So after the nine thousandth call this week from some clueless recruiter or HR drone who doesn't know a subroutine from a submarine, I've dedcided to address the following to recruiters and human resources personnel in corporate America:
Dear Monster/CareerBuilder/etc.-trolling supernumary:
I am NOT looking for a job. It says so, right on my resume, not that you ever actually read resumes.
I own my own web development business, have since 2002. I'm damned good at what I do, my customers are happy and pay me well, and frankly I'm kind of sick of recruiters calling me about every job that says “computer” on it when I'm clearly not qualified for half of them. HTML is not COBOL. ASP.Net is not PHP. MySQL is not MSSQL Server. Windows is not Linux or Solaris or Unix or OSX.
In ten years, I've had hundreds of phone calls from incompetent recruiters and HR managers wasting my time and their clients' money offering me jobs for positions that I don't want, and that don't want me. Of those hundreds of calls, exactly ONE – in ten years – was relevant to my skills.
It's exactly the same thing as if you had a position open for a neurologist and decided to recruit for it by calling everyone in the phone book with an “M.D.” after their name – a stunning display of gross incompetence.
I'm a web and new media designer specializing in ASP/VBScript and MSSQL with a fair amount of experience in ASP.Net/VB. I have some javascript experience, I have some Windows network administration experience, and I'm an A+ certified PC technician. I've been an audio recording engineer since I was in my early teens (that's “more than 20 years ago”), and I've done a fair amount of PC-based video editing work, mostly using Adobe Premiere. I've considerable experience with Photoshop, less so with Fireworks, and I can do Flash animation but NOT ActionScripting. I've been using computers since I was a kid in the 70's, I've been online since the late 1980's, on the internet since around 1994, and I started designing web pages in 1995. I can install and configure just about any application known to man – this does NOT suggest that I can USE all of them.
I am NOT: a Unix admin, a mainframe operator, a C# programmer, a COBOL programmer, a PHP/MySQL script kiddie, a ColdFusion developer, a Perl programmer, a firmware developer, or a hardware tester. I don't run cables, I don't write drivers, I don't do Lotus Notes, PeopleSoft, “Ruby on Rails” (and who's the marketing wiz that came up with THAT obnoxious appellation? I refuse to learn it just because it sounds so obnoxious, trendy, smarmy, and annoying). I am not interested in a commission-only sales position, and I swear to all that is holy and good in the world, if one more MLM scam artist contacts me from a job board trying to get me to show up at one of your idiotic “pyramid” sales scheme speeches, I will arrived armed with a video camera and the entire known history of every shady deal or underhanded tactic that has ever been ascribed to your organization, and I will stand in your seminar and ask you about each individual case until you have me physically removed.
I don't repair copiers, fax machines, or telephone systems. I cannot program your PBX, nor can I wire your phone jacks. I won't install a camcorder in the ladies' lounge so you can hear what they're saying about you (yes, I've been asked to do this). I won't tell you how to steal software off bittorrent because you're too cheap to buy Microsoft Office and your customers are sick of dealing with your OOXML-formatted messes.
Yes, I can write HTML code in Notepad.
No, I *won't* write HTML or anything else other than plain text in Notepad, because it's a waste of time that delivers nothing but an ego boost to the propellerhead who's writing it – usually at the cost of severely increased wage overhead and extended delivery times that could have been avoided if the employer would just drop a couple hundred bucks on Dreamweaver or one of the MS tools. If I come to an interview with you and you ask me to write HTML or any other kind of rich text in Notepad, I am going to laugh in your face, call you an idiot, and leave – I don't care HOW much you're offering.
I can ride a bike, too, but I'll get where I'm going faster in a car.
I don't care what your geek nephew with the shiny new CompSci told you, a software licence for a decent WYSIWYG editor is far less expensive than paying some furry-toothed basement-dweller $100 an hour to be a proud Luddite. Should any competent designer be ABLE to write code in plain text? Of course. Should they insist on getting PAID for it? Absolutely not. The time saved in auto-generating the code more than compensates for the time spent in going back and correcting it after it's generated, unless you've got a four-armed, 24-fingered programmer who makes minimum wage and has no problem with free overtime. PS: Tell your geek nephew that the real world is NOT the NCSU computer lab, and out here it actually MATTERS if software is supported, widely used, compatible with a majority of other software, and familiar to potential employees and clients. Open-source is a great idea…but you get what you pay for. If you'd rather chase across a few million message boards to find just the right geek to fix your network because you have a proprietary program that will ONLY run on the US English version of Unbuntu Linux that was released on September 19th 2006, then you go ahead and do that. I'll stick to calling vendor support or reading the instructions.
AJAX is not a new technology, it's an old technology that finally found a cutesy-pie little acronym so non-programmers could recruit for jobs that require asynchronous javascript and XML, because 99% of recruiters can't spell or define “asynchronous” and think javascript and Java are interchangeable terms. Other old technology with meaningless buzzword labels include “blogging,” “software as a service,” “platform as a service,” and “the cloud.” These are not job skills, they are trendy, obnoxious buzzwords that are semantically null.
Also, when you need ONE website built, you don't ask for THREE different database technologies and FIVE different scripting languages to run it – that's not a website, that's a clusterf*ck. If you have three different mission-critical database platforms in operation, you don't need a web designer – you need a priest. You also need to fire your IT director for putting you in that position in the first place.
I live in Oxford, NC. That's within commuting distance of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and RTP. In a pinch, I could even go as far south as Clayton, or as far west as Greensboro, as far east as Rocky Mount, or as far north as Richmond. I don't live in Charlotte – Charlotte is about three and a half hours from me, one-way. If you could be bothered to look for two seconds at a map, you would know this. Would YOU want a six-hour daily commute to get $15 an hour as a desktop support tech? Guess what – I don't either. Telecommute? Fine. Relocation assistance? Great. Hiring bonus? Sure.
Straight hire? Forget it. It'll cost me 20K a year just in gas.
If you a) have a client who needs a website built or rebuilt, b) know that client to be interested in a 1099 independent contractor rather than a W-2 employee, and c) are laughing at this because it's right, rather than because you're an obnoxious, self-important incompetent recruiter/HR drone who's thinking “yeah, you'll never work for ME, buddy*,” then by all means, get in touch and we can work out a sales commission for you.
If you are an obnoxious, self-important recruiter/HR drone who's thinking “yeah, you'll never work for ME, buddy*,” if you don't understand the difference between Java and Javascript, ASP and PHP, MySQL and MSSQL, Windows and Linux, or web development and application design, if youhave ever once uttered the words “well it's all computers, right?”…well, first of all quit your job and go manage a bowling alley or something, you have no more business recruiting for IT positions than I have performing heart surgery.
Second of all, stop wasting my time with your phone calls and e-mails just so you can inflate your numbers and show your boss that you're not slacking. Your incompetence does NOT create an obligation on my part to be polite, shiny, and respectful, and frankly I'm sick of bothering. I've blown enough sunshine up the backsides of incompetent recruiters in the hope that maybe THIS time or maybe NEXT time I'll get offered something that I can actually DO, and I refuse to continue being polite or ingratiating as though you're doing me a favor, when all you're really doing is wasting my valuable time and getting my hopes up for no reason – you're Lucy with the football, and I'm Charlie Brown laying on his back wondering how this happened AGAIN. That doesn't qualify as “doing me a favor,” it qualifies as making other people suffer because if your fundamental inability to understand your job.
As far as I'm concerned, if you fit this description you are Part Of The Problem, and I don't care to be a part of your “team”.
(* In case I haven't made it clear: I don't WANT to work for you, “buddy.” I don't care to be hired by a company whose standards are so obviously low. It's called “integrity,” and there's precious little of it in the job market these days. Maybe if you go shine balls at a Putt-Putt or something that is more in line with your qualifications, there'll be a little more. As for me, I've had it up to my eyeballs with playing nice guy and hoping. I'll run the rat-race on my own track, thanks.)