Looking for a job in computer science - Helsinki

[Lhor]

Hi everybody,

I'm French and I want to work in Helsinki. I'm graduated in french high school of computer science (ENSIIE : http://www.ensiie.fr/en ).

I speak well french (of course ^^), english and italian, and I have notions in german, japanese and finnish (beginner).

I am available immediately (I'm already in Helsinki).
I'm looking for a job but if you have a list of IT companies, it will help me a lot.

Thank you !

[CH]

I'm graduated in french high school of computer science (ENSIIE : http://www.ensiie.fr/en ).

I could not really make heads or tails from the link what kind of school that is. You say high school, but the link doesn't look like it would be a high school. Hmm, it says grande école, so that would translate to university? Right? Use the word university in your CV/application if your school in any way is comparable to it, "high school" will get you absolutely nowhere (high school here is general studies, it qualifies you for absolutely nothing other than to apply to universities, so no employer would take that seriously).

Go to http://www.monster.fi or http://www.mol.fi, for instance, and look there for what jobs are available. Otherwise "job in computer science" is a pretty wide net you are casting, you need to be more specific. What kind of job in computer science... programmer, tester, web designer...? What can you do, what have you experience of?

[Aegil]

Do you have a cv and what spefically are you good at? Development? Web applications, Games, kernel. Infrastructure support, windows linux?

IT is a big area really so you need an idea where you want to work. Also, IT is not easy to get into in finland without knowing finnish. Its possible, but difficult. Also, you should try looking on google for IT companies in finland and sending open applications and see what you can find.

[Lhor]

Thank you for the replies !

You are right both of you.

For the terms of my school, it's very difficult to translate: it's not an university, but maybe I have to name it "grande école".

I have a CV but i don't know if I have the right to put it here. I'm looking for a programing, development or test job but nothing in design (web or computer graphics, ...).

[interleukin]

For the terms of my school, it's very difficult to translate: it's not an university, but maybe I have to name it "grande école".

The problem is that no-one here will know what grande école is, so instead of asking for further explanations they will just throw your CV away. You need to find some way to describe it, at least give it an English name.

[NanaM]

OK, let's try to get that one clear.

Lhor, "Grande école" does not translate to "high school" in English. "High school" means Lycée. In your CV and applications, you should either keep "Grande Ecole / école d'ingénieur" or try a work-around like "engineer school" or "higher education degree". If you have graduated you could also write in your CV that your diploma is equivalent to a Master's degree (Master of Science, Master of Science & Engineering). Even though it may be worth even more by French standards, Finnish employers will likely not understand the difference between your French engineer diploma and the finnish university degree DI (Diplomi Insinööri).

CH, as you said you could not make heads and tails of this, probably because of our weird higher education system A "Grande école" or "école d'ingénieurs" in France is not exactly the same as university. In a nutshell, after high school, you go either to university or engineer school/grande école (this is really in short and yes there are other diplomas or types of education after high school, but let's not get too much into details).

The selection is usually much more difficult for Grandes Ecoles. First you go through 2 years (sometimes 3) of intensive preparation for competitive exams (called classes préparatoires). By intensive I mean really intense : 30-40 hours study in class per week (the courses are significantly faster and tougher than in high school), 1 to 3 weekly oral examinations (sometimes until 20 in the evening) in e.g. maths/physics/chemistry/english, and 1 written examination (4 hours, sometimes saturday morning) every single week. I spare you the work you have to do at home - regular written assignments in maths, physics, chemistry...

In short you can think of it as the military service for the brain. If you survive this (some don't), then your nation-wide ranking at exams allows you first to go to oral examinations (nation-wide again), then based on your final ranking you can choose a school. If you want to get a better school you can choose to do the second year again and hope for a better ranking. Since there are hundreds of such schools, they are grouped into pools of exams - and you can attend as many exams as you can afford (financially, time-wise and knowledge-wise). The level of some of the written exams can be insanely high, some maths or physics exams are so long and tough that almost nobody can get them done completely and flawlessly.

Can you now spot the differences with high school ? There is no such thing to enter university - in some fields there is some sort of selection, but it usually happens after the first year. If you are interested in knowing more, check for example this link.

In Finland universities are usually regarded as higher quality than polytechnics or ammattikorkeakoulu, in France "Grandes Ecoles / écoles d'ingénieurs" are considered better. There is no one-to-one equivalent of "French engineer schools / Grandes écoles" in Finland, even if Finnish universities have a fairly good level.

Lhor, I second CH's comment to be more precise as to what kind of job in computer science you are looking for, and the skills you have.

[Lhor]

Thank you NanaM ! In my CV, I have written "equivalent of a master degree in Computer engineering".

This is my computers skills:
Programing: JAVA/JEE, C++, C, XHTML-CSS, PHP,
JavaScript, XML, UML, OCamL, R

Theory: logic, graph theory, probability, statistics,
numerical analysis, optimization, data modeling

Operating system: Windows, Linux

Database: SQL 89, SQL 92, PostgreSQL, MySQL

[Ondrej]

Hi Lhor

F-Secure is looking for a French speaking customer support engineer.
http://www.f-secure.com/en_EMEA-Corp/ca ... positions/
"Technical Support Engineer, Customer Care EMEA, French speaking"

Cheers,
Ondrej

[Lhor]

Hi Ondrej

Are you the contact for this job ? I had already fill the F-secure application form.

I hope I match.

Thanks to you.

[AldenG]

Lhor, how is grande école in this case not equivalent to teknillinen korkeakoulu or university of technology?

The difficulty of admission and relative status as you describe them suggest they are comparable. Of course a humanist might argue about the relative status, but the point is that in technical subjects, the admission is very demanding and the education is both practical and rigorous. It is some respects narrow than a university but at the same time deeper.

I can see that such a school in a large country and more central in Europe might have even tougher competition for admission, but it still sounds from your description like the same general type of institution.

I don't equate a polytechnic to a university/institute of technology; in my country a polytechnic, while perhaps more than a Finnish UAS, is still considerably less demanding than something like Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University or Georgia Institute of Technology.

[Lhor]

Hi aldenG.

I don't know for the universities of technology.
But I can give you some figure about "classe préparatoire aux grandes école" (CPGE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classe_pr% ... C3%A9coles).
CPGE is a cursus where you spend two or three years (for me, 2) and their goal is to prepare student to exams to integrate a "grande école". There is a first selection here : each year around 500 000 students passed the "Baccalauréat" (equivalent to A-Level in UK) and among these, only 40 000 has integrated a CPGE. But among there is Scientific, Business, Literary CPGE (and also art or other, but represent nothing on 40000). In fact around 20/25 000 students integrate a Scientific CPGE. Only to be able to spend an exam.

How it is for teknillinen korkeakoulu ?

In France, l'École Polytechnique (nicknamed X) is very famous. There is only 500 admissions each year and every student in CPGE wants to go in X. Myself I failed in its admission... But there is also a lot of schools member of "Polytech": it's seems more like Finnish UAS and even for student in CPGE it's less demanding than other school like mine. It's not comparable with MIT of course ^^. But the X and ENS Ulm are comparable with MIT.

Lhor

[NanaM]

Lhor, how is grande école in this case not equivalent to teknillinen korkeakoulu or university of technology?

The difficulty of admission and relative status as you describe them suggest they are comparable. Of course a humanist might argue about the relative status, but the point is that in technical subjects, the admission is very demanding and the education is both practical and rigorous. It is some respects narrow than a university but at the same time deeper.

I can see that such a school in a large country and more central in Europe might have even tougher competition for admission, but it still sounds from your description like the same general type of institution.

It was a long post, but look again at the reply I wrote to CH. The admission process to French Grandes écoles is explained in details there. Tell me how it compares to the admission process to teknillinen korkeakoulu : are there two years of intensive preparation, nation-wide competitive exams including oral examinations ? Is the exam so tough that it is almost impossible to get the maximum grade (20 out of 20 in France) ?

I have followed postgraduate courses at TKK (when it was not yet called Aalto), so I did not have to go through the selection process here. The postgraduate courses seemed to me easier than my undergraduate courses in French engineer school, but I could choose courses I was interested in at TKK, whereas some courses in engineer school were quite boring.

[AldenG]

Nana, I think maybe your questions are better answered by people closer to the system.

But extreme preparation is perhaps not as exceptional in the Finnish context as it may be in some other cultures. Finnish universities (the real universities and tkk's) have always been very competitive and exclusive for admission, and people on that preparatory track have always worked very hard to get there. The people who couldn't clear that hurdle traditionally went elsewhere, such as a Swedish university instead. Now there are more opportunities in Finland for them, with the proliferation of UASes and the like.

It has certainly been my impression, though, that it was more difficult to study computer science somewhere like TKK than somewhere like Helsingin Yliopisto, granting of course that the purpose and orientation are also different. The Helsinki University approach would be somewhat more theoretical -- not in a "lighter" sense but with a broader overview. Where TKK students would be going into very demanding depth about exactly the technologies available today, HY students might (for instance) be talking more about what is coming tomorrow and why it will be an improvement. Maybe it is illustrative that Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, attended Helsinki University -- though genius tends to find its outlet no matter where it goes to school, and surprisingly often skips or drops out of traditional education.

Naturally some people will be better at application and others at theory, and each might consider their area of excellence more important or more demanding -- or might admit to their own area being easier for them. I guess the real point is that TKK wasn't a lesser endeavor, just a more narrowly focused (while correspondingly more intense) endeavor. Or that has been my impression. I'm sure there are some very smart people in both who would not thrive as well in the other.

I can't say how the level of Finland's best universities of any sort compares to the level of France's best grandes écoles. In any event, at that level the ambition and discipline required to get there and the relationships built during those years of study tend to be more important to future success than the quality of the teaching per se.

[CH]

It was a long post, but look again at the reply I wrote to CH. The admission process to French Grandes écoles is explained in details there. Tell me how it compares to the admission process to teknillinen korkeakoulu : are there two years of intensive preparation, nation-wide competitive exams including oral examinations ? Is the exam so tough that it is almost impossible to get the maximum grade (20 out of 20 in France) ?

Does it matter how hard the admission process is to Grande Ecolé? The point is... we don't have something like that here, but what OP needs to do is to translate his degree to something meaningful for the potential employer. A degree from a University would be easy to translate to a University degree here, even though the admission process seems to be easier in France. Now, somebody from a Grande Ecolé might need to eat humble pie and put their degree as equivalent as a degree from a TKK, but in the end... what would that degree correspond to if not a TKK degree? Unless it would be counted as doctorate degree.

For instance, a degree from Harvard is still "just" a University degree. Yes, you might put your nose in the air and boast that's it's from !#"!!#"¤ Harvard, but if the country in question doesn't care if it is from your neighborhood run of the mill state University or !#!!" effing Harvard then all you got is a university degree, no matter how much you had to work your butt off to get it.