Tech Careers for PLUG April general meeting

Thursday's PLUG theme is tech careers.

We have 3 presenters covering different aspects of tech careers: Salary and Compensation Negotiation; Breaking into the InfoSec Field; and The Hiring Process - an Insider's View.

To do our part for the COVID-19 shutdown, the meeting will be online using video conferencing. All of our continuing meetings in the short term are online to support physical distancing. We can still be social, so we want events to continue online.

See our website for information about joining our mailing list and our IRC channel. Use the following URL to visit our Mastodon account on the Fediverse.

https://fosstodon.org/@PLUG

We have added a draft Code of Conduct and are working towards finalizing that.

https://pad.sfconservancy.org/p/PLUG_CoC_draft

The meeting will use Zoom. Unfortunately Zoom does require installing either a b rowser plugin or a standalone app.

Zoom will ask for a name and email address. As far as we know, neither is verifi ed. You will be put in a waiting room until we're ready to start, then a moderat or will allow you into the meeting.

https://zoom.us/j/990422062

Speaker: Jill R

Title: Salary and Compensation Negotiation

Description: When taking a new job, you should always negotiate the best possible offer for yourself. But that can be easier said than done! Compensation negotiation is something we tend to only do when we change jobs, so it's hard to get a lot of experience and feel comfortable doing it.

In this session we'll discuss:

• Why you should always negotiate your offer
• How to determine your market value
• How to handle common negotiation scenarios
• Different components of a package you can negotiate for

About Jill: Jill is a long time member of the Free Software community, serving on the PLUG steering committee and as BoF organizer for the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE). They are a member of the Ansible core development team at Red Hat, focused on AWS and other Cloud modules.

Speaker: Donald "Mac" McCarthy

Title: Breaking into the InfoSec Field

Description: Getting started in the InfoSec field can be very difficult. Many entry level positions require levels of experience and/or certification that can be confusing and difficult to obtain. This presentation will be about building a realistic entry level skill set, free educational resources, understanding the interview process, and some of the many specialties in the InfoSec career field.

About Mac: Mac is a 17 year veteran of the IT industry. He has experience worked for organization ranging in size from 10 to 200,000+ employees. Mac has been involved in information security for the past 9 years with organizations in the academic, healthcare and financial, and public sectors. Mac is a linux enthusiast with a passion for using large compute clusters to help solve the most challenging problems in security analytics. He has given presentations globally on business email compromise and credentials stuffing. Mac currently serves as the Director of Field Operations for Open Source Context.

Speaker: Tucker Wolfe

Title: The Hiring Process - an Insider's View.

Description: Tucker will leverage his experience working inside the corporate hiring process to fill tech hiring needs. He'll speak to hiring processes, challenges of hiring good tech candidates and his personal experience with the process at several mid-sized corporations.

About Tucker: Tucker is a Phoenix native who has worked with local IT professionals since 1998. His experience has been a mix of both agency and corporate engagements. He has been an independent contractor since 2010 and typically works with 1-3 companies at a time, getting to understand their needs and help improve their organization through quality hires.