engineering director position, which was yanked -- I found out later because he created such a stink about it.

At the same time, they were laying off people. That aways makes life pleasant.

They were going through what I describe as a "management book of the month" period.
About every month they would find a new fad, and we had to adopt it.

The worst one I had was when they decided to follow the idea that in every group the reviews had to follow a normal distribution -- remember we had been through layoff after layoff, so the bottom end of that distribution curve had been chopped away pretty significantly.

I gave my group the reviews they deserved. It was thrown back to me for revision -- I basically had to give someone a "failing" grade - no excuses, throw a dart at a list of names if you have to, but pick one.

So ... I then had to give this bad news to some person who really didn't deserve it.
He was more than a little upset since he had done a good job all year.

Fortunately, he didn't realise that I was more upset than he was!

That job sucked.

heh! Mentor Graphics was the Job that bought me to the USA from the Blighted Kingdom in 2001. I'm still there. No plans to move, although I'm always open to offers. The team I work in is all-male, although we do now have two female QA engineers.

Never had a problem with women in the company though. (Unless you're trying to 'diddle' them)

It's been the best job I ever had. Plus, moving to the USA lets me play with guns and stuff, and I can now actually afford a house.

As "Just Over Broke" gigs go, it's not bad at all.

Cheers
7.62

On women at Mentor ...

Before coming to live here, I had spent lots of time working in the US on behalf of my employer in France. Practically everywhere but the Pacific NW. the first time I saw Oregon was when I went to Mentor for my interview.

Anyway ... after what I had experienced elsewhere, my first impression of Mentor was "Very male, and very white".

While I was there, I did see some changes. The person I mentioned above had an AA ad director. When he became VP, he appointed her as director ... She was not really very good at the job.

There was one female VP, she had a lot of female senior staff. Some were good, most were not.

There appeared to be a lot of pressure to employ promote non-white and non-male staff. A discussion with an HR person convinced me that the pressure was coming from government who were concerned that the company didn't have enough minorities.

IMHO that probably explains WS4LIF's expereince.

That is surprising. The only discrimination I have experienced, (and put into practice) is whether people are competent. The only prominent female I'm aware of was Anne Wagner/Sanquini? Pretty good GM from what I hear. But if you look at the board, it ain't exactly what you'd call "diverse":

www.mentor.com/company/executive_team/index.cfm

But take a look on campus, and you'll see decent mix of ethnicity. Still not many women though.

I am looking for a Video/DSP/hardware engineer with FPGA/ASIC skills and some C++ knowledge who would like to try his hand at a little bit of sales and marketing.

Not sure we could afford to feed WS's Class III habit though :-)

Cheers
7.62