Pencils Down

Ah, the joys of looking for a new contract.  This was one of a stream of emails from an agency as to each little keyword that was in the job description.  Another was “Spring MVC” which I was told was some special version of Spring and I obviously don’t have experience doing that so my resume will not be forwarded to the manager.

It makes you kind of wonder what kind of people go for the agent job.  I bet they believe in that old saying about a good salesperson being able to sell anything.  Who cares if you don’t have a clue about what this ‘person’ does or has been doing for a living?  Your job is to cross off every word in the job description against the same wording appearing in the resume.  You don’t need no stinkin knowledge.  (Apologies to that old Bogart film)

This was at a pretty good agency as well.  Pretty good in the people had a clue, at least a few years ago.  I guess times change.  People do anything for a job.

Of course, I am curious how well the agent’s resume matched up to the agency job description.  But I don’t think I really want to know.

Talked with a big shop in town.  Met with a founder and a vp.  Got along great.

Job was mid-level, so had to talk to sw director and an architect.

Director went over a standard question list for all developers.  Great.

Architect interjected random questions.  Most of them did not have an answer, were trick questions, or otherwise pretty off tangent.

And the coup-de-grace: Gee, I graduated about the same time you did.  We must be the same age.

Gee, if I known you guys were jerks I would have taken my tape recorder.