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Job Hunting

November 25, 2007 on 7:23 pm | In General Nonsense |

I’ve been watching the job boards pretty closely lately. Every two to three days the same job appears under the title “Web Developer (contract)”, “Sr. Web Developer”, or “Staff Software Developer” with slightly different job descriptions. Mostly the main requirements are thus:

• 5 years web development experience
• DHTML, CSS, Javascript
• server-side scripting language such as JSP/ASP/PHP

I’m pretty sure I interviewed for this position months ago. If I’m right, they’re extremely picky. The employer ought to say what they really want.

DHTML is AJAX. I didn’t realize this until recently. I first heard about DHTML when the 4.0 browsers came out and thought the technology died out. It kinda did… until Gmail was introduced. Now it is called AJAX and Web 2.0. Now people can’t get enough of it. All it means is now the web browser is an application development platform instead of just a presentation tool.

I’ve been telling recruiters that I didn’t have DHTML experience because I thought it was dead. I didn’t realize the name changed and I was doing it every day for nearly two years.

The scripting language they want experience in is only one of the three. Actually it’s none of them. This company has developed their own scripting language. They call it open source and I guess it technically is, but they’re certainly the only ones using it. It’s Java-centric, so when they get you on the phone they’re looking for Java programmers. JSP maybe. Anyone who has been doing PHP or ASP (i.e. Microsoft technologies—C# would be a better requirement here) for the last five years probably doesn’t have enough Java-related programming experience. Javascript doesn’t count.

As many times as this job posting has appeared on different boards and with how many recruiters are looking to fill it, perhaps the employer should consider training a worthy employee? Any programmer with any of the experience specified would probably do well with about a week or two to train. Instead it seems the decision makers want someone who can hit the ground running—and they’ll spend weeks or months and loads of cash exhaustively searching until they find the perfect candidate just to save a weeks’ salary in training.