A question for management types.

I understand that slavery is no longer legal in the USA.

John

I don't think you can legaly bind an employee to a company, or a company to an employee. That would be fairly useless anyway. While ago, some companies practiced slowing down the GC procedures. However, with the typical processing time increase to several years, that became unnecessary.

VLV

He wouldn't have been a good employee under those circumstances anyway. He might have even damaged the company.

Being a good employee can have its drawbacks. In 1970, when I laid myself off from Motorola, I expected (and hoped for) the standard treatment... escorted straight out the door. Instead they made me serve out my two weeks notice :-(

...Jim Thompson

two points. the interviewer is HR, not technically competent.

The goal may be to find N unsuitable candidates so a predetermined foreigner can be greencarded.

No. I told HR to only weed out resumes with serious typos and such. Or very obvious imposters. And no, it is not at all a waste of engineering resources. Example: I wanted to hire a guy from outside medical to become production manager. In our business that required an engineer with serious technical knowledge. HR and my boss wrinkled their foreheads. "Ok, you go ahead but remember this was your decision, we would advise to hire a person with medical device expertise". I finally found and hired a guy from an aircraft manufacturer. And yes, while he is not a helicopter pilot he does hold a commercial pilot's license to fly "the big iron". Turned out to be one of the best production manager we ever had.

I once instructed HR (at an unnamed company :) to "file 13" any resume from ASU.

...Jim Thompson

Slavery isn't legal, but indentured servitude apparently is. ;-) You can recover some employment costs if contractual obligations aren t met. What the limits are is a job for the lawyers. I agree with others though, you can't afford to keep someone who doesn't want to stay.

It's not what you ask that is important but what answers you get. There are many ways of finding out what you need to know without exposing yourself unnecessarily.

One of the engineers I worked with a year or so ago immigrated from China. She worked for a Japanese company there. They sent her to Japan for training, and she had to repay some of the costs of that training in order to be able to leave. 8-(

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I've never excluded any university, and I never will. How smart a design engineer is depends on his/her personal skill sets and mind set, not on whether or not it's ivy league or what the grades were. Heck, some bright designers I know do not even have a degree. The fact that I've got a masters from an ivy league university does _not_ necessarily make me better than other.

when

med

fter

That's a good plan. I've seen too much "type casting" in the industry. Grads from certain schools go to test, others design, apps, etc. I interviewed MIT grads that couldn't draw a freakin' NAND gate in MOSFETs. [It's some sort of optional course,] I told the guy doing the recruiting I'd go postal if I had to interview someone without basic knowledge of logic gates, and he weeded them out. To be fair, he wasn't asking if they could design logic gates since he assumed everyone had that knowledge.

Because that's their job. They don't have much else to do. Expect more like that, you've just got to put up with it and hope you get lucky soon.

Dave.

I finally

Are you telling me that after fifty some years doing design in the RF field, the fact that I've got a commercial pilot's certificate (it ain't a license, Bozo), a flight instructor certificate, and an airframe and powerplant mechanic's certificate that simply holding those certificates would disqualify me from being a qualified RF/microwave engineer?

Go pound sand.

Jim

One

That's quite common. My son had to agree to similar terms before his employer would pay his tuition. My SIL had to do the same (except the state paid via a scholarship) forty something years ago. I see nothing wrong, at least from what you've said above. It does cost a lot of money to train people. Employers should have some return on that investment.

Contractual obligations are another thing altogether.

It actually has been quite standard for large companies supporting students (specifically when paying tuition and books) to require, by contract, the same duration in guaranteed service. That is why i never asked for / accepted a previous employers terms for reimbursement.

Or shortly, if they intend to screw you, you cannot can them fast enough.

Contractual obligations an be quite wide ranging and very asymmetric. Employer paid tuition cases are notably so.

One

Indeed. As the bard himself wrote in the Scottish play:

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly"

This was during some particularly bad times for the EE department at ASU... all the Professors were Indian's or as old as I am now ;-)

ASU EE is now all Indian students :-(

...Jim Thompson