So if you were changing hosts then I can understand the usage of a Gmail account. We have hosted Gmail at where I work now (Mocra) and we’re able to keep our @mocra.com domain so the email address looks all businessy whilst still being hosted by Google. By now I’m sure you’ve already found a hosting provider. Unfortunate that your old one was spam-blocked. I too do not wear suits, hell, I don’t even own a suit!

If the descriptions are written by clients then it is (obviously) no fault of your own if they suck. The client gets what the client wants. As for the descriptions most of it is “standard” now.

Senior positions go a little like:

3/4+ years Ruby/Rails experience, great knowledge of Linux server maintenance, Scrum, Agile, TDD & BDD methodologies. HTML, CSS, JavaScript are a big plus.

Junior positions obviously are a little bit more wound back, probably requiring a little experience. I find it unfortunate that there really doesn’t seem like there’s a company out there who’s willing to train minions up to be awesome at what they do, but then I guess they run the risk of them running off to a competitor. Hooray for employment contracts I guess.

I am curious as to how you came across it, like I said before I’d simply forgotten about it. I haven’t done a job dissection for quite a while, but I did write a page on this site called “Job Postings” @ http://frozenplague.net/job-postings/ about what I look for in a job posting.

As for the client name well, that’s quite a conundrum.

I think your email’s a keeper, would be good to have someone further to talk to about the job industry, I’m curious about its inner workings especially when it comes to hiring new software developers.

The position descriptions are writen by clients. In the event we do a retained search, we have a long meeting to do exactly what you’ve done here and get something really robust. This is really more of a turn and burn thing. As to the production support piece, it’s really something to discuss via phone and we don’t want to write volumes but the client is doing alot of debugging and getting their code standardized and running worry free over the next couple of months, then the person will spend 90 percent of time doing the fun stuff. Some teams write killer descriptions, others leave alot to be desired or in the case of tech, which we don’t do so much of anymore for many reasons, simply flood you with a thousand acronyms that are annoying, then you get the gig and it’s doing something completely different.

As to the referral fee, it means it is a fee, paid to you for a service provided. It’s pretty generous and we get a lot of these.. Good people know good people.

I want to thank you for taking a crack at this one. It’s definitely a search we grabbed out of nowhere and it’s contingent vs retained which leaves a lot of room for error (just comb thru our site on the pitfalls of contingency search) because it’s a rush job on every level. This ws for a friend, so we slammed it out.

Keep my mail, whatever you choose, out of your spambox and maybe the next one will really wow you.

P.S. last but not least.. The client name.. We can’t disclose this stuff usually.. You would flip out if you were a hiring manager and suddenly you’re getting direct calls from people.. These descriptions circulate widely now and we don’t want our clients names out there until we determine the candidate is going to be a fit or unless they ask us directly etc.

Cheers,

Ryan

anyway I agree that there might be a good reason about using gmail when sending an email, personally I often switch from my personal to the gmail’s one because my personal email server runs greylist, therefore I’m not entirely sure that the recipient’s smtp server will try to send the email again if it’s important.

see you in irc.

kain