Enron...
sigh.
I went to college near Houston (Texas A&M) and interviewed with Enron in early-mid November, 2001 prior to December graduation. Given the timing, I believe it may have been the very last interview loop they did.
For a soon-to-graduated Comp Sci student, Enron put on an amazing presentation. The interview was onsite at Enron headquarters. They took the candidates to dinner one evening, put us up in a nice hotel, and spent all day the next day grilling us in panel interviews, having us work individual problems, and challenging groups of interviewees with team problems. It was calculated, thorough, and to this day it's the most comprehensive and satisfying interview experience I've ever had. Driving home, I knew they had successfully sifted our group to identify who the best candidates were.
The job market was also really tough in late 2001, with the dotcom bust and 9/11 making it challenging to find good opportunities. If memory serves, some of the other options I was considering at the time were to write PowerBuilder for an old-school oil company and maintain Fortran for a small, decades-old engineering firm. Enron, in comparison, seemed like a godsend.
Enron was opulent. Enron paid well. The software people seemed genuinely interested in what they were doing. Everyone seemed smart and ambitious. We were shown one room that was an open workspace and each desk had a pair of flat panel monitors (this was three years before I bought the first flat panel for my home PC and years before I had two screens at home). Enron was as sexy to a software professional as any workplace in the world in its time.
I knew there was some drama surrounding the company, but I was generally oblivious to the details. I was overwhelmed with a 16-hour course load, a student job slinging C++ for a local consultancy, and a job search. While onsite, a few better-informed candidates asked some of the employees about the brewing scandals. The Enron folks shrugged it off. They believed in the company and believed in the work they were doing.
I had a great interview and left really excited. A week later I got a call from their recruiter and was told they liked me and an offer was incoming. I was stoked. Then, silence. Maybe the Thanksgiving holidays were the reason for the delay, I thought. In another week or two, the Enron collapse was headline news. Every single Enron employee I had interacted with was out of a job, and the prospect of thousands of Enron employees hitting the market simultaneously made my job search even tougher.
Enron provided me and my fellow interviewees some SWAG while we were there. I had a hat, a clear plastic mug, and a few other items. I sold them for a dollar at a garage sale a few years later.