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in reply to This isn't a job offer.
I'm a perl developer who is fairly desperate for work. I can only telecommute.
I got fired from my last real job for refusing to create an open mail relay. Those people are out of business now.
Refusal to move or follow instructions blindly make serious impediments to employment, but I am adamant. If obedient assimilation is what's required, Java programmers are a dime a dozen.
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Re^2: This isn't a job offer.
by ptum (Priest) on Apr 03, 2007 at 14:10 UTC
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I was laid off from a telecommuting job about five years ago, which was a bummer, because I lived way out in the country. I spent 17 months failing to start my own business, and stubbornly looking for another telecommuting job -- I found that employers were hesitant to hire a telecommuting employee out of the box -- they saw me as 'a pig in a poke' (as it were).
Eventually I became less stubborn (or more desperate) and took a job with a major e-commerce company in the Seattle area -- it required me to drive three hours each way, but it was a job and it paid the bills. After five months of that horrendous commute, I moved my family in to the city, and ultimately found another job that I transmogrified into a situation that allows me to work from home three days a week. Now I could probably move back to the country (which I love) if I can only disengage my family from life in Suburbia. I agree with Herkum that sometimes one has to be flexible. :)
A note to the OP -- others have mentioned telecommuting, and I would strongly encourage you to consider that. There really aren't many reasons, these days, why a team can't work closely together yet be physically distributed, as long as the team members build good relationships to start with. If I were in your shoes, I'd build a team of three or four telecommuting developers -- I'd spend some money getting them all to come to the office for a couple of weeks at the start, and then I'd cut 'em loose with modern collaboration tools and see what they could deliver. There are a lot of people (like me) who wouldn't consider living in LA unless you were offering serious money.
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Re^2: This isn't a job offer.
by schumi (Hermit) on Apr 03, 2007 at 09:18 UTC
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Good man!
I know it's sometimes hard to stand by your opinion, if you feel your job is at stake. Been there, done that - and I didn't even get the t-shirt. This is why I left my last job last summer, after eight years of employment there. I was somewhat stunned by how much I took before actually leaving...
But let me tell you this: I was out of a job and looking for half a year. Cut into my savings quite a bit, that did. But then I found a good job again, where the ad could have been made out to my name, it was so fitting. And it was worth all the hassle and wait before. And I've since learned that you don't always get from bad to worse. Sometimes it actually gets better - sometimes even a lot better. I wish you the same ending I had...
--cs
There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. - George Carlin
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Re^2: This isn't a job offer.
by exussum0 (Vicar) on Apr 03, 2007 at 16:33 UTC
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If obedient assimilation is what's required, Java programmers are a dime a dozen.
Dude, whiskey tango foxtrot.
That's as bad as saying all perl developers write line noise or all C developers write spaghetti code. Some of us java developers, architects and what not are fairly competent tyvm.
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++exussum0. This thread caught me at a low point and I indulged myself in a fit of self-pity. I regret splashing the dirt around.
For the rest of the posters: I like where I live, and I'm bound here by the need to look after my parents. Cities have fewer people here, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant or inactive. There is a sort of high density rural population nearby that is much more economically productive than bedroom communities are. This place is active in transportation, energy, finance, and medicine.
Businesses here are very conservative and not very knowledgable in IP, so they basicly all limit themselves to what microsoft can sell them. I haven't had much success marketing LAMP locally.
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Do it again, and we'll have to remove your letter e and u keys from your keyboard :)
You'd be surprised how much MS is entangled w/ business in general. Even here in NY - people love MS, because there's a finger to point at or a hand to hold. In terms of the perl interpreter, php, apache/jakarta and to some perception, mysql/postgres - they are disdained 'cause they seem unpointable. You can't pay, "the world," and get a patch for your OS in some agreed time line.
That isn't to say you can't fix it yourself or find help out there in OSS, or that companies can go away and/or say screw off.
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Zaxo, re. city vs. rural, I think some cities may have a concentration of a specific type of company, and that can make the job market look a little different than it actually is.
For example, the city near me seems to be loaded with finance companies. The jobs listed tend to be pretty homogeneous (5+ years xp (usually Java or MS, but sometimes Perl), finance experience, trading floor xp a plus, long hours but high pay), so if you don't qualify for one, you generally don't qualify for most of them. The ads often have the mysterious phrase "hedge fund" in them, but I don't see what finance has to do with landscaping... ;)
Anyhow, if you factor out those finance-related jobs, I wonder if the market here isn't much different from a more rural job market.
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Re^2: This isn't a job offer.
by talexb (Chancellor) on Apr 03, 2007 at 16:31 UTC
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I'm a perl developer who is fairly desperate for work. I can only telecommute.
I don't know your situation completely, but if you can sell yourself as a contract worker who would prefer to work at home (for whatever reason) after a 'warming up' period in the office (perhaps 4-6 weeks), that could work for an employer. After that, you could plan to come into the office a couple of days a month, perhaps on a regular basis (every other Tuesday), or perhaps as required (OK, I'm wrapping up project X, let's get together to discuss project Y).
I'm sure employers would be flexible ...
Alex / talexb / Toronto
"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds
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Re^2: This isn't a job offer.
by Herkum (Parson) on Apr 03, 2007 at 12:55 UTC
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There are only so many telecommuting jobs, and it is even more limited if you are going to use Perl only.
I looked in your profile and it says you are in Huntington, West Virginia. Chances are there are not going to be many Perl programming opportunities there unless you make your own.
Show SOME flexibility here, move to become a Perl programmer or change your skill set to something you can do in Huntington, WV.
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Really? What do you know about West Virginia?
Huntington itself is a small city in WV of 49,000~ people. It is reasonably close to Charleston, WV which has about 51,000~ people in the area. So the population in the area is fairly small. IT is also not a major industry there. Two of these things together indicate a lack of IT positions in general without the specifics of a Perl position
In addition, Zaxo said that he has been unemployed there a while which indicates that there are not a lot of opportunities in the area for him to do what he wants to do.
Telecommuting is not so unreasonable in this day and age
Just because a programmer can do most of their work from by telecommuting does not mean that companies will offer telecommuting jobs. I have been browsing www.dice.com, www.monster.com, and jobs.perl.org for a couple of months and most jobs require you to be on-site at least some of the time. Very, very few positions are 100% off-site telecommuting.
The other problem with telecommuting is that you are competing against everyone else in the country/world(depending on your location) for that position. Even if you are a good programmer, it can be hard to distinguish yourself from 300 to 400 resumes for that one position.
I am not putting down Zaxo, I am trying to encourage him to be a little more flexible. Most people that get a dream job is because the go out and find it, not wait for it to appear on their doorstep. You never know what you might be missing by refusing to expand your skill sets or moving to a new city.
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