Life Is Simple

When I was a teenager I loved to read science fiction. The problem was that there wasn’t enough science fiction around me to satisfy my hunger. Another problem was that not all books were up to my taste, some of them concentrated more on more interesting things then others. Overall the problem, as it seems, was that there was no book that I would absolutely and unconditionally love.

About that same time I read somewhere that the only way to become a good writer is to start writing what you want to read but no one wrote so far. I tried, but failed, as it turned out that there were things that no one wrote about and for a reason.

Similar things happen when you start offering something to the market. Something that you could use but no one bothered to develop before you. In case you were born late - that’s how Symantec’s Undelete (former Norton Undelete) came to life.

So, hopefully the following project is worth such a long introductuion. The web site Rate My Recruiter is, basically, just that - a Recruiter rating web site. Submit your stories, tell us what you think, what your experience have been so far and share it with other people.

Popularity: 32%

Despite everybody and their mothers getting online, the state of IT jobs market remains somewhat grim. There are just not that many interesting positions available anymore.

The problem is that large companies only want to hire either code monkeys (so that thay can outsource their jobs later to India or Romania because of budgeting issues) or gurus who are capable of replacing entire departments. Such gurus want (and deserve, trust me) huge salaries that are, however, still offsetting salaries of few average programmers. The problem, though, is that such gurus are rare and hiring them means doing things in a certain specific way.

Let’s say you hire a guru for a project, the project gets completed, your guru moves on to another project at another company. Three months later you need an update to your existing software. You can’t hire same guru - he’s somewhere else and not interested. So you hire an average Joe (after all - the job isn’t that complicated, right?) who spends three times more time trying to figure out what’s going on. By the time he’s done there’s a new update pending, so you keep paying him three times more for figuring things that were done in a certain unique way.

Personally, I am neither a code monkey nor a guru, so I am sort of in between the bandwagons here. Can’t say if it’s a bad thing or a good thing. By the way, my own dream job of the moment is some large development project on which I will be working alone with a good and understanding project manager and business clients who don’t tell me how to write the code. Oh, and I prefer free bottled water in pantry, thank you.

Popularity: 35%