Bonkers

[Paul Makepeace]

On 5/4/07, Nicholas Clark <nick at ccl4.org> wrote:
> Yes, I'm mailing this to the main list, quite deliberately.
>
>
> Something is bonkers here:
>
> 1: There are (at least) 12 companies in and around London trying to recruit
>    developers with strong Perl skills
>
> 2: I know of 5 people who are sufficiently dissatisfied with their current job
>
> 3: The recruitment agents are having kittens* because they can't find
>    anyone to interview for these jobs
>
> 4: Last night there were around 25 people at the social meeting;
>    There are hundreds of subscribers to this list, and at least 100 are in
>    London.
>
>
>
> There must be some intersection between those companies seeking to recruit,
> and some people on this list. Yet no-one at any of these companies says:
>
>   "Yes, I know no job is perfect, and this one does have its warts. But on
>    average it's fun, and you should at least interview here"
>
>
> Why not? Is everyone at these dozen firms all sufficiently dissatisfied that
> they too want to move on?

A peculiar tendency which I've never quite understood is people saying
"$work" like somehow where they work is something they'd rather not
reveal. Given this, it's not hard to see there's an at least equally
sized superset of those who'd rather not/are edgy about recruiting for
$work.

<pimp>

At the risk of being a bit tiresome about it (it's been a few months
now since I last pimped), Google are hiring, and pay well. I'd be
happy to discuss my healthy salary and bonus offline. Their comp
package is on a par with any large company with revenues in the $10bn
range (plus all the beanbags, Ben & Jerry's, free lunches, etc, etc).
Recruitment is happening globally: London, Dublin, Zurich are (now)
big engineering offices, as well as the many other places including of
course California.

(An FAQ: Perl is used at Google quite a bit, it's just not much in
production code.)

Site Reliability Engineers (root at google.com) are very highly sought
after: the rare combination of strong software and strong sysadmin
skill. As a fellow SRE having more of us makes my life easier, heh.

Here's an offer: if *one* person replies to me and ends up hired into
SRE I'll fly in and put 500 quid behind the bar at the next London.pm
meet and/or towards venue hire of the next YAPC/LPW event or
wh{o,at}ever is deemed a suitable recipient. If two get hired I'll
come up with something non-linearly more extravagant (i.e. >thousand
quid).

So London.pm becomes the benefiting middleman :-)

The worst that'll happen to a candidate is you'll get a free lunch and
a thorough technical interview work-out... If you're interested, email
me.

</pimp>

I am surprised people are making the most noise about money, is that
the sole block to moving jobs? Is challenge, work place environment,
peer quality (this is the biggie for me at Google), and other
intangibles all nicely covered, and it's just the cash slowing people
down?

> If not, lets have some de-lurking. Because without it nothing is going to
> improve.**
>
> Nicholas Clark
>
>
>
> * Because currently having kittens is easier.
>
> ** Because I know that those 5 don't move because whilst they aren't that
>    happy with where they are, they know that there is worse, often through
>    personal experience of it, and so they stick with the devil they know.
>    Recruitment agents are slaves of mammon. They have no reason to be truthful
>    in any recommendation.
>