How To Get a Job At a Mega-Corp 373
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?
Freelance decker (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd much rather be a freelance decker than work for a megacorps...
Get bought out by them. (Score:3, Insightful)
That way, you can toil for years as you watch them destroy what you've worked on. Highly recommended.....
Orly? (Score:3, Insightful)
With the economic hangover starting to wear off...
Says who?
Slashvertisement? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, be a foreigner (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Why would you want to? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:3, Insightful)
As opposed to the typical geek snide arrogance of thinking they hold the keys and you had better get to ass-kissing if you want your network to work?
Those positions have always been there. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Get bought out by them. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a company that is a buyout target:
Only sell out if there is enough $$$ in it that you don't have to keep working there. Maybe stay for another 6-12 months to ensure a smooth transition, but then get lost. Of course, very few posters here actually have a company that might get bought...
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent 6 months on a "move existing code to different environment" project. Maybe 3 days of it was code changing, the rest was meetings and "engaging" other teams and getting misinformation and basically having to figure out everything myself, or interested parties like the integration people who have to deliver to clients helping figure it out.
At some point, every company moves to short-term cost reductions instead of focusing on maintaining infrastructure for when things pick up again. The first clue you're in trouble is when they fire smart people because they are too expensive. Then the remainder of the smart people see what's happening and jump ship. The few who remain struggle to keep everything afloat, only to get laid off when the company gets bought/merged.
If your potential employer already had its IPO, you're in danger. If it has ever bought another company, you're closer to danger. Short-term planning is responsible for some of the most soul-draining policies and requirements ever to offend humanity by their very existence.
Megacorps (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:2, Insightful)
A linked list consists of a set of structs, objects, or data structures of some sort, each containing, in addition to its own data, a reference to the next in sequence (and to the prior in sequence as well, if it's a doubly-linked list). These references let one iterate over the set of data structures in order to perform operations on each set of data in sequence.
Am I close? I'm only a classics major, not an engineer, but that's what I was able to remember off the top of my head.
Re:Just got out of an interview with HP (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, interviewing with a megacorp that over years found everyone with a clue and fired them is hardly something you can expect to be enjoyable I'd say.
Personally I think HP has a good chance of having damaged themselves permanently unless they can really pour a _huge_ amount of money into HR (which by your story they didn't and won't).
Re:Find a Recruiter (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, I had to pipe up on this one.
Having worked a couple MS contracts myself, and being quite annoyed by the mandatory 3-month break, you're overstating the situation.
MS has you sign an NDA, like most companies do, where you agree not to work on a competing product for a competing company within X amount of time. That's pretty standard, and only bars you from competing directly with the team you were just on.
After one year contracting with MS, you have a mandatory 3-month period of downtime where you cannot contract with MS. This doesn't apply to contract work at any other company. It's a long story, but this came around because of a lawsuit raised by contractors back in the day.
Standard to all the contracting agencies, they have you sign a non-compete saying that for the first month of eligibility for another MS contract, any MS contract you get has to be through them. Agencies used to have non-competes of different lengths, some up to three months or more, but it was recently restricted to a uniform one month across the board.
Re:Slashvertisement? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say the flaw in the article is lack of comprehension or explanation of the hardest part of megacorps. There are many ways to find job postings, and no shortage of advice on interviews. The hardest part of getting employment at ANY of these companies is getting the screening phone call. Before that, maybe there's some magic in a good resume, or magically selecting exactly the right words for the resume, or I dunno what I never figured it out. In my experience: knowing a guy on the inside is really the #1 best way of getting in, that job postings are fulfilling legal requirements but not entirely the right way in the door.
Speaking for myself, I am offered 100% of the jobs that I even get a phone screen for. I am given a phone screen for perhaps less than 5% of the jobs I submit a resume to. So the real trick is figuring out how to bypass that big brick wall of HR resume screening.
Re:Megacorp aside... innovative jobs instead... (Score:3, Insightful)
And why not just the most visionary people you can find?
Age discrimination. Its not just for breakfast or early bird specials anymore.
Re:Freelance decker (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked at a pretty big corporation. And I’ll never do it again.
The simple reason it, that humans are not made for such big social/power structures (yes, that counts for countries too). And the reason for that is, that above a certain number, most of the other people in the group become faceless entities. Which means certain social feedback mechanisms are missing.
Think about what a person in a 30 people tribe (or your group of friends and family) can do and not do, versus what someone in a 300,000 people corporation can do and not do, and you know what I mean.
This mechanisms get replaced by endless meetings over meetings about meetings, micromanaged policies, and people who are banned from having any personal interest in the company as a whole, because they can’t control its direction at all. (Or at least never see an effect.) So they mostly end up doing it for the money. Passively.
While the bosses, having to become experts in management, and lacking proper feedback from their employees (including what’s a bad idea), then make bad decisions.
Now I’m of course not saying that this is always and without exception the case. (Only stupid people are talking in absolutes, or think by default that others do.) But that is the only result that fits with all experience I got, be it first, second or third hand.
In my eyes, those companies are always already dead. The only reason they still are still moving, is their giant inertia. Like a supertanker needs 10 nautical miles at full speed backwards, to get to a halt. Like a giant dinosaur, that takes half a year to completely cool down to ambient temperature.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
SMB all the way.
AMEN to this. I worked at a big semiconductor company. I worked my nuts off and was constantly getting good reviews. Then with some new management, I was forced to train a gang of people overseas and some H1-B's (aka slaves) and then that was all she wrote for my job.
Besides not having h1-b's at the new place, there is another advantage. Since there aren't as many people I don't get pigeon-holed. I constantly get to learn new skills. Hell, I started out as a hardware guy and am now getting to do some web development.
Re:How? The better question is WHY? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know. We get a disturbing number of resumes claiming 20+ years of overall experience who can't seem to code their way out of a wet paper bag. No one on our interviewing team has found a way to distinguish those resumes from the people who are great.
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Explain quicksort? Seriously? That borders on cruel unless they're straight out of college. Those of you who have been out in the workplace more than ten years, raise your hand if you still remember how to write quicksort without looking it up. Heck, half the quicksort algorithms I see published in textbooks have an off-by-one error and don't even work. It's quite possibly the most frequently botched algorithm ever. And you want somebody to explain it cold? You are one sick [expletive deleted]. :-D
Besides, there's no useful reason to know quicksort unless you're applying for a job writing sort algorithms. For 99% of the programming jobs, all that really matters is that when you ask them what sorting algorithm they would use to sort a list of 10,000 items, they had better not say bubble sort or suggest implementing their own algorithm (which will invariably end up looking an awful lot like bubble sort). There are plenty of libraries out there for heapsort, quicksort, etc. that are so trivial to use that it makes knowledge of the algorithms at any depth largely unnecessary.
The purpose of teaching those algorithms is not to have people understand the algorithms themselves, but rather to serve as a gentle introduction into algorithmic complexity and the more broadly useful topics of binary trees and other link-structured data. Expecting people to memorize the details of a particular search algorithm is missing the whole point of why we learn about those algorithms in the first place.
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:2, Insightful)
you will soon come to realize that large defense contractor companies like lockheed, boeing, etc. will hire you on if you can breathe. their profit is generated by a percentage of each man hour worked on a project, not on the completion of the project itself. the more people they have charging to their project, the more money the executives and company makes.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:3, Insightful)
Quicksort? Oh my, I haven't actually had any reason to actually write my own implementation of that since I was a student and I can honestly say that I don't really remember much about it except that it involved splitting an array/a list by picking some point in the list and making sure all elements with a lower/higher (depending on sort order) value end up before that element and then recursively sorting bits and pieces, I definitely don't remember what the best practice for picking where to first split the list is but I'm sure if I ever end up having to write a quicksort function again I could re-learn it pretty quickly.
That said, I don't think throwing a bunch of theoretical concepts at prospective employees is the best way to weed out the incompetent ones, most likely there are lots of competent and experienced developers who, like me, just haven't had any reason to keep the formal definitions of various algorithms and concepts accurately stored in their heads since a lot of that stuff is useful to have encountered if only to have knowledge of its existence but just isn't used in everyday development. So what you end up with if you demand perfect textbook knowledge of every little intricacy of computer science you'll end up hiring a bunch of fresh grads who still have all of it fresh enough in their minds that they are able to explain it by simply quoting their college textbooks, but three years from now they'll have forgotten a lot of those details anyway...
/Mikael
Re:As someone who's just gone through the process (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hell, I started out as a hardware guy and am now getting to do some web development.
I'm sorry to read that.
I hope they don't demote you even further, to janitorial tasks.
I appreciate your position (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:How? The better question is WHY? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, working in a startup is great for the reasons you mentioned. Until the layoffs come, usually about a month after the "down to earth" CEO and sales VP last assured the troops that things looked great, lots of big orders coming, financing looking good, product getting rave reviews etc. And usually we're talking about the first of several rounds of layoffs, each of which cut meat and bone in contrast to the 5 percent layoffs that are becoming more commonplace at bigco.
Re:Other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
But not too much!
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to single them out, but I've found those trained in India to be the worst.
I too have experienced the same. The IIT graduates are by far the worst in this regard. Their heads are so inflated by their "elite" education that it requires only the slightest pinprick of reality to burst their bubble. Personally, I think that this is due to the style and structure of the Indian education system. The IIT graduate will, by the time they have completed their degree, beaten out thousands or even tens of thousands of others (not all qualified mind you) seeking a job in IT (i.e. the proverbial "golden ticket" to the middle and upper classes). The tests required to get into IIT feature massive amounts of rote memorization and obscure problem solving techniques which may have little or no use in real world IT work; serving mostly to eliminate large numbers of applicants. In this way the Indian education system is great at emphasizing rote memorization, but terrible when it comes to teaching critical thinking and creative problem solving skills. Indeed, when these "IITians", as they like to call themselves, are thrown a curve ball; they strike out 9 times out of 10.
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Linked list? Quicksort? You might as well ask them how printf() works. You'll get about as much information about the candidate's ability to think creatively and build large complex systems---basically nothing.
Re:Freelance decker (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also really good advice :D
I've worked for megacorps for over 15 years. It's soulless.
I'm not quite sure I agree with your soulless comment. I've been at a Mega-Corp for almost 25 years now, and I really still enjoy my job. I got lucky when I was hired, and got in with a development group that has always had work to do. I also got lucky and worked for a pretty good boss for the first 8 years (he knew how to shield his people from crap.)
Since then I've had bosses who range from follow-the-3-ring-binder-plan type to some who have more of a sense of humor. Managers have come and gone as they follow the corporate advice to "move around to get ahead", and there's a definite correlation between the ones with longer tenures being the most effective. And I've had co-workers ranging in talent from "So, wet paper bag, you've thwarted me once again, but next time I shall escape!" to "Rock Star!" (seriously, he's a wicked fine coder AND he plays guitar in a metal band.)
So why do I stay? I *choose* to enjoy it. If I chose to hate it, I would hate it, and it would suck, and I'd leave. Instead, I have a very positive attitude about it. Life is too short to work at a job I hate, and if I didn't have an income the rest of life would be pretty damn hard. So if I have something I like to do, something I'm good at doing, something I choose to find rewarding, and I get paid to do it, well that's a winning hand. I'm deliberately going to appreciate it.
Sure, not every day is great, and there are corporate tragedies and comedies, and sometimes the penthouse office gets a bee in their bonnet and hands down their stupid ideas that if we just had one more re-org, everything would be all better; but that's all noise I simply choose to ignore. Let the managers run around all panicky about how many people they will or won't have after their re-org. I don't care. At the end of the day, I'm still doing basically the same thing; maybe for a different boss, but that's almost an inconsequential detail.
Soul exists only when you put it there yourself. And sure, I know it'd be damn hard to remain positive if I worked under a smothering micromanager, or a screaming executive director. But if you report to someone who's fairly reasonable, the only reason you can't thrive is your own choice.
Knuth yet again... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Normal conversation. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just talk about programming.
It takes 5 minutes to know if the person in front of you is conversant with the field or not.
Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance? (Score:3, Insightful)
20yrs commercial experience since I was at Uni and gained my CS degree, most of it programming in C where quicksort is a library call. I had a vague recollection the algorithim involved recursion. I also majored in operations research and even though I passed with flying colours I still don't understand how some of the logistical algorithims work let alone remeber the details. The important part is knowing they exist and recognising where they might be applicable.
"If that's too confusing for you to understand or remember, once it's been taught to you, you should NOT be programming."
I've worked with people who have been in the bussiness for 40yrs, I put it to you that all of them would have forgotten more random trivia than what is currently stored in your head.