Slashdot Mirror
What EMC Looks For When It's Hiring
Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com, writes
"Because EMC has expanded through more than 70 acquisitions in eight years — it was hiring even during the recession — and because many of the acquired companies were startups, it is trying to leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative. People it hired 'need to be able to move fast and run,' Thus, a key to getting the company's attention is to prove you can do what you say you can. In other words, when Murray asks if you can work fast, you can't just say yes. You'll have to use your previous achievements to prove that you can."
I see advertisements like this will be standard for now on, I guess I'll be taking my pageviews elsewhere then...
Well there goes 98% of potential candidates from here ...
Whenever I rush myself, I make mistakes, miss things, etc.. I end up not doing a good job.
Isn't prioritizing speed a bad thing? Better to do the job right than fast.
What EMS is looking for when hiring:
Demonstrate value
Inspire Hope
C++
Engage Physically
Seriously, between this and the amateur hour CBAQ for a minecraft server earlier, I'd have been better served going to pornwall instead of /.
when Murray asks if you can work fast
Yeah just what I want in my storage gear, the fastest to market. Eh, reliability, long life, ease of use, who needs that stuff.
I think I'm done here...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That is why Network Appliance is killing these guys.
Maybe this article was posted to the wrong site by mistake? Just delete it and we'll pretend we didn't notice.
...give as a fuck who this guy says? Community manager?
What they're really after is people who will work 60+ hour weeks for low pay. Oh, and if you have some computer skills too, that's good.
Developers and engineers are ASSETS. Almost all of them will fit a normalized Bell Curve. That means that someone claiming they perform 10x faster than someone else is typically just full of it, or does a sloppy job. Further, engineers don't need to prove their worthiness, if they passed their interviews and are competent, then they are good. They certainly shouldn't be bragging about how fast they did something. Clear, clean solutions without any bugs are hard to find, and worth their weight in gold. I'd run, run very fast from a company talking like that.
I fear for the future of the US in the hardware/software space. We already work more hours than most other countries, now we have to do a timed obstacle course?
Who the eff is EMC??? Why hasn't anyone ever heard of them before?
Have you ever read the story of the goose that laid the golden egg?
There's never enough time to do it well the first time, but there is always enough time to do it again.
Dice thinks they are being smart to try to mask a plug for a company. They did it with redhat and now emc. It has already left a bad taste in my mouth and overtime I'll come here less and less.
If you are the smart guys at DICE you have been told.
Ironic a company that wants fast would keep a candidate waiting for two and half hours in a barely air conditioned lobby. I only stayed because the recrutor begged me to stay. I asume he had some quota to fill. Finally some frat brother type finally arrives to give me a precusory 15 minute meeting which he wraps up by telling me all the reasons he doesn't like me. Needless to say I haven't exactly hurt myself advocating anything EMC in the last ten years.
When I woke up this morning, I realized that I wasn't dealing with enough competing corporate factions, and that my boss wasn't tracking my performance closely enough. In the past I'd given consideration to getting involved in slavery, but most of the options out there didn't align with my professional goals. Thank you, /., for giving me this career lead.
If EMC says can you suck their micro shaft fast. I sure there will be a line around the block.
Please go fuck yourself. That's all.
Wow, what an unbelievably horrible story. Everyone: we need to send a message to /.'s newest corporate overlords. If you don't have mod points, post a comment saying how shitty this is. Seriously -- one line is fine. If you do have mod points, mod up every comment that says so. I want to see 1,000 comments and 100 +5s by the end of the night. MAYBE they'll notice.
Posting anon so no one thinks I'm just karma whoring. I've been coming here 15 years, mainly for the comments, but enough crap like this and I'll quit reading because I know all the smart people who give a shit won't stick around.
Who else would promote a job with a company thats acquired 10 times a year as some kind of golden ticket? Every one of those acquisitions comes with layoffs and a whole new, cheaper staff - that's what nimble is a codeword for.
I listed my resume on Dice once, about 5 years ago. Worst mistake of my life. I don't even live in the US anymore, and still get about 2 dozen spams from con artist "head hunters" telling me about the latest exciting opportunity to be fucked over by some two week contract in timbucktoo.
Now I get spam on /. too! Hip hip hooray!
They love it if you have an H1B. In fact, it seems like almost all positions on Dice.com require an H1B or they won't give you the time of day.
leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative
A hint to the recruiters and advertisers at Dice.com and EMC: Slashdot readers generally aren't very impressed by this sort of Bullshit Bingo. These phrases you're spewing are designed to sound impressive, but they don't actually mean much of anything – other than "I've got an MBA and I'm trying desperately to prove my worth."
People it hired 'need to be able to move fast and run
Translation: They exploit the hell out of their employees.
Clearly my preferred strategy of studying problems, thinking about them, and writing a solution that correctly solves all the problems we can come up with would be utterly unacceptable there. They clearly prefer the strategy of "rapid prototyping", dealing with only a few problems (probably those that customers have reported), and not much bothering with testing the "solution" before delivering it.
It's good to know such things before applying for a job.
And their strategy does seem rather common in the business world, which explains the large percentage of buggy, poorly-designed stuff that we see all the time.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Almost every company I ever worked for fear competent people.
They identify them early and the managers smear you with shit before you can even shine.
This occured with an EMC subsidiary, VMware were two managers on my floor were sociopaths. Made life very interesting. They were not interested in what was good for the company but what made their bonusses inflate. These sociopaths were in Burlington, Ontario and the VP of the diviision may Kim Il Jong look like a very subtle egoless individual.
When I dared take a risk and moved up the food chain to expose the incompetence, I was shortly terminated. Many of the new procedures increased our case time thru poor tool selection while pressure was increased due to increased business to terminate cases in shorter order. In essence VMware became Microsoft to say reboot your machine and things will be fine. BS -- funny how much of the management where ex-MS people who had no concept of UNIX-RT kernel issues which vmware was loosely based on. They also raised the barriours to log new bugs and during my period there working on failure cases, the time to resolving failures increased from 1-2 months to 6-12 months because the teams resolving the issues were moved overseas where there was a resistance to resolve issues.
In another company, I on my third day of employment I exposed 20 failure points that would escalate to various serious issues -- of course being a good employee one does not blow away a design without providing a solution. Did that in a 5 page memo -- every criticism had a solution. I was yelled at and screamed at by the VP for a good hour using every major expletive possible on who the f*** I was. One year later all 20 failure points exploded into 20 major forest fires -- I was brought into a tiger team to resolve the issues and eventually I brought up my previous memo -- the VPs freaked, the President/CEO was shocked and wanted to meet with me when he came back from vacation -- was terminated mid-way thru his vacation. Suspected it was cover your a** time.
No -- companies do NOT want you to expose their weaknesses because it marks the previous management and it affects the present bonusses of the present management.
This is just major HR boulderdash. Just total BS to identify people they really don't want.
This was written by somebody who has no experience in a major corporation.
my two cents.
A frustrated engineer with 30+ years experiense.
Isn't it them who bought Slashdot? And now we see them on the front page every week? What a coincidence... What good is a news source without so much as a veil of neutrality?
If anything, these thinly veiled plugs just show that Dice, itself, is trying to "leverage the dynamic culture" of /. Keep it up Dice and you know who else needs "to be able to move fast and run"? Everyone visiting this site because they have better things to do than read non-articles like this.
Not EMC! Had to deal with them on multiple products at my last job and they were horrible. Their own professional services people would tell us so regularly. Their salesmen consistently lied about product capabilities and management at my company ate it up. Millions of dollars were given to them for what amounts to shelfware and their storage was swapped out for Hitachi because it also didn't live up to the promises. But because they're a "partner company" it was the ops department's job to eat as much shit as EMC could spew at us and like it.
All I got was spam from the site and spam from recruiters asking if I want to move to texas for a 3 month contract to write code to test Ruby on rails deployments for 60 hours a week at $15 an hour. Now that dice.com owns slashdot and all I see is spam for me to work 60 hours a week to test whatever company has the most openings on their website. Synopsis: Dice is an evil spam monster of a company and has infected an old favorite of mine. Conclusion: I'm not going to use this website anymore.
My wife worked there for several years. One friend commented when she started that it was a great place to have on your resume, since you'd be looking for a job after the layoff came. Sure enough, layoff comes, she gets a package, and now people are impressed that she worked there. The culture was best described as "macho", her management was from the "mushroom management" school, and the outsourcing stories hilarious. I'm amazed the place stays open.
Any corporation like this loves yes men. Have heard from colleagues who work there -- EMC is a hell hole. They fear people who expose problems and promote people who give a stamp of approval.
...and here was me thinking the editors had no shame...
I been coming here since 1999. And now would like to move on. Can you recommend any other sites. I would really love to move on.
Thanks.
EMC is the worst IT company for support I have ever dealt with. Perhaps that's what they look for when they hire?
Back in those days, Slashdot didn't have ads about working for Red Hat, EMC or other massive corporations that care little for individuals in the face of lengthy, restrictive HR policies.
Hey, it's stopped working!
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
The article is pure BS.
EMC is a *BIG* company. This means a lot of things. One of which is they have more divisions. Every division is a different and diverse as companies themselves are. Different divisions have different departments, groups etc. All have different needs, different people, hire for different reasons, etc. There is no "one type" that "EMC" looks for.
Also, as with big companies - you have an extreme range of skillsets, talents wants and needs. You have people at all ends of the bell-curve. Some are fantastic, some are lousy, most are somewhere in the middle.
Everything in a "big company" tends to become diluted.
When did that start?
Not a username just a mailto link. Not part of the community. Just an orbital megaphone broadcasting advertising blurb for the parent company.
I've been visiting Slashdot less and less, and stories like this show me I've been making the right choice. So where is the core audience moving to?
Now, not only do I know never to post a profile on Dice.com and never search Dice.com for potential employees, I should also never ever accept a job offer from EMC. And probably should also avoid using their products if I can manage it, since they show all the signs of making their tech team work insane hours to churn out overpriced garbage.
I am officially gone from
feedback@slashdot.org
I sent an email from my work address. Maybe everyone else that sees this dribble should too.
...and so does this AD.
The only other tech site worth a damn & with original content, I believe, is Ars Technica. But the community discussion isn't as good as Slashdots [was?] - probably because it's not threaded.
You're putting nails in the coffin that was Slashdot one article at a time.
I am shocked people actually believe the original post.
This is exactly what corporations do not want -- all points are directions for termination. EMC included. It is obviously a propaganda piece.
The MBA's in charge believe in slash and hack and their intermediate managers love people who will vouch for them -- not make them look bad.
What planet did the original poster come from?
My wife works for EMC. Its a terrible company. I tell her all the time that EMC strives for mediocrity. Theyve screwed her over on pay since the day she started while we've watched her hiring manager hire all his/her unqualified buddies into support positions when they know as much about IT as my 90 year old grandmother. There's a reason everyone is abandoning ship for NetApp and Cloudera. If you're fresh out of school, EMC might be a good starting point. If you're working towards a career, look elsewhere.
a few more "stories" like this and slashdot is toast
good job, assholes
Posting an ad as if it were an article is not product placement, it is fraud.
I worked for EMC for several years, including 2008-2010, when they cut pay 10%, then merely restored it the next year without any increase, and then gave a mediocre raise; effectively no raise for three years, not to mention when you factor in inflation. Through that period they still managed double digit revenue and profit increases.
As soon as the job market improved I moved – fast – to another company. Ironically my boss and his boss weren't as thrilled with my speed then.
I know a total psychotic who spent 2 or 3 years at EMC. Eventually, they fired him. Avoid that place like the plague - anyone who would fall for this guy has no idea what they're doing.
Slashdot should not be doing advertising like this.
Moreover- what a shitty article! EMC want's smart people, who do great things. Not just anyone!
This is so poorly written they should fire this guy Murray for allowing this, the whole PR staff for being involved and the writer of the article for being a moron. Really, does this make anyone say "wow, I really want to work there!"
This reflects really bad on EMC which is actually a pretty solid company.
EMC is the new CA
Why would anyone want to work for EMC? Everything they make is overpriced crap touted as "enterpriseware" for gullible pointy haired executives. I very much doubt the company culture is nurturing to geeks.
Ironic to hear them talking about what they look for when they're hiring - they just laid off a lot of people from their main company (and I think also from VMware.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A friend of mine started working there after they acquired his previous employer. He was forced to walk across burning coals as part of some crazy indoctrination. EMC is fucked.
As with any company, your quality of life depends on your boss. Mine sets realistic quarterly goals, which I've met every quarter since starting there (yes I work for EMC). I occasionally work a few extra hours a week around product launches, or to do extra testing, but it is a few weeks per quarter at most. Our software engineers? Yeah they have it rough at times but they are paid well too, and their work is tied to products worth billions (makes the resume look good). Plus I have an office, no dress code (in our NC office anyway), onsite workout facility, and other perks. Best job I've had 13 years into my career.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
FTA, it appears to "people who aren't, you know, old." Between the lines, that message came through loud and clear.
Check out Reddit. The site works much better than Slashdot (especially the moderation system), the only problem is that the tech forums aren't as active.
How about DRDC?
Didn't read, Don't care.
--
Had to deal with those wizards as part of my day job.
They made the comcast robots sound useful.
Perhaps needless to say, my company found a different vendor for our multi million dollar backup solution.
No brain, no pain.
Gentlemen, the State of the ./ is SOLD OUT.
Dice. This crap came from dice. Dice stop it before you go too far.
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
Any company earning more than 50 million a year has no IDEA what it means to move 'fast'. I work for a certain tech company in NJ and we know how to be 'agile' and move fast. Go to hell EMC, and go to hell slashdot for being a sellout. What the hell happened to you?
Holy shit...I actually had a comment deleted. I'm not making this up. I flamed dice.com for making stories up and EMC for being a garbage company to work for and slashdot removed my post.
Seriously, before DICE bought /. it seemed like I just didn't have enough time to catch up on all the articles I wanted to. Now I'm lucky if there's two or three articles a week that are interesting enough for even a second glance. And now this shit? Terrible...
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
its code words.
when I hear a company (who has money) act like they are a startup, I immediately think 'sweat shop'.
9 times out of 10, I'm right, too.
if you can afford proper staffing, there is NO REASON to 'rush' your people.
unless your culture is such; and then, I want no part of you.
rushing is for 5-50 man startups. NOT large companies.
have fun burning out your employees. we know you don't care.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Bring it on ... more spam/advertisement posts like this will kill Slashdot presto.
Reader since 1999
Ah sorry, I couldn't resist.
This middle-manager speak is a stereotypical example of what obedient group-thinkers regurgitate in the hope of kicking other competitors of the same ilk, off the hill they're climbing; they could be selling cheese, or trading pebbles, or running an "app startup" and it wouldn't make a difference. Just the same bullshit bingo, while engineers are kept down in the basement, getting a bone thrown every now and then...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
reddit. its all i got.
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Feb/45
Why would we trust this company to have anything of worth to contribute with such a severe technical deficit...
Fuck you!
...and was in a rather bad financial situation for that, too, due to the lack of preparedness. Guess what kind of companies I did not apply to? The kind that post this kind of crap.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The "lack" in the tech part is more than made up for by other parts of the site, the AMAs tend to be rather good. So far it is the best alternative I have found to (the old and good) Slashdot.
......in one of the specialist teams. We had a good team dynamic with only a handful of people in it but we were all making a difference and felt like we were. Then they made a number of management changes in a relatively short space of time and put a number of assholes in charge that totally destroyed what team dynamic had previously existed. When I left the team was nothing but a shadow of its former self being controlled by numbers and no one felt that they were actually being listened to. Many good people left that team. Some are still with EMC and others moved on to new pastures mostly due to dissatisfaction with the management.
Almost as bad as IBM. We'll never go with them again.
With clear data and compute specification, the sales and 'specialists' said it was easy and could put something in place that would last and expand well into the future. We received a terrible storage solution (don't know who signed off on it). Didn't (couldn't) scale and didn't perform. When things went wrong with it, they couldn't even diagnose it. What was the point of the support contract? Truly awful.
Never again. Avoid at all costs.
.
kthx.
Judging from my interactions with EMC over the last year, the bar is extremely low for being hired at EMC. It took over 4 months to get a VNX installed, and apparently this required 20+ people from EMC. I am NOT exaggerating. EMC drone #1 to rack the equipment. EMC drone #2 to install the O/S. EMC drone #4 to install the replication software. #5 to "design" the replication. #6 and #7 to implement the replication. #8 to "design" nightly snapshots. #9 and #10 to implement the snapshot design. And on and on and on. It's amazing that they are still in business.
Even now, my VNX is not working correctly & I have been trying for over a week to get someone on-site to look at it (and I'm in a MAJOR metropolitan area - it's not like they have to fly someone out to the wilderness of Alaska).
Luckily they haven't destoyed Isilon, which they aquired not too long ago - great product, great experience with tech support.
Video footage and musical soundtrack:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4ZxR1C0xmc
Captions:
00:14 The Slashdot Community has eyes that exceed human spectra, to root out commercialist cause and effectra.
01:00 Once a burrow is excavated, all attention is focused on preparing defenses. Using found objects of technological innovation and nerd society, it is trying to leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative.
02:02 Here we see Slashdot decorate its burrow with one of its most cherished objects, the brain of Linus Torvalds.
02:21 A member of the Microsoft benchmark team uses the the brain of Linus Torvalds as cover, attempting to infiltrate the burrow with stats that prove that Windows gives comparable server performance to linux.
02:30 Slashdot attacks the benchmark infiltrator devouring stats and all. Slashdot asks if you can work fast, you can't just say yes. You'll have to use your previous achievements to prove that you can. Microsoft failed to prove its case. Slashdot spits out the GUI mess in a fury of determined resolve.
03:00 Slashdot's greatest foe is the Corporate Recruiter Lionfish, a formidable adversary who seeks to gather intelligent minds into coordinated pursuits of innovation. The price is dear for its victims are soon bound tightly to Nondisclosure Agreements. But it is a magnificent sight as its spines of available startup capital warn other Corporations that they's rather not step on it. The Recruiter Lionfish tests the defenses of Slashdot's burrow. The defenses hold, and poor Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com is met with a brutal and frenzied response.
03:45 Its fortress also serves as camouflage. Here we see an NFL recruiter passing over the burrow as the thriving Slashdot Community hidden within goes completely unnoticed. Politics and sporting culture find it impossible to penetrate its topic defenses unless they present some technical challenge or have suffered an IT disaster.
04:15 Finally we see Slashdot making forays into the world to gather properly vetted discussions to place into its firehose.
All rights reserved. Trademarks cited herein remain sole property of their various evil corporate overlords.
Of whom --- it would seem --- we would welcome --- I, for one.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I interviewed with them, on their request. I was asked a hypothetical question:
"Suppose you are at a customer and you as consultant know that product A is the best fit. However, your sales wants to sell product B because it makes a better margin for EMC (or closes that guy's target, who knows). What will you advice the customer?"
I will always advice what's best for the customer. Honesty will always pay in the long run. But not for EMC. They expect you to advice what is best for EMC, right there and then.
That was the moment I decided EMC and I are not compatible.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
...is a meat grinder.
.
I thought that the code that runs this
.
Going to slashcode.com gives us a page with the newest comment dated October 2009 that tell us to go to sourceforge: http://slashcode.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=slashcode/slashcode;a=tree;h=refs/heads/live;hb=live
where the Changes folder has stuff as new as 2003! and the Slash folder has changes from 2009-09-16. So that's the date that slashcode started to wilt, eh, if not die from lack of attention. Seems like I got to the party too late! (since I just found out about this place last year in the summer and just joined up / registered in september last year!) At least the archived articles are interesting, and everynow and then there are some cool articles visited by 30 people like reading from the ROM masks directly!
Wow, this sucks. But I'm not happy with OSNews either. I don't know what EMC looks for when hiring. But I know what I'm looking for: a new tech site.
Anybody want to help me build the new slashdot? I'm serious. Contact me at the address listed in my website. I don't think we need huge corporate sponsorship, we just need a bunch of interested nerd who value good comments and interesting articles.
Ready to fork this sucker?
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
In other words, when Murray asks if you can work fast, you can't just say yes. You'll have to use your previous achievements to prove that you can.
Yeah, that's not quite how it worked in my interviews with EMC. Did I get asked about projects that I worked on? For the most part, no.
I did get asked to write a lot of code on a white board. That's how software is designed these days, right? And we all rewrite sort (and other basic algorithms) from scratch rather than use highly optimized libraries, right?
... send more employees....
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I won't tolerate this kind of crap that mixes journalism and advertising (they need to stay separate as possible) because money taints journalism every time. Buh-bye Slash-rot.
In my experience, there's plenty of articles posted there in the tech sections, plus it's much, much, much better laid out (e.g., there's a separate "Linux" subreddit at /r/Linux where you can read Linux-specific articles, there's a separate "science" subreddit, a separate "technology" subreddit, there's probably Windows and Apple ones too if you're into that, etc. Unlike Slashdot where everything is mushed together in one, plus stupid slashvertisements like this dumb EMC article here). The "lack" is that there isn't nearly as much posting activity in the comments. However, there also seem to be far, far fewer trolls, so it balances out somewhat. It probably helps that Reddit doesn't have the idiotic Slashdot moderation system where only certain people get mod points sometimes, and then aren't allowed to post in the same discussion that they use their mod points in; of course, this does make it more of a popularity contest (unpopular posts get modded way down), but that's still better than the broken system that Slashdot has, as obvious trolls and shills will get modded down to negative points.