Linux-related jobs in Toronto

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 9:27 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
<clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> There is also a practical reason for asking for "Canadian experience". I'm
> not likely to pick up the phone to call someone in Poland or Russia to
> confirm that Zbigniew worked there and "Oh, by the way, what sort of fellow
> is Zbigniew?" If you had some local experience, the odds are higher that I
> can get the real story behind your story by working my network.

A further practical reason is that there are language and cultural and
possibly even legal barriers to getting such information.

- A Polish reference mayn't be usable if the folks doing evaluation
don't have depth in Polish.  (Ditto for Hindi, Cantonese, Russian,
Mandarin, and any number of languages.)

- Educational references are difficult to verify if nobody can read
the transcript, or knows whether the school is a "real" one versus a
"degree fabrication mill."  This probably also applies to employers.

A bit less comforting, but also the case...

- Employers that don't hire "foreigners" weren't likely to *accept*
them if they did hire them.  If you don't conform to their cultural
norms, working there wouldn't be a treat.

I'd tend to apply this principle to the "big 4" consulting firms that
live inside the remaining big accounting firms, albeit not in an
ethnicity perspective.  They participate in many countries, and
definitely have a "racially diverse" population[1], but there's a
keenly distinctive sort of corporate culture which few if any of us
around TLUG are likely to conform to or be comfortable with.

And keep in mind that it is *that specific culture* that led the
evaluation of financial institutions, which allowed such recent
massive financial disasters as Enron and AIG, and presumably, thereby,
led into the worldwide recession that we are apparently presently in.
Arthur Anderson is no more as a result of their responsibility for the
Enron problem.

[1]  I spent some time at Deloitte Consulting some years ago; in the
specific group I was in, I, as an Anglo-Saxon Canadian, was in the
minority, as there were considerably more staff from (India, China,
Eastern Europe) than there were native-born Canadians.
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