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Subject:RE: The odds of finding work through job ads From:"Darren Barefoot" <darren -dot- Barefoot -at- capeclear -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:22:09 -0000
Actually, I can argue with the model, for a couple of reasons. First,
the employment market has changed drastically between 1997 (when the
article appears to have been written) and today. Additionally, there's
been a lot of education about spam and how to avoid it. There are fewer
good email addresses on Usenet and people are better equipped to ignore
or automagically delete your spam.
Furthermore, spammers are rarely actually trying to peddle a product. A
Wired experiment (admittedly far too few spam mails as a sample group)
found that only 17% of spams Wired writers replied to 'gave rise to what
appeared to be "legitimate" offers: people with a real product to sell
who were actually interested in selling it.' The rest were just attempts
to harvest email addresses, to send more spam. Essentially, the majority
of spammers appear to be involved in a email pyramid scheme. So, it's
hard to know how effective the 'product spam' actually is.
In truth, you were successful 6+ years ago. That said, I wouldn't want
to:
a) encourage job hunters to spam anybody, because spamming is
intrinsically bad.
b) raise job hunters' hopes that this would be an effective means of
obtaining gainful employment.
I'd be interested from hearing from any other technical writers who have
sought work through spamming. DB.
-----Original Message-----
From: John Posada [mailto:JPosada -at- book -dot- com]
Sent: 18 March 2003 17:03
To: 'Darren Barefoot'; TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: The odds of finding work through job ads
Darren...define success and for whom? If I send out 600 emails, get 599
flames, and one position, was I successful?
I realize that this is the model under which we each receive hundreds of
junk mails per day, but ya can't argue the model.
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