Beware Red Hat interviews: You'll pay for coffee, lunch and fuel Want a job at Red Hat? If so, prepare to buy your interviewer coffee, lunch and maybe even the petrol needed to drive to the coffee shop. That's what happened to the company's CEO Jim Whitehurst when he was interviewed by his predecessor Matthew Szulik. In an extract from his imminent tome “The Open Organization”, Whitehurst …
You are expected to:
1. hire a corporate jet and fly them to a 7 star Dubai hotel.
2 . lay on complementary female entertainment (wink wink)
3. find jobs for said FIFA person's immediate and extended family
4. start a shell company in the Cayman Islands
5. buy a Sepp Blatter T-shirt and mug
6. understand the offside rule (optional)
7. NOT go on holiday to the USA.
"for a company that makes a business of exploiting other people's efforts for free"
You cannot exploit open source software unless you're breaching the license it was released under. If I release software for free and say anyone can do what they like with it, you doing what you like with it is not exploiting me, regardless if you're profiting from my work.
On the flip side of that Red Hat contribute massive amounts of code under those same open source licenses which plenty of other companies use (not exploit).
This is the nature of open source.
> The very nature of open source is
May I respectfully ask what is the extent of your open source development experience? Because at 20 years into it and counting, as a user, developer, sponsor, and customer, I find your "view" of the nature of open source rather at odds with mine.
For that matter, may I ask about the extent of your closed source development experience?
> The very nature of open source is to exploit someone else work.
The very nature of closed source is to exploit the workers to build up large companies and benefit senior managers / shareholders.
> That's why so worshipped by greed people, those who liked a lot to be paid for their work, but don't like at all to pay for someone's else.
Actually it is more about the freedom. If I don't like what gnome team are doing, then there is unity, cinammon, kde, etc. to choose from.
If I don't like Vista, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, etc. then the only choice is XP an increasingly risky choice. With linux if I really prefer 2.0, I can stay there.
When I look back at that meeting now, I realize that Szulik and Cunningham were just being open and treating me like any other person they may have had coffee or lunch with or got gas with.
The normal, open people I have lunch with would make damn sure they had money on them to pay their share of the bill before going out to lunch, and would be embarrassed if they found they couldn't pay. This sounds more like some perverse kind of "amusing" test.
Job interviews are as much about an employer selling themselves to you, as they are about you selling yourself to a potential employer.
If the execs start cheaping out like that before you've even joined the company, what are they going to be like once you've joined ?
I've been ripped off by companies who offered to pay interview expenses, then changed their mind. One of them made the mistake of contacting me on LinkedIn the other week - "Not a chance, I'm not travelling halfway across the country for you to waste my time and rip me off again !"
That bridge wasn't so much burned, more nuked from orbit.
That reminds me of one of the 'highlights' of my dubious 'career' at a previous employer...
There was a bid meeting between us and a big customer which was in what was obviously a motor dealership converted into an evangelical church rented out as a conference centre during the week.
Because the senior people at the 3 companies in our consortium had all been terribly, terribly, terribly busy we hadn't actually sat down to discuss anything at all (e.g. what we wanted to do, for how much money and on what basis) before sitting round in the foyer half an hour before the start of the meeting. Someone wanted to get some documents photocopied and the 'conference centre' wanted cash but none of the great and good had any (in the manner of the Queen) so I had to pay.
During the meeting
a) our (new-ish) MD randomly went off on one with the big customer's people over something trivial
b) one of the senior people had a crackpot idea of passing these obviously internal documents round the table for the customer to see - fortunately one of my colleagues at the other end of the table managed to intercept them
We then went to a pub (without our MD) and one of the people in one of the other companies in the consortium said 'don't you dare ever put him in front of one of my customers again'. Then we went back to one of the other consortium member's offices and the senior people had a row in an office whilst the more junior among us made polite small-talk for a couple of hours.
Good times.
Either there are people running businesses in the US, who haven't heard of ATMs, or they're so rich, they literally assume all us little people exist to pay for things in cash on their behalf, so they don't have to dirty their hands with actual banknotes.
Or they're just incompetent and incapable of proper planning.
Why would anyone want to work for such people?
Sean Timarco Baggaley has a good point about ATMs.
That said, I really thought these guys were going to be some kind of jerks expecting him to pay up for the meal, gas, etc., just because. It sounds like it really was just a serious of events that ended up with him paying. Fair enough.
At the point he'd claimed to have forgotten his wallet, I'd have said "What a coincidence, so have I!", turned round and walked out. I'd not want to be employed by a company which saw me as easily exploitable.
Seems the thinking was, "If this guy's desperate enough for the job, he'll do anything".
I've never had a job.
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