Re: [tlug] de-lurking with a question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Ben" == Ben Konrath <ben@example.com> writes:

    Ben> The earlier thread about Redhat's demise has prompted me to
    Ben> this post and

The reports of Red Hat's death are greatly exaggerated, especially for
your situation.  They still have the single biggest collection (by
head count, anyway) of GNU/Linux talent in one place, and remember,
it's the people not the place.

    Ben> because I get the feeling that the first career oriented job
    Ben> you get is important. Of course I could be wrong.

My brother co-op'ed at Rochester Institute of Technology.  His first
co-op was with DEC, and that's who he got his job from at graduation
(despite having the grades you'd expect from a phototrope sentenced to
school in the snow bucket of New York).  Beginner's luck, he
says---his other co-ops ranged from uninteresting to downright sucked,
and he would have taken any of the other jobs he was offered in
preference to working with any of his co-ops (but DEC, of course).

So I would say, based on his experience, you don't want to _waste_
your internship if you can avoid it, but if you don't hit it off, you
won't be permanently damaged.

BTW---by the time he interviewed at DEC, he'd lost contact with his
former boss, and was applying to a completely different part of the
company.  Fortunately, his former boss beat him there!  It's the
people....  ;-)

    >> Work?  YMMV.  The really important issue is your supervisor and
    >> the other people in your group.  Good people are where you find
    >> them.

    Ben> I guess that's hard to get good feeling for before you
    Ben> actually start working.

If that's what you think, then you haven't won the big prize.  You can
know a boss you want to work for badly from the second email.
Complete lack of contact with your future boss or anybody from the
group (hard to believe for Red Hat, they're not that big) suggests too
much bureaucracy.

There's no reason to get on your feet and scream "Run away! run
away!", not even pessimistic, really, but you could have been luckier.

    Ben> NB: none of this is computer science-specific.

    Ben> Sorry to all if this is off-topic. Thanks for your thoughts,

No, I meant the things I've heard about the research environment
aren't CS-specific, it runs the gamut from "Teaching English as a
Second Language" to "industrial applications of scanning tunneling
electron microscopy."  I have no reason to believe it's irrelevant,
either.


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