Dunno ...
"he's from half-a-world away from me, he's a recruiter, so he's Fair Game™, right?"
And still, I wonder.
I get this sort of thing almost every day now. An e-mail from someone ... the opening line is always,
"Hope you are doing well," from someone whose name is totally-unpronounceable to this old American (unless he has adopted an English-Sounding Psudonym™, which is very cute) ... who wants to find "someone," for "a < three | six | nine | twelve>-month contract somewhere," who ...
... knows Some Arkane Bit Of Wysdom™ that I, as a matter of happening,
can "legitimately claim to know."
The most recent example of this was: "IBM Assembler."
(Apparently, Dell is on a nationwide search™ for this.)
Well, it's only Monday, but last week it was: "Ruby," "JCL," and "COBOL." And the week before ... but, I digress.™
Pardon me, but I sometimes wonder if I"m just missing something here. I happen to come from the days of
BYTE Magazine, back in the glory-days when Carl Helmers was still running it. At least once or twice a year, an entire issue would be devoted to some new programming-language ... I vividly remember
Pascal's Triangle, with cover art by Robert Tinney. And, well, "here was another Cool Progarmming Tool." So, well, "you
learned it."
And so it was that, during the routine course of your routine profession ... heady though that profession
always was ... you were
constantly learning. Therefore, it actually
wasn't "a stretch" when someone presented you with something that you hadn't
yet done, and asked if you could do it, and you said,
truthfully, "yes, I think so." (And subsequently did.)
... have we, somehow, lately,
lost that?
I quoted the poor, I'm-sure well-meaning bloke "$125.00/hr plus expenses," and I have no idea whether he will ever get back to me. Likewise, I have no idea whether the hiring-manager ... whoever he-or-she is ... actually knows better. But, still, I
wonder.
"I wonder if" the software profession really
has degraded to the point that it values "what someone used-to need to know, and still does,"
over its former reliance on the fact that, if there's (still) a machine out there which works in a certain way, a professional in this business would (still) know how to make that machine do its necessary job, even if encountering that particular (type of) machine for the very first time.
I vividly remember when "that was more-than half the
fun of it."
Are those days really gone?
I freely admit to being a scion of the days in which, if a company
(like Dell) needed to find someone who, as in this case, "knew how to program an IBM mainframe in assembler," they would either
still have a lifetime
(gasp!) employee who still had that knowledge, or they would find someone who would relish the challenge of rising-up to this new challenge.
Instead, "a recruiter from a foreign land" conducts a presumably world-wide search for ... resumes ... and, I would point out,
presumes that "a <3 | 6 | 9 | 12>-month contract, doesn't have to be an American Citizen and so-much the better if (s)he is not" is the
only alternative worth pursuing.
Pardon me for asking
two three obvious-to-me questions:
(1) "Don't you (Dell) have any sort of
internal resources ... uhh,
left ... from which you could tap?"
(2) "Does there
really exist,
any sort of real-world IT project, that could
possibly be characterized as, "<3 | 6 | 9 | 12>-months?"
(3) "Why is the mere fact that 'you haven't done this sort of thing before' not automatically prefixed with,
'yet?'"
After all, part of the
fun that attracted me to this business, never-mind how many years ago, was that it would always present you with new challenges and possibilities, and that you could actually do them. Sure, you might feel like an upside-down cat for a few days, but you always landed four-paws-down ... and you
grew from the experience.
Today, it seems like "the one thing that you're looking for is the one thing that's
right under your nose in the 'expendable' person whom you laid-off last quarter." The career-promise that is left to
today's employees is "just more and more and more of the same (until we lay
you off, too)." And so, I can't help but wonder, "how foolish can we be?" How shortsighted have we become?
