An Experiment in Scotch

I’m slowly (and by slowly I mean, not really at all) start­ing to think about look­ing for a job. I’ve been off for almost a month now, I’ve accom­plished quite a few things at home, got some starts on other things that can be con­tin­ued on nights and week­ends, and I gen­er­ally feel like I’m get­ting close to return­ing to the land of the worker bee. One thing I’m run­ning into is that 95% of the posted jobs on the big boards suck. And not just suck in a “That job will clearly suck” sorta way, but in a “The recruit­ing firm couldn’t be both­ered to write a decent descrip­tion because they know this job really sucks” sorta way.

At the very end of this suck­age high­way where the road drops off the end of the world, we have job descrip­tions like this. A job descrip­tion that amounts to “Win­forms and C#” does not exactly get me all hot and both­ered enough to send in my resume. How does a recruit­ing firm stay in busi­ness when they can’t be both­ered (or don’t know enough Eng­lish, more likely) to write a half-ass descrip­tion of the job along with maybe just a cou­ple of the benefits?

While that is not com­mon, it’s not far from the aver­age of these jobs on Dice. In 30 days of irreg­u­larly surf­ing through the post­ings there, I’ve run into exactly 2 jobs that I didn’t imme­di­ately equate with an anal probe. On top of that, you are almost always deal­ing with a recruiter. You have no idea what com­pany the job is with until they get your resume. Are com­pa­nies that pressed for resources that they can’t put up their own add on Mon­ster? These are not the com­pa­nies I want to work for.

Speak­ing of recruiters, how does a recruit­ing firm get any­one inter­ested when all their job post­ings look like this? The job descrip­tion is “Need 2yrs up pro­gram­ming with C#”. Really? What is up pro­gram­ming? Is that really a descrip­tion or more of a require­ment? How des­per­ate would you have to be to basi­cally send in your resume blindly to some­thing like that? Isn’t it com­pletely obvi­ous how much that job must suck that they are per­fectly OK with their recruiter com­pletely mail­ing it in? In the end, I’m sure they stay in busi­ness because there are peo­ple out there who blast their resume out to every sin­gle job post­ing on Dice and see where their shit sticks. Like dat­ing in col­lege, it’s about quan­tity, not quality.

I’m sure that there are plenty of decent recruiters out there (I’ve worked with exactly 1 good one and I think he got tired of deal­ing with me) but over­all, recruiters seem to suck balls on aver­age. It’s too bad that they have a monop­oly on most of the jobs.

All that said, if you’re will­ing to wait and will­ing to do a lot of search­ing on your own, you can find decent jobs. I have 3–4 right now that I’m doing research on to see if I’d want to work there. I’ll prob­a­bly apply to at least 2 of them and see what comes out of it. The plan right now is to have gain­ful employ­ment on Jan­u­ary 1.