Perl Vacancy

[Simon Wistow]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 06:48:40PM +0100, alex at owal.co.uk said:
> I might know of a well paying perl gig but I'll be damned if I'll post
> it here.

I, as the shadowy alias behind the leader at london.pm.org email 
address, get quite a lot of mail from recruiters asking if its ok to 
post jobs or if I knew anyone. 

My big dilemma is not whether we'll overwhelm the list with posts from 
recruiters but that I'll be embarassed by the reaction of the list to 
the post. 

What we, as geeks and people immersed in a technical culture, tend to 
forget is that we are not normal. Nor do "outside" people who might only 
have a cursory aquaintance with our freakish tribe (and the freakish 
tribes of all the other people they might want to recruit) know every 
single in and out and inside joke and rule of (to them) arbitary 
etiquette that we've acculumated over the years.

Whilst we may think it's hilariously backward that someone can't tell 
that a mail on a web page is from a mailing list rather than an 
individual there exists, amazing as it may seem, people who don't know 
what a mailing list is. In fact the whole process of email is actually 
fairly magical.

Of course you[*] can't audit a company, optimise the aerodynamic flow 
over a wing section, cook 200 covers a night at a restaurant or edit a 
magazine either so basically we're even.

So, I shall couch this in terms that I hope everyone will get. What you
think is an incredibly witty and urbane response that is the nerd
equivalent of flexing your muscles in front of the girls is what
everyone else sees as a childish tirade that embarasses you, embarasses
the list and embarasses the Perl community. So from now on I'll send an
offlist warning and second offences will get you unsubbed. Yes, you can
probably resub from one of your other quintillion domains. Yes, you
think I'm a fascist. Yes, you can sub me to every spam list and porn
relay that you can find. I'll cope.

That's not to say that we can't talk about stuff - there's a genuine and 
interesting discussion to be had about the merits of screening 
applicants by CPAN uploads or Degree. But keep it civil.

And if someone posts to the list breaking some rule of etiquette - leave 
it to the list admins to sort it out. If you want to become a list admin 
(or any admin) then mail me off list - we're always happy to have 
volunteers.

Simon




[*] I just *know* that someone is going to point out that they trained 
as an accountant before entering the lucrative and glamourous world of 
programming.