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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Adrien Lamothe (a_lamothe at yahoo.com):

> 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 a very good point.  Thank you for articulating something I'd
certainly noticed, myself (and you and I have also talked about this
problem, extensively).  You and I have both seen this syndrome in
action.

> 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-profit industry? Software developers
> working in India?

I thought the reaction from tire-kickers on the list was interesting,
too.  Paraphrasing freely:

Sarah Mei:  If you're a starving enough consultant, you might find a job
that involves DBA work, programming, deployment management, and
sysadmining agreeable, so I see nothing wrong with the posting.

Asheesh Laroia:  Well, they're probably a small institution, so it's 
fine that they're looking for a grandiose skills mix.

Andrew Stanton:  Non-profits don't have much money, so it's OK that 
they're probably not offering much.


Concerning the Greatschools ad itself, one reason I didn't think it
merited much comment is that about half the jobs listings I _see_ claim
to have fairly absurd combinations of requirements, so one more didn't
really stand out.  (I moderate the jobs mailing lists for SVLUG and
BALUG.)

> 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?

Again, at the risk of offending the SF-LUG regulars, a lot of _them_
remind me of starry-eyed Internet newcomers in the 1980s, for whom
absolutely _everything's_ exciting, fascinating, and welcome, because
it's all completely novel.  I used to get immense resistance from such
people to the idea of rejecting or discarding incoming spam, malware,
and fraud e-mails:  "Well, how do you know some of that spam isn't
_interesting_?"