Career Fair
Just coming back from a career fair at CMU’s University Center, where I went to say hi to the people who manned the Mozilla booth. As I hadn’t come to engage in recruiting discussions, I neither carried a resume binder under my arm, nor was I dressed in a black suit like every other person who went there.
Quite amusingly, while the students dressed up in order to show off their seriousness, all of the recruiters were dressed casually in t-shirts or polo shirts and jeans in order to show how relaxed they were. Funny sight.
Lucky as I am, I also got a USB stick from the Cisco booth (thanks Rob for giving me yours, since you got the last one!)… It has 1GB, that’ll make for a great new root drive for my Slug (which currently runs on 512M). By the way, why can OS X’s Disk Util.app format an ext2 partition, but OS X can’t mount or read it? Very odd.
Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering how high the percentage of international students at CMU is:
I’m a Drexel grad who works in the steel industry on the other side of the state, and sadly that sign is pretty common for firms hiring engineers. You can thank the US H1B situation for that. For Bachelors-level jobs, it’s nearly impossible to retain foreigners on H1Bs past 7 years, which doesn’t exactly provide the greatest return on investment. As a result, many companies have decided (the one I work for included) that it’s not even worth bothering. Sad, but if you don’t like it, write your congressman
Ugh, yeah, I’ve had to install some semi-ancient EXT2/3 drivers from sourceforge to get my OS X machines to recognize a drive from *my* Slug as well. Annoying.
@Ryan: Thank you for the insightful comment. It is sad indeed that it is so hard to get H1B visas: Both due to the number cap as well as the considerable costs associated with it. From a monetary point of view, for most companies it doesn’t seem attractive to hire a foreigner like that, unless they are very desperate for employees, or very rich
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@Les: Yeah, it’s sad. I read that with OS X 10.5, rather than adding support for, say, ext2 (which I would much rather use on my USB sticks than FAT!) they even dropped support for an additional file system: UFS is not a first-class citizen anymore, making HFS+ the only viable choice.