use Perl

Another installment of "how not to job-hunt" (or "what skills not to have") in which Scott, our antagonist, actually gets a reply from a coverletter to a jobs.perl.org position, and where Scott makes an observation on what Perl employers really want.

I actually got an email back from a job I applied for! It said, "Don't ever speak to me this way again". Lesson: in order to get a reply from a job application, I have to be offensive to the point of the damning myself for the position. This job was interesting because it was both telecommute and in-town.

My email was a follow-on to an initial cover letter that was written just for the position, with great care (if comments were enabled, some cock jockey would completely botch his comprehsion roll and post "well you shouldn't send emails like that - no wonder you haven't gotten a job!"). The cover letter was perfectly polite and cordial but it encluded a P.S. of:

P.S: I'm serious about working with you. Please do the favor of acknowledging this email, even if you've already selected someone else, so that I know you recieved it. I think a one minute reply is a reasonable request given this personalized cover letter. Thank you.

No reply. Typical. Almost two weeks letter, I send:

Hey, I haven't heard from you. What's up with that? Are you having trouble getting ahold of me? Looking for more SIP experience? Am I overqualified? Underqualified? It blows my mind I can spend an hour a day writing coverletters and get nothing more than a mass-cc'd poorly written Perl quiz every month or so in reply. I know the response from jobs.perl.org can be overwheling (I've hired from there in the past - I know), but, c'mon, I'm local to you. I wrote a book. I help coordinate the local Perl Users Group meetings. Pay attention to me! =P

Okay, now for the "observations". These observations are a "note to self" type thing, and not directly based on the above. The question plaging my mind, is, given my (largely relatively new found) qualifications, why wouldn't people want to even consider me for positions? Or, why are they so eager to burn bridges with me?

What Perl employers want from Perl employees, or, why these people use Perl at all: They use Perl because Perl programmers are submissive, docile, and eager. They have no concept of productivity and have no means by which to judge it and frankly, it isn't all that much of a priority anyway, not compared to the matter of control. Let me be clear: most Perl employers want to dominate employees. But this makes for idiotic, brain-dead, technophobic companies that can't make money off of any technical or employee skill level. Java employers, on the other hand, pay huge sums of money to their collective employee pool (as Java programmers demand more money and more Java programmers are required - almost every Java program is a team effort). Java programmers have their own lingo of project management, design, refactoring, architecture, and so on, making discussion of development a thoroughly technical process management can't participlate in, so management delegates technical tasks and decisions to the Java programmers. This a complete worse is better" arrangement. And, before you'll accept techies running the show, you'll have to become non-technophobic. All of the little Perl-using outfits I've run into job hunting are completely technophobic. And the dot com boom of course made these little business-wanna-be-tech companies more technophobic.

I guess this doesn't make Java actually technically superior, but it does make it more socially appropriate.

Usual shtick. If you have a comment, email me at scott@slowass.net, and if by some miracle it happens to be on-topic (not that that has ever happened), I'll quote you.

-scott