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How To Get a Job At a Mega-Corp
Barence writes "'With the economic hangover starting to wear off, the technology giants are once again recruiting in earnest. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have vacancies on their websites, and now could be the perfect time to land a job at one of computing's biggest hitters.' PC Pro talked to people inside Microsoft, Apple, and Google to discover how to track down the best jobs, and what it takes to get through the arduous selection and interview processes." With lots of experience both within and without, what other words of wisdom can be offered to those wishing to break into a mega-corp?
I'd much rather be a freelance decker than work for a megacorps...
in the last year, when interviewing...has anyone else noticed the interviewers air of superiority? like they hold the keys and you had better get to ass-kissing. i can't be the only one to have noticed this.
and this article...like the mega-corp is gods blessing to YOU. like you aren't just trading time for dollars and they aren't the ones making the profit? oh, please sir, may i have some more?
That way, you can toil for years as you watch them destroy what you've worked on. Highly recommended.....
With the economic hangover starting to wear off...
Says who?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
With lots of experience both within and without, what other words of wisdom can be offered to those wishing to break into a mega-corp?
Black clothes, a ski mask and quiet footwear would probably help.
I only skimmed the first and second pages, I didn't want to wait for all five pages to load.
What I gleaned from those two pages though is that large companies have job postings on their web sites. What a breakthrough! Who would have guessed this?
SMB all the way. Unless you enjoy either having your spine ripped out, or relentlessly climbing the corporate ladder. I guess they supposedly have great salaries, but what is your soul worth? I have yet to find a corp that can beat the perks of working for a successful SMB. We need another article called how to break free of the giants.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Seriously, many of the "published positions" are reserved for H1-B and other candidates who will not need pensions, who will cost less in salary, and who will be less likely to question management. It was laid out very well in this famous old video: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU)
Others are simply fraudulent: I used to work at a 500 person company which listed positions in my department and others where the "listings" were used to bump up head count for stock pumping and advertising reasons, while deliberately ignoring the hundreds of advertisements in order to demonstrate our "growth" and encourage investment while not actually paying for employees. The same nonsensical behavior used for the H1-B craziness are used for just this sort of stock pumping: roughly a dozen positions were always listed as "open", even though they'd quietly bury all the resumes. Other tricks, not in the video, include deliberately requiring far too many qualifications, listing far more qualifications than the role requires, listing far *fewer* qualificiations. It's especially fun when an HR department bases its manpower on number of applications handled, rather than number of employees placed or speed of placement.
* Don't post those pictures of yourself posing nude next to an inflatable dolphin on Facebook.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The first page says... to get a job, you need to find a vacancy.wow!
The second page says... to get a job, you need to pay attention to the job description.damn! this is awesome!
The third page says... to get a job, you need to submit your CV and wait.holy shit! it never occurred to me that I need to submit a CV!
The fourth page says... to get a job, you need to talk relevant things during the interview.oh noes! I always talk about movies during interviews!
The fifth page says... to get a job, smart casual is a safe choice.This tip is godlike! Most other applicants dress in bikini and that's why they didn't get a job!
With lots of experience both within and without, what other words of wisdom can be offered to those wishing to break into a mega-corp?
You'd better be young, idealistic, without a family, and willing to trade your life for your job. Some large trendy corporations might not be like that (yet) but the vast majority of corporate america is a slave labor camp. My advice is to stick up for yourself and don't let anyone take advantage of you, because they will if you allow it. Overtime is for emergencies, not business as usual. And emergencies had better not be business as usual. If you think working 50 or 60 hours a week and foregoing vacation is normal or "necessary in today's world" stop it. Just stop it. Life is not all about working.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Provided you have the requisite skills, find a recruiter (aka Head Hunter) to get you a contract position at Microsoft (Volt, Comsys, et al.), Verizon, etc. You'll make more money, get a peek at the corporate culture (to see if you like it), and might have a better "inside track" at applying. You might even get paid for all the hours you work! (depending on the ethics of the corporation and your contract agency).
The down-side is that you will have to pay for your own benefits (generally) and may resent the fact that someone is taking home part of what the company pays without doing any work for it, and will have less job security.
How do you contact such a person, yo ask? Post your resume on Monster with the right keywords (provided, of course, that you have the skills!).
YMMV
Uhm, the three companies you mentioned have had job offers up the entire time of this 'economic hangover' has existed.
You get in the same way people have ALWAYS got in. A friend on the inside or dumb luck.
The friend on the inside helps you bypass retarded HR people, otherwise you have to rely on dumb luck to get past that particular part of the process. After that, you just need to actually have a clue and fill their needs for them.
I've never had to deal with retarded HR in my career, luckily. Every job I can think of having, I got because I knew someone that worked there. In fact, thinking of all the people I know closely, I don't know of anyone right now (with the exception of a google employee friend, which I don't think knew anyone before hand) who got their job without knowing anyone at the place.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I'm actually a bit surprised at the almost-uniformly negative response to "mega corps." I've worked at two companies that could be described as "mega corps." The first, while not exactly soul-crushing, bore such a striking resemblance to Office Space that I was happy to leave. The other one has been an almost-uniformly pleasant experience, with a solid focus on tech and very little bureaucracy. What I've taken away from this is that you can't judge the quality of a job by the size of the company.
As far as the 60-hours-per-week thing goes, both jobs had me firmly in the 40-45 hours range. The lone, very rare exceptions (50-55 hour weeks) were solely due to my own fuckups, and my desire to not have my fuckups impact the rest of my team (as in, they're actual people who didn't deserve to look bad because of something I did). I've never been forced to work long hours.
On the topic of overtime, I've found that mentioning "quality of life" and "no mandatory overtime" in interviews will get you dropped like a hot-potato if the company in question actually does expect 60 hour weeks. I've made it a habit to ignore people telling me not to ask these things, and make sure to ask it in every interview. Tends to weed out the places I don't want to work.
I realize that my experiences may not be the norm, though.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Money is a collective fantasy about rationing; how can we move beyond it? As Iain Banks wrote, money is a sign of poverty. James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" also envisioned a post-scarcity society that had moved beyond it.
The last time an big company recruiter sent me an inquiry, I sent back this link: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
The problem:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"School Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Some more links about moving beyond the need to work for pay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_economy
From something I helped put together:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I literally laughed my butt off.
-Dave
Moving from Apple Retail to Apple products...
"You didn't get a job in Apple Retail expecting to move up to working on Apple products did you? If so that would be the saddest thing I've heard in a while"
Obviously, you aren't an Apple employee, and you haven't really used Google without declaring this.
If you are an Apple Retail employee already, ask your HR person about the "Apple Retail Corporate (ARC) Exchange program". I know at least seven people who are working in Core OS, or on products like "Numbers" or "Final Cut Pro", etc., who started out as Apple Retail employees, and those are just the people I know personally. If you are qualified, it's relatively easy to get what is effectively an internship, either coming from the store to corporate, or going from corporate to the store. If I recall correctly, in fact, an HR manager from corporate is now the manager of the "flagship" New York Apple Store.
-- Terry
And why not just the most visionary people you can find?
Age discrimination. Its not just for breakfast or early bird specials anymore.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
It does if you ever been part of recruiting for one of these firms. I've been an interviewer for a so called "mega-corp": 4 to 8 candidates a day, an hour per candidates, and thats after a pretty in depth screening process (so a second round interview: the first round is NOT done by HR, but by people that actually do the work, like software engineers and such, to weed out the worse).
Honestly? its pathetic. You'll have to go through 20-30 candidates to get anything worthwhile. Its not -TOO- bad for new grads. As long as they have the fundamentals, we can train them, no problem (and the quality of grads has increased greatly. 5 years ago it was a total joke). Getting -experienced- developers who actually know squat though? Its almost impossible, to the point that when we find one, we'll pay pretty much whatever they ask. That INCLUDES during the recession where there were 10 times as many applications. Its just that rare.
Where megacorps screw up though, in my opinion, is at the HR department. Stupid blanket policies like "don't hire anyone with 3.0 GPA, no matter what". So someone from Random Crappy University with a 4.0 will make it to first round (and usually gets dismissed, but they still got to talk to us). Someone with a 2.8 from a reputable institution, however, will not even get a phone call, even if we talked to them and know that there were reasons behind it (one bad year where family problems got in the way, and poof you go), and no matter how much we beg, it won't go through HR. That, is really stupid.
I agree completely. I have run the gamut, working at a 300k+ megacorp, 2 ~30k megacorps, a 1000 person firm, a 30 person firm, and an 8 man startup. Smaller is better in almost every way on a day to day basis. The bigger firms tend to have better benefits when it comes to things like 401k matching and vacation time, but thats pretty much where the benefits end.
Every small firm I have worked at, I have felt that I was more challenged, and did more meaningful work, and contributed to the bottom line in a direct, easily measurable way. The atmosphere is much more family-like, where you all depend on each other, and can bring your friends/family and often even your dog into the office without a problem (security polices at megacorp generally don't allow this, and if they do, you have to go through the hassle of signing them in, getting them visitors passes that they have to get photographed for, etc). My gf is in sales and would always stop in and say hello when she was in the area, and I knew my coworkers families, etc. Megacorp only has shitty free coffee for its employees and vending machines, every small firm I have worked at has had a well stocked kitchen with healthy and no so healthy snacks, drinks, and you could ask the office manager to buy anything within reason and she would, Ditto that on office supplies- want a whiteboard for your cube and have a hang up about only using uniball pens- not a problem, but at Megacorp, you will get whatever is standard issue in the supply closet, where they may actually lock it up and monitor you while get supplies.
Did you just read a blog post at Megacorp about google's sparse_hash hash map library and want to download it and try it out to see if it really delivers on its increased performance over your compiler's stl implementation? Well hold on there will rodger, if you are even allowed to get past websense and get to the download site, there will undoubtedly be restrictions on your ability to get the code into your local dev environment, and even it offers a 5x speed up in your app's most critical area, you are going to have a weeks long battle to get the library's use approved, and a large part of that will be convincing the "architect" whose nose has been up in the air so long he hasn't been able to read a technical book in the last 5 years, that it was his idea. Innovation doesn't come from the unanointed, didn't you get that memo? Meanwhile, over at the startup, I had the code integrated as soon as I verified it passed our unit tests.
Meanwhile, over in megacorp land, you just got an email about a ticket being opened speaking something about how some operations person in singapore can't get his pipes to work properly even though he bashes them properly and the script shell greps just fine and CUSTOMER IMPACT. The ticket has been opened for a week, and you can see xioahu ping was getting pissy and reassigned it to you because it was ignored by your coworker. Singapore is almost exactly 12 hours out of whack with your schedule, meaning your work hours don't overlap at all- looks like there is going to be some OT to get this worked out. Meanwhile, at the startup, the ops guy who makes sure the system hums just yells out to the sys admin to grant his process privileges to /var/log and the problem is resolved in under 3 minutes.
You are given a project at megacorp, and you think the db backend should be postgresql because you like its grown up transaction features and don't need all the crap from Oracle. However, policies at megacorp demand that you use one of their approved vendors that they already have a license for, and you have to talk to the DBA team to provision your database and push the paperwork for the appropriate chargebacks to be put in, and there is a 3 week lead time to get all the work done. Meanwhile, at the startup, you take a box with spare capacity, throw postgresql on it, and in a few hours you have a development server up and running and tell the admin to put in a purchase order for some DB servers.
You
I wanted a leading role at on of the top companies, and I got it after about a year of effort. I later had to hire people to my new team. Here is my $.05.
1. Know exactly what you want, and do your research. Who would your managers and colleges be? Become familiar with them.
2. A hiring manager usually have specific short term tasks to be solved. Know what they are, and make sure you are the solution to at least one of them. If you are not, it is probably not a good job to focus on anyway.
2. Get in multiple applications. One to HR, other people on the team you want to get into. Also find a friend already in the company, and have them forward a resume.
3. Go to conferences etc. Your future boss and colleagues might be keynote speakers etc. Listen to what is important to them, and talk to them.
4. Hone your skills, and become the right fit.
5. A team just wants to be successful in the organization, with little risk.
During interviews, make sure the team knows that you will contribute to the short term challenge at hand. Also document that it is little risk to hire you. By low risk I means mostly that you can and will deliver as expected with no incompetence, attitude, and personality problems. If you can't, it it probably not the right job to focus on anyway.
6. Know what you are worth to them, and ask for it, not more. That may include moving expenses etc.
Bottom line: Know what you want, and go for it, and be prepared and be honest to yourself and your future team. Honesty makes it easy for you to convince people that you are the right person.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I know several people who started in Retail at Apple, and are now working at Apple corporate. Among them are a very talented visual designer, a manager who leads a team that develops various apps for internal use, and a person who writes sales training materials that are used worldwide.
Besides those, I can also point out that since Apple retail is growing so quickly, that people who stay within the retail organization can move up quickly if they're willing to learn and work hard. I know three different people who went from sales, to assistant manager, to running a store within three years.
I don't know what problems you had when you worked there (assuming for the sake of argument that you're not making it up), but I know that many others have done quite well by joining Apple retail. I'm even aware of several people who didn't make the cut to get their own store at Apple, but were recruited to run stores for other companies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So, basically, bend over and take it for 15 years until you can move to some other employer. Awesome.
Well, if accumulating 15 years of work experiences means "bending over and taking it" for you, then... welcome to human life. Whether you work 1 year or 15 years, whether as a employee or consultant or business owner, whether coding the ultimate compiler or flipping burger, you bend over and take it in from someone, one way or another.
It's called earning your bread with the sweat of your brow. Also, there is nothing wrong in accumulating x years of experience in preparation for a career move into another company if there is the potential of greater benefits. It's called having foresight, career improvement.
In case you thought you made a snarky, illuminating comment. Newsflash: You didn't.
And it's good Subgenius rant. But I have to point out something.
I've worked at large companies as well as small ones. There *is* slack to be had at larger companies as well. Think Wally from Dilbert. Sometimes you can land a position where your job is to warm a chair. I had a job like that for 3 1/2 years. I was a chair warmer. Sure they gave me work. And I did the work. But. None of it went anywhere. I knew that about 3 months in - a co-worker told me how 99% of the things they make get buried, and my project would definitely be one of them. At hire there were lots of big promises about the new product line and spearheading a new effort and taking the company in new directions and territories. But it became obvious that my job really was to justify the amount of management the company had. A sickly symbiotic relationship began.
And once I had learned that, I had some pretty serious slack.
I used to sneak out to the parking lot and nap in my van, or work on projects from home. I had a laptop pc. I'd run the AC in the big van and just hang out. I even soldered an electronics project in my van. Mostly to see if I could do it. Yes, I could.
Now I'm not saying that every corporate cube has that much ease. But. You shouldn't discount larger companies out of hand. Some of them are so large you simply "get lost" and people just leave you alone. When that happens you are on your own. Just show up at 8:30, make sure the boss sees you...then sneak out and go to the park or take a 3 hour lunch. When you're lost in a large company, it's almost fun to see how much you can get away with. Bring in a portable HD and play games with Portableapps DOSBox, or WinUAE (nothing that installs files on the work PC is the rule). I taught myself Java from downloaded PDF books. And snuck out to take the exam.
Yes, I've actually done all of those things. Not every day, not all the time...but I have had some absolutely excellent slack at big company jobs.
How did it end? I got bored and ran out of stuff to do, the economy turned around...so I found a real job. I actually do prefer to work and I do like what I do. But it was an excellent place to lay low and ride out the dotcom bubble. A lovely paid vacation, I like to think of it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
But not too much!
This Talibanized mentality about programming really has to stop.
People can arrive to the same knowledge by many different ways, it is simply stupid to expect people to arrive to a certain degree of competence by the same means as you did.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Just talk about programming.
It takes 5 minutes to know if the person in front of you is conversant with the field or not.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I use is to ask esoteric questions until the prospective employee is forced to either start bullshitting or say the magic words "I don't know, I would have to look it up".
I ask them to describe some problem they solved that they're particularly proud of. Every coder I've ever wanted to hire has a few inventions they want their peers to know about.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."