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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.
Oh, I figured it out. They hire by getting an ad posted as a story on Slashdot. Go work for Redhat!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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 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.
As someone who's been involved in various stages of the hiring process, my question is, does it work?
I have been involved in hiring hundreds of people, at several different companies, and I have found that idiosyncratic hiring practices rarely help. It is much better to follow the KISS principle:
1. Screen the resumes and pick the top 10%
2. Email them and set up a phone call.
3. Chat for a few minutes, and if you like them, set up a face-to-face interview.
4. If you like them at the interview, and they can demonstrate competence, then offer them a job at the end of the interview.
I have worked for companies that did much more elaborate interviewing, including multiple interviews, lunch meetings, etc. We seldom changed our opinions after the first interview, it was time consuming, and the candidate pool was shrinking as the best people were accepting jobs elsewhere.
I've been out of work for a while, now.
high pay? pay AT ALL? where? when can I start?
(yes, the job market still pretty much sucks. getting better but its not an employee's market yet by any means).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
(yes, the job market still pretty much sucks. getting better but its not an employee's market yet by any means).
If you're good, and you're in the Bay Area, it definitely is. Try something like putting Erlang on your linked in profile if you are having trouble.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
"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
You also have to remember when it comes to technical talent red hat is an open source company and we tend to hire open source people. One huge advantage of open source is we can easily see what people have worked on and contributed. Meaning for most of my coworkers you can plug their name/alias into google and find the projects they work on. Also the communities we work within tend to be quite well connected, for example in the Linux security community we all know each other because we help each other and work on issues together constantly. It makes hiring a lot easier when you can actually see with strong evidence that the person you're hiring is actually capable of doing the job you want to hire them for and even better that they are already a cultural fit.
"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.
Maybe not "idiot", but certainly not anything nice: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/303
-- Linux user #369862