By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

When Leilehua Maly, Crystal Kaneshiro and Neal Flaherty moved from Hilo to Seattle, they went on faith. None of the three, who graduated last year from the University of Hawai'i-Hilo, had a job.

"My parents were very supportive, but I can only imagine what they thought about us going away from home without jobs," Maly said. "Of course, we were all worried that if we didn't have jobs in six months, we'd be flat broke."

The faith they had was in their education. The three were among the top computer science majors in their class.

Crystal Kaneshiro, Leilehua Maly and Neal Flaherty credit their University of Hawai'i-Hilo education for helping them land jobs at Amazon.com in Seattle. Photo courtesy Maly family

The three set their sights on Seattle, even though Maly had never been there, because it is the land of opportunity for careers in computer science.

"There's Microsoft in Seattle, there's Boeing, there's Amazon, so the job possibilities are tremendous," Kaneshiro said. "There's also Nintendo."

Maly applied to Amazon via the company's online submission process while in Hilo. He thinks two things on his resume caught someone's eye: He spent time as a student worker for the NASA infrared telescope facility on Mauna Kea and he taught a game programming class at UH-Hilo.

That got him the initial telephone interview. After that, it was all about what he knew.

There were follow-up telephone interviews with technical experts. "I was given very tough questions, problem scenarios and problem solving and actually a programming assignment, a project I had to do and turn around to them within a couple of days," Maly said.

Maly passed and was granted a face-to-face interview — a grueling process that lasts five hours.

"You're stuck in a room and people come in one after another and tell you, 'Do this on the whiteboard.' It's basically a very long test. They want to test your ability, your versatility, your background," Kaneshiro said.

Within three weeks of moving to Seattle, Maly was hired and started work as a software development engineer at Amazon. His work was so impressive that recruiters at Amazon wanted to know if there were more like him.

"My human resources contact asked me if I knew anyone else who graduated with me and I said, 'Well, yes. I know two people.' "

Maly graduated from Waiakea High in 1996 and went to college on a scholarship from Kamehameha Schools. Flaherty graduated from Ka'u High in 1998. Kaneshiro graduated from Hilo High School in 1998. All three graduated from UH-Hilo in the spring of 2003.

Both Flaherty and Kaneshiro were subjected to the five-hour interviews and testing at Amazon.

Flaherty now works as a software development engineer in Web promotions. Kaneshiro works as a support engineer for the fulfillment center software. "So basically everything after you hit the 'OK' button that you're gonna buy it, everything after that, I support the software that goes into actually picking and packing and making sure your order is right, so whenever that stuff breaks, it gets routed to our team," Kaneshiro explains.

Their jobs aren't exactly 9-to-5. Maly and Flaherty have to pull "pager duty" on two-week rotations.

"You have to bring your computer home and you have to log in within 10 minutes after you get the page so that Amazon doesn't come to a grinding halt," Kaneshiro says.

Kaneshiro couldn't come home to Hilo for Christmas because it was all-hands-on-deck.

"We're a retail company and my team gets hit the hardest during the Christmas season, so they need as many able bodies there as possible."

Care packages from home have helped the transition.

"We've gotten tons of them," Kaneshiro says. "All of our families live on the Big Island, so we get macadamia nuts or Kona coffee, or my parents send us Big Island Candies a lot."

And the three have plugged into the Hawai'i connections in Seattle.

"They have a great store here, it's called Uwajimaya, and they actually have laulau and poi. It's a life-saver. We get our rice there and fish, and they even have Zippy's chili," Kaneshiro says.

Seattle can be laid back, more like Hilo's pace than O'ahu's, they say. They like it there. And they love their jobs.

"I'd like to give credit to Dr. Judy Gersting for making the program as rigorous as it was," Kaneshiro says. "In my field, you can't be specialized in anything. You have to have a good, broad base. My manager says he was quite impressed at how fast I caught on

to things, because we deal with everything from database to coding to structure. ... My manager likes the fact that I rigorously document things. That's one of the things that got ingrained into our heads at UH-Hilo."

"We are very, very proud of them," said Gersting, UH-Hilo professor of computer science and head of the computer science/engineering department.

"Our program follows national curriculum recommendations put together by the national computing societies, the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Computer Society," she explained.

"I think it speaks very highly of the fact that these students were prepared enough to qualify for these positions, particularly in these economic times when such jobs are hard to come by," she said.

"And they did this entirely on their own. ... It wasn't like their uncle worked at Amazon or anything. They just had a good background, and they presented

themselves well in the interview process because they had a broad background based on our program."

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.