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Job Hunting for Your Future

Personal experiences sharing by Chao2012-10-29

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Career Path

• Professor/Postdoctoral Fellow– Well-respected career, 尊師重教 – 《韓愈師說》：師者，所以傳道授業解惑也。– Educate students: knowledge, life experience– Pioneer the research: advance human being’s

knowledge in a field

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Career Path

• Entrepreneurship– Brilliant ideas?

• PageRank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996, published in 1998, patented in 2001, be the foundation of Google shortly

• Technology in RankDex was developed by Robin Li in 1996, patented in 1999, be the foundation of Baidu shortly

– A group of team sharing the same goal– Solid engineering skills– Business plan– With the spirit of adventure, 成王”敗寇”

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Career Path

• Industry– Make your ideas impact hundreds of millions of users

• Join Baidu your idea may impact 80% of search market in China

• Join Tencent, your idea may impact more than 600 million unique users

– Make cool product by utilizing your research expertise– Conservative, balance between income and risk– Join a well established company

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Career Path

• We have so many successful 師兄師姐 worldwide, pursuing their different careers

• What to choose for your own?

Follow your heart!

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Job Hunting in Industry

• Prepare yourself• Start job hunting• Things you will experience• Settle down

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Job Hunting in Industry

• Prepare yourself• Start job hunting• Things you will experience• Settle down

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Prepare Early

• Thanks to Michael’s and Irwin’s recommendations, many of us have the opportunity to intern in top-tier companies

• Google, Microsoft, Baidu…• Intern experiences would +++ competence• Academic visit also helps– Haiqin’s visit to Stanford– Yilei’s, Kangyu’s and Qirun’s visit to US university

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Company in China

• Beijing (BJ), Shanghai (SH), Hangzhou (HZ), Shenzhen (SZ)

• Google (BJ, SH)• Microsoft ATC, STB, Bing (BJ, SH)• Microsoft Asia (BJ)

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Company in China

• Baidu (BJ, SH, SZ)• Tencent (BJ, SH, SZ)• 一淘 , 阿里子公司 , 提供阿里系搜索与广告

支持 , data mining related (HZ,BJ)• 阿里云，阿里子公司 (HZ)• IBM (BJ)• HP (BJ)• …

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H1B in US (Borrowed from Hao Ma)

• US is more complicated than China– H1B is a non-immigration visa in US– Allows US employers to temporarily employ

foreign workers in specialty occupations– Applications start from April 1st, and can only start

working on Oct 1st

– Every year quota: 65,000 + 20,000• Link

– Academic postdocs have different J1 and H1 visas

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Useful Website

• Job website in HK– http://www.efinancialcareers.hk/ (recommended

by Haiqin)• Update your profile in LinkedIn– Headhunters would find appropriate candidates

from LinkedIn profile

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Other Good Job Sites (List borrowed from Hao Ma)

• Hotjobs• Monster• Careerbuilder• Indeed• Dice• …

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Coding

• Coding is a very important part in interview– Data structure• Arrays & hashtables• Linked List• Matrix• Bit manipulation• Stacks and queues

• Strings• Trees & graph

– Basic algorithms• Dynamic programming• Divide and conquer• Large scale• Sorting and searching

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Books for Coding

• Introduction to algorithms• Programming pearls• 编程之美• Design patterns

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Websites for Coding

• http://zhedahht.blog.163.com/– Many coding questions and solutions

• http://www.careercup.com/– Coding questions of IT company

• http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm– Coding questions of IT company

• http://www.mitbbs.com/bbsdoc/JobHunting.html– Job hunting forum of MITBBS

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Practice Coding

• Practice coding in Google docs• Practice coding in http://collabedit.com/• Practice coding on white board• Practice coding on white paper• DO NOT practice in Visual Studio, eclipse

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Prepare CV

• CV could be many pages for PhD students (personal opinion)

• List publications, academic activities, interns, reviewer experience, etc.

• You must know each bullet on your CV!– Remember details on each paper, even co-author

paper– Pay attention to each skill you have listed out, if

you are not familiar, not list it!

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Job Hunting in Industry

• Prepare yourself• Start job hunting• Things you will experience• Settle down

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Procedure

• Big companies all have their own job sites– Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, etc.

• Normal procedure1. Submit your CV2. Written test3. Phone interview/video interview4. Onsite interview

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Accelerated Procedure

• Refer by friends in the company– Skip written test– Usually guaranteed to have a phone

interview/video interview– Big companies all have referral process

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Job Hunting in Industry

• Prepare yourself• Start job hunting• Things you will experience• Settle down

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Interview at Google

• 1 written test + >= 4 onsite interviews• I have experiences 3 onsite/video interviews because

intern transfer procedure• Coding, coding and coding• Google doc, paper, white board (very small size)• Bi-lingual interview (Chinese + English)• Google expectation on coding (also other companies’)

– Propose and write a basic approach– Revise and optimize the basic approach to a better shape,

space complexity & time complexity

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Interview at Baidu

• 1 written test + 3 – 4 onsite interviews• NLP department - machine learning group• Coding on white paper• Introduce and discuss your research work• Discussion on solving product design problem• Personality, communication and team work

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Interview at Tencent

• 1 phone interview + 6 onsite interviews• Tencent has the largest SNS in China

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Interview at Tencent

• Discuss your research paper or project in quite detail

• Introduce your work to a non-expert user• Real world product design problem, open

problem• Coding on white papers

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Sample Programming Question

• 输入一个整形数组，数组里有正数也有负数。数组中连续的一个或多个整数组成一个子数组，每个子数组都有一个和。求所有子数组的和的最大值。例如输入的数组为 1, -2, 3, 10, -4, 7, 2, -5 ，和最大的子数组为 3, 10, -4, 7, 2 ，因此输出为该子数组的和18 。

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O(N3) Solutionint maxSubSum1(const vector<int>& a){ int maxSum = 0; for (int i = 0; i < a.size(); ++i) for (int j = i; j < a.size(); ++j) { int thisSum = 0; for (int k = i; k <= j; ++k) thisSum += a[k]; if (thisSum > maxSum) maxSum = thisSum; } return maxSum;}

Most straight-forward approach

We could save computation on this for loop

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O(N2) Solutionint maxSubSum2(const vector<int>& a){ int maxSum = 0; for (int i = 0; i < a.size(); ++i) { int thisSum = 0; for (int j = i; j < a.size(); ++j) { thisSum += a[j]; if (thisSum > maxSum) maxSum = thisSum; } } return maxSum;}

An improved version of most straight-forward approach

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O(NLogN) Solution

Divide and conquer

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O(N) Solution

• Idea: 当我们加上一个正数时，和会增加；当我们加上一个负数时，和会减少。如果当前得到的和是个负数，那么这个和在接下来的累加中应该抛弃并重新清零，不然的话这个负数将会减少接下来的和。

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O(N) Solutionint maxSubSum4(const vector<int>& a){ int maxSum = 0, thisSum = 0; for (int j = 0; j < a.size(); ++j) { thisSum += a[j]; if (thisSum > maxSum) maxSum = thisSum; else if (thisSum < 0) thisSum = 0; } return maxSum;}

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Job Hunting in Industry

• Prepare yourself• Start job hunting• Things you will experience• Settle down

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Choose Offer

• Again, follow your heart• Expertise matching• Pure research VS. R & D VS. Pure D– Pure research: MSRA, MS Redmond (arguable)– R & D: Google, Baidu, Tencent– D: I didn’t try this…

• Company style• Package

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• Q & A• Thanks!