Jerry Sievers wrote:
<venting>
Fellow coders;
I just get off the phone today with some clueless headhunter and after
listing for her (very proudly I might add) my OS and dev tools
platforms of choice;
Linux/Apache/Postgres/PHP
I get a few moments of silence and she mentiones to me some new wizzy
bang dev languages including C-Sharp. Oh and you bet she asks me if I
an a DotNetter.No, I reply quizically as if to ask, why on earth would
I ever need that?
She goes on to say that the tools I am using are "older tools" and
that I should consider crash courses in these so called "up to date
languages". Oh this is precious.
God, I just about lost my breakfast all over my desk.
Before letting her go I made a futile effort to inform her that these
old moldy tools of mine are ALL under active development, are very
modern and are all over the net.
Dumbass headhunter!
</venting>
Well yes, headhunters are indeed dumbasses! Think about it... How much
does a headhunter get paid? That said why wouldn't they do instead of
recruit? Because they don't have the knowledge nor the talent.
That said, the headhunters are indeed driven by the needs of their
clients, which are the businesses. The better question would be: Why do
businesses feel the need to use these new, often unproven, often overly
complicated technologies for their business? The answer is very often
they do not. You see many times the people in business who are doing the
hiring don't know the technology either. So they ask their subordinates,
who, often are just wanting to play with, learn and use new technology.
So they tell their bosses and the bosses refer the technological buzz
words to the headhunters and then they call you with strict requirements
for their clients.
I've been guilty of wanting to learn new technologies too. Often I look
at the opportunity as an opportunity for me to learn more about a
particular aspect or to get a new technology under my belt. However,
after the dot com bust employers got really picky and you could not even
get into a place unless you met 100% of whatever buzzwords were thrown
out there. Many times I'll have a contract where the employer say needs
somebody who know WebLogic or Java or C# or whatever. For what I do such
things are unnecessary but I look at it as a chance to get more familiar
with those technologies. Usually it ends up I don't touch it at all
because as I said, it wasn't necessary and therefore was not really a
requirement. Some dumb employers think that if you merely know a lot of
technologies then you must be good, even if they only want you to
perform work with a much smaller set of things.
In general though I keep away from the new fangled stuff like the C#,
dot.net crap and go for the tried and true Linux oriented methodologies
and languages from PHP, Perl, shell scripting, MySQL, Apache, good old
C, etc. These tools are well engineered and designed and do not require
overly complex IDE environments to understand and work with the
technologies and allow people to do real work, real quick. YMMV.
--
Bad breath is better than no breath.
