Slashdot Mirror
Getting Over the Stigma of a Previous Job?
Subm asks: "Some friends-of-friends worked at a company with such a high profile downfall their past employer became a liability. They weren't involved in causing the downfall, but with the name 'Enron' on their resumes, interviews were spent defending their past employment. SCO is more focused in its industry than Enron, was and its reputation is in a downward spiral in that industry (Unix and GNU/Linux, not lawsuits, that is). SCO's staff will have to look for other jobs sooner or later, and most within the Unix/GNU/Linux community. Can good workers get over the stigma of an employer's reputation? How will working at SCO affect its staff's careers? Does anyone at SCO talk about this?"
In most employment contracts found at such firms as SCO, these employees would be banned from working in a similar field for a specified period of time, correct?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
From what I can tell from the published reports, the "smoke and mirrors" approach to financial disclosure was pretty pervasive at Enron. I think anyone who has experience of that kind of trading business would regard someone who claimed to have known nothing about it with a rather skeptical eye. (I know I would. Although I'm a geek, I do also have an MBA and spent ~20 years working in IT on Wall Street. Had I worked at Enron, I feel certain I would have known something fishy was up -- there just aren't that many secrets in that culture.)
SCO/Caldera, on the other hand, did have a legitimate, although not very successful, business before they entered the litigation industry. If I were hiring, I wouldn't touch any of the management with a bargepole, but a Unix support tech who just did a competent job is a different story.
In any case, in any interview, all you can do is to tell the truth (emphasizing your good points, of course), and hope that the interviewer will take things on the merits.
That's a very niave viewpoint to have. If you've been lucky enough to work with and around companies like that then you are one of the few.
Having SCO on your resume will certinaly close a lot of doors that might have been open otherwise. In this economy employers have the luxury to pick and choose so instead of taking a chance on someone who might have had something to do with SCO's actions they would probably step right over and move on.
I agree. I was unemployed a few years ago, and I was told directly to my face on more than one occasion that I was overqualified for a position, and they were not willing to offer me a job for fear that I'd be too bored, and that I'd probably just leave after a while once I found a new job that was on my level.
...or high in the financing department doing the number juggling, just focus on what they actually did. There's not much else you can do. Even if they knew that their sector wasn't going that well, it's not too uncommon in a big company. Unless they were in a position to know that the entire company was tanking, well they did their job, did it well (hopefully) and are not to blame.
If they need to defend it from before it started showing up in the press, try to show that you couldn't have been in a position to know (hopefully). And if they need to defend it after it became known, well you needed to put food on the table. You hadn't done anything illegal, weren't doing anything illegal, and you were getting a paycheck.
But if they were in positions that are suspicious, that might have known or at least suspected, or that even just sound as if they'd know that much, well... no, then they're out of luck, even if they're completely innocent in all this. People will always wonder.
At least, that's how I'd attack it. It might go against the common "I was so big and important and had all this responsibility" show-off you usually do at job interviews, but in this case I'd try to make myself seem small and insignificant.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have no idea what northern american unions are like since almost everyone talking about them seems to be on one side or the other. Here in europe they seem like a good idea. Disbanding them now that the fight seems to be won is like disbanding the fireservice because I haven't had a fire in the last two decades.
Unions would fight tooth and nail against the exporting of jobs. But hey, it is not like we highly valuable workers in the IT ever have to worry about that happening to us? That can only be done with low quality jobs like assembly lines.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You cannot seem to make up your mind if you use Redhat, back up the SCO claims or damn them, and what your business does, imbedded or bank software support....
7 42 943d =6709 401
Fsck'ing liar.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75388&cid=6
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=74902&ci
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It's time that this FUD campaign come to an end. I own a small business that deploys five Red Hat AS boxes. SCO has already sent my legal department (2 lawyers) three letters (threats) regarding our "illegal use of the Linux operating system [sic]".
Like most users of Linux, we are at the point where we are not going to stand still while SCO trashes the entire Free Software movement. I have already authorized a payment of $10,000 to the FSF, and a payment of $5,000 to the Red Hat Open Source Now fund. If you want to do all you can during this waiting period before the trial, I would urge you to sign this petition [petitiononline.com] that signifies the unity of the Free and Open source communities against SCO's outlandish claims.
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I work for a medium sized (137 employees) company that processes customer data for many retail outlets, as well as a multi-national bank. We were one of the first companies to drop our entire line of Windows servers (workstations unchanged) for a Red Hat Linux solution in the summer of 2000. Porting our internal applications was a real pain, but the significantly increased uptime and greater ease of administration made up for all initial shortcomings.
Fast forward to end of 2002, and we had become disgusted with Red Hat's road map for its' Advanced Server license. It seemed as though we had lost all of the benefits of the GPL.
There was no way we were going back to M$, but there was a movement from higher up top to change distributions. To make a long story short, we passed on SuSe and chose the often corporately overlooked Gentoo.
The benefits of this move are stunning. We have been able to hire 16 additional employees to handle our own fork of Portage, and 22 additional employees to provide support. Not only to we do a "ghost compile" for each box (many different Pentium and Athlon systems), we also take a minimalist approach. The combination of those two choices have enabled us to increase performance per box to something like 26% faster on average.
With the obvious help of the Gentoo open source community, we have created a low cost, self-sustained IT department that can function well into the next decade. Thanks Gentoo!
...would you want to work at a company that allows employees doing interviews to reject potential candidates based on their personal opinions of the candidates' past employers, and, subsequently, on the candidates' moral fiber?
Unless the candidates had influence over their company's business deals, holding past employers against them is ludicrous:
- Would the interviewers who based their decisions on this criterion leave their current positions if the company they work for "took a direction" they disagreed with?
o If so, then either this employee is extremely strong-headed and/or already disgruntled with his current position. What does this say about the company that they allowed this employee to do interviews? Is this employee going accidentally drive candidates away?
o If not, then this employee is a hypocrite. And, again, what does this say about the company that they have this employee representing them.
- Why would management want to hire someone who may quit as soon as they feel the company has "taken a direction" they disagree with?
- Doesn't this line of reasoning by a interviewer implies that the candidates' ability and experience doesn't count much to the interviewer.
(Again, this only applies if the candidate had no influence at their previous employer.)
Breakfast served all day!
Get a lawyer. Have him make a call to check your references. Sue the guy and the company.
I am serious about this. Slander by a former employer is a serious problem for you. He's effectively preventing you from getting a job. If you have copies of your performance reviews, you can prove that he is lying.
Alternatively, tell prospective employers about this in advance. You could show them copies of your reviews. If they are serious about hiring you, they will be able to identify someone with a grudge.
These days, many companies will only confirm dates of employment, due to concerns about geing sued. My last two employers had this as an explicit policy. As an employee, one could give only personal references. Managers were restricted from even that. Start date and end date only, not even reason for separation.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...