In my soon to be 49 years of engineering work experience, the only time I've interviewed for a new job was when I left my first company in 1980 and joined McDonnell Douglas in SoCal. In 1977 we purchased our first CAD system from a company named United Computing in Carson, CA which was then being run as a subsidiary of MDC. In late 1979, MDC made final financial arrangements with the original owners of the company and merged it into their commercial automation division, McAuto. They also started to aggressively hire both programmers and pre- and post-sales personnel and that was when I became aware of an opportunity to take my by then nearly three years of everyday usage of the system and use that experience to find a new job. Remember this was when CAD/CAM was a very new field and any sort of real world experience was being sought after by both the companies developing the technology as well as many of the larger companies that were starting to invest in using it. During the early part of 1980 I started to see adverts in the local paper from companies looking for people with CAD/CAM experience. I ended-up interviewing with two large companies, one in Ohio and one in Utah. The people in Utah went so far so to make an offer on-the-spot, which I almost took except that I would be working not only out in the middle of what to me, coming from Michigan, looked like a desert but the office I would working in was located about 50 feet underground (the company manufactured material which occasionally blew-up while it was being produced so most of the employees worked in bunkers). In these two situations, since the products produced were so different than what I had worked on (I worked in the R&D group for a company that manufactured food machinery, primarily large commercial baking equipment) therefore I never even brought any 'examples' of my work, besides they were really looking at my take on how to implement CAD into an engineering organization.
I finally decided to call our rep from United (now McAuto) who had sold us our CAD system and asked him what was available (I was thinking that perhaps another local company was considering purchasing a CAD system and so I might not even have to move). Now since we were customers of MDC they technically could NOT approach me with a job offer as there was a 'no poaching' clause in our contract with them, however that did not prevent me from initiating any contacts (however I did have to sign a legal document stating that MDC had NOT made the first contact). Anyway, when I found out that they were hiring, I agreed to talk to them and so I flew down to St. Louis but since they already knew the sort of thing we did and since I also knew some of the people who worked on the software, the interview was not really what you would consider as typical for someone coming in cold. Anyway, I took the job even though we had to sell our house and move from Michigan to SoCal, but it was the best offer by far (although when you consider the cost-of-living difference between Utah and California that might not be a completely accurate statement) and I would be working with people I already knew, and most importantly, I would be working on a system I already knew inside and out, unlike the Utah offer where I would have been working on another, now-long obsolete system. Of interest is that the company in Utah, after many mergers and acquisitions, are now using our software so who knows, maybe I might have simply got them to move quicker if I had taken their offer. And for the record, the people in Ohio, they're now a customer as well.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
