Your SE, your headhunter!

"You need to have a collaborative hiring process."Steve Jobs

I talk to my customers on regular basis and more often than not, the discussion about an available position comes up. I also hear when engineers are looking for a new opportunity (for various reasons). I have to be careful with all the legal and political aspects of putting in touch my customers' engineers and hiring managers together.

I have seen great success with these types of hiring (or match making). As an unbiased 3rd party, I somewhat know who fits where and what type of training or coaching is needed (if any) for the candidate to flourish in this new environment. I have had friends asking for an introduction for a position which I declined because it wasn't a right fit.

Sometimes, it is very hard to sift through resumes and find good candidates. Sometimes, it is hard to make a resume standout and eventually get in front of hiring managers. But asking someone who knows both parties to make the connection, I think is easier.

If you are looking for a job or need to hire someone, talk to your SE. She/he just might know about your next dream job or a super star candidate.

Comments

MPLS vs VPN (Internet Connection) and power

This topic has been covered extensively by experts. What has not been covered in my opinion, is the underlying and fundamental change of transport infrastructure and specially power. The traditional WAN transport mechanisms are solid in terms of power normalization all through the last mile. With the new (or not so new) shift towards commercially available Internet connections (namely DSL and Cable), customers need to watch out for excessive power coming through those lines and the respective modems and into their edge devices. There are surge protectors out there with "ethernet in/out" ports which could be used to mitigate this problem. Happy conversation out there...

“If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.” ― Richard M. Nixon

Does your product integrate with other security products? At this point, you should hate product silos (point products) as much as I do. I understand and respect “divide and conquer” or “best of breed” strategies. I also understand having different security vendors at different layers of the network could possibly prevent an incident better (one vendor might not see/catch a vulnerability but another might have a signature or way of catching it). But isn’t it time to ask your vendors how and if they can work with each other? So what we (vendors) are competitors? If by integrating with each other, we are able to increase the return on investment (ROI) for the customer, then why not (I know it might sound naive and unaware, but could you just imagine ). Vendors have application programming interfaces (APIs) for interaction with other platforms. However, customers have to have application development resources to write code for these APIs, and that's not answer to a tr

"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." -Isaac Newton

Your vendors’ systems or sales engineers are a wealth of knowledge. I don’t say that because I am one, I say that because we have been around various IT departments as employees or sales engineers. We have seen different ways of achieving the same goals and can save you headaches or hidden roadblocks. It is mostly a myth that we only know the technology we are representing or selling. First of all, we have to know our competitors’ technologies well enough to be able to differentiate ours. Second of all, we have to know enterprise IT applications well enough to make sure our products actually work in tandem. SEs also talk amongst themselves. I might not know the project you are working on, but I am sure one of my colleagues do. I work with a great group of engineers from different backgrounds. They are sharp and always willing to help. I’ve worked in energy (both upstream and downstream) industry, healthcare (distribution and provider) as well as manufacturing (

Systems Engineering Life

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