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Loading ...25.05.11
Idiotic Recruitment
Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, News, Random Thoughts at 8:14 am by Liv 
This has just happened to me for real recently and I thought it more than deserves a blog entry.
I am used to receiving (quite often irrelevant) regular job offers/notifications from various agency who had my CV years ago and as such still have my CV in their database and include me on their regular job emails. Occasionally I do look at some of them if they sound interesting — after all, who knows, the next big thing might be in one of these emails. I do get though as I said quite a lot of them which are totally irrelevant to me — these typically include some contract work in the likes of Luxembourg, Spain, France, Netherlands etc — since I’m not interested in these I just scan the subject of the email quickly and if it fits into one of these categories I’ll just delete it straight away.
If you haven’t heard the phrase yet, memorise it now: plan for a crisis! Because if there is one thing certain in the running of each company, that is having a crisis – we all encounter it on one level or another. You might be lucky enough for your crisis to be your project just being delivered one week later and as such dealing with customer expectations for that period or it might be the opposite of the scale where your project can’t be delivered anymore, despite all the time and resources in the world.
If you are developing applications as your day job then you are used more than likely to compiling your code and then running it (I know there are exceptions to the rule in those who are using interpreted languages but there’s still a majority of us it seems who use compilers). Some of you might even remember “the old days” when using either a Borland or Watcom or Microsoft C++ compiler on a 486 used to take an hour for a medium sized project, time which was spent by your team around the coffee machine discussing the latest football results – only to find out at the end that “compilation failed” 
When Pentium came on the market and subsequent faster processors and with compilers themselves getting faster and cleverer (for a while) these sort of things happened less and less…until recently!
I’m fed up with reading a lot of articles on various technical websites which are aiming to teach the world how to do various things related to programming! And that sounds strange I know, because we need those articles, we need more people to share their knowledge this way. But I’m fed up because I found out more and more these articles are written by people with very little experience (which is why probably a lot of them are positioned as “entry level”) – to the point where it’s probably only about 10 – 20% of the new articles appearing nowadays actually have any value.
I had a couple of recent discussions on the phone recently with 2 head hunters who were trying to get me a “dream job” in some banks in the city. I say “dream job” because that’s exactly how they presented it to me – the fact that it was in a bank it meant for me straight away otherwise! Anyway, I turned them down (no surprise there, if you read some of my previous blog entries you would know that I turned down bigger names in the past). One of them though said to me with annoyance and disappointment in his voice when I politely declined: “I’ve got no idea what’s going on: I’ve got a list of top notch developers who I’m calling and every single one of them turns me down!I’ve got a big pile of cash (we are talking 6 figure by the way!) and a position dealing not with dead code but with some new innovative products and technologies and nobody wants it!”
