Duality

(interviewed on Wednesday, March 30th and Thursday, March 31st)

Unlike the design engineer positions I applied for at Power Integrations and Emosyn, the position I applied for at International Rectifier (IR) is a rotation engineer position. IR’s rotation program is a two-year program where engineers get to work in different roles at different locations. March 31st was the official interview day for rotation engineer candidates. About half of us chose to fly in the day before to have a casual dinner with current rotation engineers.

This interview couldn’t have happened during a worse week. I ended up going to the lab the morning of my flight to LA. And I ended going back to the lab after flying back to the bay area. But I digress.

In the morning, I was interviewed by four people: two from HR (including the mentioned Dave Taylor), the director of IC design (Chris), and Andrea from IR-SA (IR’s partnership with Sanyo Appliances). The interviews were fairly relaxed. My only true technical interview (the one with Chris) went okay. His insistence on conceptual reasoning caused me some problems—though I should know the stuff from 240. In my interview with Andrea, 192 saved me. It wasn’t really a technical interview; he asked me if I had dealt with or implemented various things: high-voltage circuits, IGBTs, PWM signals, regulators, boost converters. The last three are used in 192.

After lunch, we were given a tour of IR’s 8 buildings at their El Segundo site. The buildings were pretty old and unglamorous. I think BWRC’s sexy design has spoiled me.

The whole rotation program feels like an extension of college. The manager of the rotation program, Susan Sanchez, organizes events for rotation engineers to help them get to know each other. It was easy to see that the rotation engineers I met were all friends with each other. It made the place feel like a comfortable place to work.

That’s one thing both Power Integrations and Emosyn lack. I felt out of place at both sites because I was at least four years less-experienced than everyone else. At IR, there would be 15 other newbies along with me.

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Random Highlights

Only the candidates from Berkeley were Bachelors students. The rest were Masters. I’m not sure if I should take that for more than face value.
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Me: What are those exhaust tubes for?

Guy: (Turns from his work) Solder fumes.
Guy: (A moment after returning to work) I probably should be using them.
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(not-UCB-) Alan: (Holding a PCB) Where are the wires?
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Just for the EE people reading this: one of the projects that was demo’ed during the tour was their audio amplifier. It’s a Class-D amp with an LC filter at the output. They said its efficiency is 96%. Gotta be, because the board didn’t even have a heatsink. I was hella thinking about how it all worked out in the frequency domain (LC fixing the non-linearity of Class-D) during the walk back to the HR building. Made my head hurt.