[conspire] Fwd: Re: [sf-lug] Looking for a Senior MySQL administrator in San Francisco

[Adrien Lamothe]

I enjoyed his rant, too -- but, like the posting the prompted it, it has
nothing to do with the legitimate business of LUGs, which is Linux
technology, and broadening and perpetuating a collective understanding
of that technology.


Actually, it does have something to do with Linux and open-source. I've noticed a trend by companies, to trivialize people who work with open-source technology. In many decision-makers minds, the fact that the technology is mostly free and created by a group of "hobbyists" means the people who will work for them implementing the technology will do so more out of fondness for the technology, ergo they can be paid less and given lots of tasks to complete. I'm noticing this attitude is prevalent among smaller companies; the large corporations have a better understanding ot IT, though they are doing things like outsourcing software development to India for $10/hour. This is going to be a big problem for those who need to work in the employ of a company. The situation is similar to what is happening in manufacturing, where companies have cut operating and production costs to the bone, yet don't pass any of the savings on to the consumer and continue to reduce employee salaries
 and benefits. Perl programmers doing freelance work now average about $15/hour.

Notice that the guy from Greatschools never directly addressed my statement about salary, yet in two differnet emails he said something to the effect of "we pay competitive salaries by industry standards". What industry standard? The non-profilt industry? Software developers working in India?

This type of thing also happened back in the late 80s when computer system prices started dropping. Executives started asking the question "Why are we paying someone $50,000/year to administer a server that only costs us $30,000?" This type of thinking is of course ridiculous, but many business leaders have that type of "bean-counter" mentality.

Regarding the appropriateness of posting jobs to user group mailing lists, I've come to the conclusion that it is inappropriate. When you come home after work, you want to take your shoes off, sit down, read a book, etc. Sometimes a mosquito slips past the screen door and annoys you; that's O.K., it happens. But you don't want to deal with mosquitos in your home, you have to deal with enough of them outside, and outside is where they belong. Job postings are a distraction. There are plenty of other places people can post them. Ask yourselves this question:  do you know anyone who has ever secured a job from either the SF LUG or Conspire lists? My experience is that most companies posting to user group mailing lists are bottom-feeders looking for cheap or free work and they ruin things for the few good companies that may post. Have you ever seen Oracle, IBM, Sun, HP, etc. posting jobs to user group mailing lists?

Cheers.
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