the eternal student

Job Interview with Micron in Boise, Idaho

This is Boise coming from the airport and from my hotel window.

I flew into Boise, Idaho on Sunday afternoon and had a good feeling about the area and people as the realtor was showing me around. I haven’t seen a city that has a better range of immediately accessible and affordable outdoor beauty and recreation than Boise. Chattanooga comes close, but Boise has the option of incredible mtn biking (#1 for that in the US) and skiing all in the same day. Camping is also a big deal in Boise. The downtown area is alive and well. North Boise felt like a Little Five, Virginia Highlands, or East Atlanta but a little more down to earth and still affordable. The other neighborhoods ranged from new subdivisions, older neighborhoods, to trailer parks. Quite a range of areas to choose from, but nearly areas had a great view of the foothills. Boise would be a great place to live and fit our lifestyles well. Which brings us to the other factor in decision to move, my job at Micron.

Brief background on Micron:. Micron is the largest manufacturer of memory chips behind Samsung. If you have an Ipod, a digital camera, or a cell phone, than most likely it has a Micron NAND flash memory or a CMOS optical chip. Micron and IBM are the only US companies in the top 10 worldwide for patents. They not only come up with new ideas for technology, but they have the ability to implement them. That makes it both an exciting place to be, but also can be a lot of pressure.

The interview process at Micron was by far the most technically intense, but also the most rewarding and fun. It felt like my PhD oral qualifiers again only with real problems. I interviewed with 5 separate people from the technical staff. Each one had some particular situation they were dealing with that they wanted my opinion on it. I did much better in these open ended questions than the ones at my GE interview. Most of it was good old-fashioned brainstorming on a white board. It was intense, but fun.

Micron made a job offer the next day, February 7th, which also happened to be my birthday. The job offer included a decent base salary, 2000 shares stock options, and a $3k signing bonus. They have numerous performance based bonuses including patent bonuses, 10% of all company profits are given back to the employees, and a performance bonus every 6 months based on a percentage of your salary. My would-be manager said bonuses can be anywhere from $5k to $10k a year. The relocation plan includes moving all our stuff plus 2 vehicles, a fully paid 5-day house hunting trip, they pay for our realtor in Boise and a realtor to sell our house in Atlanta plus closing costs, 60 days storage, 60 days temporary housing, 30 days rental car, and $3k incidental stuff.

Since the offer I’ve had several conversations with Micron about the work culture and the type of work I’d be doing. At first I was a little nervous about the environment being too performance oriented, but that is mostly because I’m making the transition from having control of my own schedule and performance to an industry-based 8-5 job which does have to make money. Number of hours worked is typically 45-50 hours a week, which sounds good considering I’m doing about 70 now while trying to wrap up my PhD and earn money for us.

The job entails developing new technologies and ideas for packaging chips that will be introduced 3-5 years out. This involves both concept and developing a stable process for mass producing. Basically the idea is to make things smaller, faster, cheaper, and more integrated. They also want me to enhance their reliability and modeling department as it is nearly nonexistant now. It sounds like a good mix of hands on work and modeling work. The first few weeks would be working in a cleanroom (picture the Intel commericals with bunny suits) getting hands on learning their process, tools, and capabilities. After that only about 25-50% of my time would be hands-on in the lab and clearnroom. Every two weeks they have brainstorming sessions on a whiteboard for sounding out new patent and product ideas. It sounds like a great opportunity for me to learn new stuff, stay current if-not-ahead of current technology, and use my current skills and interests.

So, we are seriously considering the Micron offer and moving to Boise. Right now is a good time for us to explore the West and decide if we like it. It will be hard to move from family and friends here. We do have some family in Boise whom we’d like to know better. If it doesn’t work out, we can always move back to the East before the kids hit junior high.

We’ll make a final decision in the next week or so. Hopefully, before Phineas arrives. Lynn is showing more signs of being