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How Red Hat Hires
New submitter markfeffer, Senior Editor at Dice, writes "Red Hat's hired about 600 people in its last three fiscal quarters, and it's going to keep hiring – about 900 to 1,000 more this year. The company's primarily looking for software and technical support engineers, along with salespeople who can help strengthen its cloud-technology capabilities. They want people with strong technical skills, of course, but the company puts a premium on those who've taken the time to research its business and send in a resume that's custom-tailored to the job opening."
Love this ad by Dice/Red Hat in an attempt to attract talent. I mean, I sure hope it's an ad, because if it's a legit bit of "news" then slashdot's standards have really fallen.
Red Hat Hiring? Oh, from the mobile app, I thought this was an ad for Dice..
As someone who's been involved in various stages of the hiring process, my question is, does it work? It's great to hire people who are interested in the position, I'd do that too. But how do they find people who would be interested in the position? Do they just pay a lot, or what?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wow. Just wow. They're really trying to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, aren't they?
Please cancel my subscription to your newsletter.
And not even very well disguised spam at that - wonder if thats a paid link now where did i put Matt Cuts mail address :-)
Apply at Red Hat through Dice.com
Extensive experience in spelunking, cave diving, labryinth design, byzantine cryptology and chinese calculus.
Must be a self starter able to absord intense criticism, derision and scrutiny.
Prior work experience in self generated realities and distorted truth dimensions a plus.
... News at 11.
Wow - head hunting on Slashdot... Really scraping the bottom of the barrel these days.
I hear that the church of Scientology is having a banner year!
..and journalists at Dice spend the same time writing their "articles"
facing out.
Our new overlords can go fuck themselves if they think the community is going to see this paid ad/posting as "news".
The company's primarily looking for software and technical support engineers, along with salespeople who can help strengthen its cloud-technology capabilities.
Something tells me those words don't mean what you think they mean, unless your salespeople also have technical skills. Either that or they're dead on and "cloud-technology capabilities" literally translates into "we're selling you air" ...
I'm just wondering why you think Red Hat wants to kill open source? I don't think they are trying to kill the goose that is laying their golden eggs. In fact, I'm pretty sure they contribute a lot of development effort to many of the open source projects they use/abuse.
They do charge for what's generally available for free in some folks view, but they are a model for how you can make money from Open Source (at least one way. And a quick search on Google would surely lead anybody who didn't already know to CentOS which distributes a Red Hat free distribution that matches Red Hat's distribution down to the jot and tittle (sans the Red Hat Trade mark and Copyrighted art work).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Holly slashvertisment BATMAN! Did you just see what I saw? Not one, not two, but three links to Dice.com!
... I've ever spent literally days preparing a job application online and had the rejection response almost faster than I clicked the submit button.
It was truly soul destroying.
A premium on those who research their business... Hmmm...
Jx
Its all down to the cover letter,
In the first paragraph, you want job X: Tick
You have Y years experience in similar area: Tick
You have a degree: Tick
You say something to show you are keen: Tick
You go into the pile for second look (or get another 20 seconds, the next few paragraphs will get you from that 20 seconds into the second look pile)
New submitter markfeffer, Senior Editor at Dice, writes
Not even trying to hide things anymore? Fail Dice ad is fail.
I'm just wondering why you think Red Hat wants to kill open source?
Two words. Lennart Poettering.
See also systemd and pulseaudio. Or better yet, ask Linus himself.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
It's weird, they want to receive CVs from people who have done their homework on them. The outcome of that is that they will receive CVs that are tailored to their view, which really just means that they will receive CVs that are custom-tailored to manipulate them. Unless all you want is salespeople, I just don't see how that is a good thing. They should instead strip all CVs of all but standard information and format it in a standard way in order to prevent all that manipulation from reaching the people who make the hiring decisions.
Congratulations to Red Hat though I definitely won't among the hires. I am uninterested.
Here's why:
Most of these tech companies require that a [new] hire remains up-to-date. This isn't the problem, though. The problem is that the costs involved are pushed to the employee. The time/energy spent is enormous. If one has little ones, it's worse.
Time came when I was absent minded, thinking about a function that just could not work properly. Exposure to newer ways of solving tasks like the one I had would have helped, but I had to foot the initial cost!! Imagine that in this economy. My company agreed to reimburse the costs if I passed, and remained with them for at least 2 more years. In the mean time, deadlines were exerting enormous pressure.
Guess what, I quit, and I am a happier fella.
I do not, will not, customize a resume for Red Hat. The Starship Enterprise could be flying over and hiring, but they would get standard and that is that.
Those who have spent any serious time applying for jobs know that numbers matter. It is ALL a numbers game. There may be ten thousand, or maybe a hundred thousand, people who will apply for the position who technically qualify. The job market is overflowing with programmers who have "mad skillz" (and maybe even spelling skills). The odds of getting the job are very very slim and you will have taken 8 hours to customize the resume, format it perfectly, etc. It takes about 2 minutes to fire off the appropriate standard resume (I assume you've three or four standard resumes) and a marginally modified cover letter.
Assuming the probability of getting a specific job is about the same, you do the maths on which is the more productive approach.
Sure, Red Hat is a major prize, but so is the lottery. And you know how that is a really crappy investment.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've been put off Red Hat since they made Gnome their preferred desktop environment.
I was genuinely interested in what RedHat were looking for and especially curious to see what the implied clever resume was. This "article" is just bad form.
You're better off not sending them your resume.
Captcha: leftists. Yup.
I'm just wondering why you think Red Hat wants to kill open source?
Two words. Lennart Poettering.
See also systemd and pulseaudio. Or better yet, ask Linus himself.
I think Lennart Poettering's work on PulseAudio and Systemd is superb. PulsAudio just plain works; sound has never been so easy and flexible in Linux. /init can't die fast enough in my opinion. Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Arch Linux and many lesser distroes, have all ditched it in favour of modern solutions.
Sys V
Claiming that Red Hat want to kill Open Source is just plain pathetic. RH is _THE_ major contributor to Linux, both with their own projects and up stream contributions. They have always been unwavering staunch in their belief and support of Open Source.
pulseaudio sucks donkey balls. It plain works unless it doesn't, in which case you're fucked. Fortunately plain ALSA works as good as ever and since I first encountered pulseaudio I've kept it off my systems and I haven't had any problems.
So it's the PHB who run the show the that means that the minimum of five years’ experience and other BS like we want a masters or phd comes from non tech managers?
Staffing firm? also interviews are to be a 2 way thing not just looking for a seat filler.
I had something like that one a quick phone call from a Staffing / outsourcing firm and then a few days later a call saying why are you not in city that is like 150 miles away in the phone call they said maybe some places up to about 75 miles away. And I did not even fill out any paper work at all.
Some times when they want to hire with just a phone call it may be a scam or a body shop where it's sink of swim or at times you get on site and they say we don't have the funds for you to go into the position you where hired for.
Why? Their support is terrible. Don't waste your money. Go with CentOS and hire a good admin.
pulseaudio sucks donkey balls. It plain works unless it doesn't, in which case you're fucked. Fortunately plain ALSA works as good as ever and since I first encountered pulseaudio I've kept it off my systems and I haven't had any problems.
I was an early adopter of PulseAudio since I used Fedora Core. Yes I had problems in the beginning, but only because I used my uncommon internal audio chip. When I used an old, but common and well supported SB 16 card, my problems went away. Really, if you still have problems with PulseAudio, it is because your distro or the audio chip drivers sucks.
Not only does PulseAudio works, it provides features and benefits that ALSA/ OSS /ESD /ArtsD doesn't have. PulseAudio is an elegant solution to the many problems Linux used to have with its audio system. Come on, who doesn't want individual audio level settings for each program?
Having worked at Red Hat in 2 different departments, I can certainly say that this article is 100% bullshit.
Last line in the article:
"In essence, Red Hat wants to know that you’re going to make a commitment to the job, not simply get a bit of experience and jump somewhere else
Dice News in Tech"
RedHat takes full advantage of it's brand to sucker and lure unsuspecting and gullible people into working long hours for low pay. Everyone is overworked at the low to mid levels, management is dysfunctional, and voicing your own "ideas" is a frowned upon form of insubordination that is likely to get you blacklisted/fired.
If you want to form a real opinion about the worklife there without a bunch of marketing nonsense, take a look through the reviews on glassdoor.com: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Red-Hat-Reviews-E8868.htm
How dare a Linux & open source company try to hire employees and make money! Who do they? Decadent monsters.
BURN THEM AT THE STAKE!
"Come on, who doesn't want individual audio level settings for each program?"
Me. WTF do I need that for? My system sounds just fine, always has although audio is rarely used. Mostly just in connection with multimedia apps, and the login screen. That's it.
ALSA did everything I needed for years, and ESD/OSS before that. As a user I really don't give a rat's ass how the code looks behind it all, as long as it works, which it did.
As far as SysVinit, same idea - it worked, and worked very well for decades. I still have no use for fast booting since I rarely if ever reboot. And I fail to see what other use there is for tinkering with something that worked just fine - I liked the old scripts since they were very self-documenting and easily modifiable.
So, no. Keep it.
C|N>K
GNOME Shell is an usability nightmare and it's all the work of morons at Red Hat who know nothing about UI. They should fire Allan Day and all who worked on the GNOME Shell design and hire actual UI experts.
Does anyone happen to know what the salary is that they're offering for tech support? I suspect it's not even worth my time. I do tech support in a primarily unix environment and I earn about $150k per year. From home. (Well, from a houseboat, usually). Something tells me that Red Hat doesn't even remotely compete with that.
"Come on, who doesn't want individual audio level settings for each program?"
Me. WTF do I need that for? My system sounds just fine, always has although audio is rarely used. Mostly just in connection with multimedia apps, and the login screen.
The point is that PA allows unobtrusive audio clues, like a gentle "ding ding" 10 minutes before an appointment, even though you are listening to fairly loud music. I like the fact the sound levels in VLC and Amarok is different from the rest of the system.
Before PA there wasn't a functional sound daemon, so everybody just turned off any sound notifications and manually set the sound level to zero to avoid a sudden blast of noise when accidental starting a web commercial, or when "System Bell" gave a extremely loud warning "DING!" just because you had been listening to load music earlier that day.
Not talking about the problems with running sound i Dosbox, or using two apps with sound at the same time, bluetooth sound, etc. PA solved all those problems, it just works and makes life easier for developers, distro makers and end users, which is the reason why all major Linux distributions have converted to it.
People trash talk PA, but it just that, trash talk, without technical argumentation, without any alternative to the many features that PA gives, and without regard to the fact that PA works well in the real world.
That's it.
ALSA did everything I needed for years, and ESD/OSS before that. As a user I really don't give a rat's ass how the code looks behind it all, as long as it works, which it did.
As far as SysVinit, same idea - it worked, and worked very well for decades. I still have no use for fast booting since I rarely if ever reboot. And I fail to see what other use there is for tinkering with something that worked just fine - I liked the old scripts since they were very self-documenting and easily modifiable.
So, no. Keep it.
SystemD goes way, way beyond the wish of faster booting. It really is a Sysadmins dream come true when it comes to controlling the many services (not just daemons) that runs on modern Linux systems. "systemctl" is just a natural, UNIX like way of controlling all these services from the command line or in scripting. "init/Sys V" was perhaps a fitting system for the needs of Unix boxes in the 1980's, but modern day servers and desktop systems have other needs, and init scripts are complicated, messy and fragile to edit. SystemD is just so coherent and natural to use, and allows far superior ways of maintaining, configuring, and monitoring systems.
I think your main problem is, that make your own way of using your system, a baseline for everybody else. You may not use sound very much, but many people actually do, you probably don't use bluetooth sound on your system, but many Linux devices, like smartphones do, you may not have the need to tweak init scripts, or administrating or monitoring services on a server, but other people do.
Where did Linus say anything like that about Lennart? Not doubting your words, just genuinely curious.
Maybe not "idiot", but certainly not anything nice: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/303
-- Linux user #369862
Now how about Novell/SUSE and Canonical?
-- Linux user #369862
First off, I didn't say that was my belief. I was playing devil's advocate by answering the question in a way that *many* people in the open source community would agree with.
:D
I don't have a problem with systemd per se, but the breakage introduced into udev is unacceptable and Lennart's attitude towards anyone that disagrees with him is not only insulting but degrading as well. All in all he makes a poor representative for a premier Linux company and I am surprised RH has put him in that position. There are also concerns about Lennart's attention span and how quickly he delegates major projects to a maintainer only to move on to the next big thing.
Systemd is also obfuscated and counter-intuitive in many areas. Having all of your startup located in one directory in nice human readable scripts certainly has its advantages. Systemd also has its advantages as well - quick boot due to parallel execution of init, service dependencies, etc...
The other thing that concerns me with systemd, as explained by Lennart, is not only providing the ability to boot a shell-less system but striving towards that as the end goal. That I have a problem with. If I wanted to use Windows, I know where to find it.
Pulseaudio is one of those things I guess either works out of the box and you love it or is a complete nightmare to set up and you end up hating it. I fall into both camps having had both experiences. Maybe I just love to hate it
I recently switched over from Gentoo to Arch Linux on several of my machines just so I could wrap my head around systemd (amongst other things). I also like the idea of a rolling distribution with *less* compilation time. Once I understood systemd and its underpinnings it is not so bad and remains mostly out of my way. Changing the naming convention of network devices that has been in place for decades really pissed me off at first and Arch's decision to drop net-tools by default (really???) did not help matters in this regard.
The jury is still out on pulseaudio in my book.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
The link to the article (that's custom-tailored) that talks about customizing your resume refers to a study conducted by TheLadders.com, a recruiting agency. There are no details there as to how the study was conducted and no way to determine whether or not the results are in any way significant. YMMV.
First time, they flew me out, rented me a car, interviewed me for over 5 hours. Once I arrived at the HQ on campus at NC State, I wasn't allowed to leave. I wasn't given anything to eat. I was given a bottle of "red hat" water (I took 2 more as I left to get on my return flight). So needless to say, once the HR rep came around (she was the last interviewer) I was pretty tired and pretty snippy because I hadn't eaten anything all day (the person who was going to be my boss was to take me out to lunch, but he didn't. He just left after interviewing me). I didn't make a good impression, and frankly, I'm glad I don't work there. That was my first experience. The 2nd interview (for a different position) went mildly better, but they hired local, and I was out of state. I'm sure most people don't care one whit about this, but just figured I'd share my experience.
I have nothing clever to put here...
Dice needs to be very careful in how it does its gorilla marketing. Red Hat is a good company and has contributed ALOT to the Linux community; nonetheless these type of stories will drive techies to other sites.
One problem I have with Red hat is that they exhibit blatant ageism. I'm 61. They were looking for simple Sys Admins, something I've done for 30 years with SCO, then Solaris then Linux, specifically Red hat Linux. I could do this job in my sleep. As soon as I walked in I could see from the look on the hiring managers face that I wasn't going to get the job. Same thing happened to tow of my buddies. It's unfair, illegal and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. I fully understand why a 40 something manager doesn't want to "manage" a 60 something employee but I just want the world to know that I won't be recommending Red Hat to anyone anymore. In fact I just converted my new company from the Dark Side to Debian.
- the avenger