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Andrew Plato wrote:
> Ummm, I think the person made it clear it was a staff job.
> Considering a salary was posted and benefits.
Well, I told you I was reading between the lines, based on my
experiences at that time. We don't have the original advertisement but
in '99 an awful lot of these job postings were shotgun posts to all
available categories on the board - CON_W2/IND/1099/PERM, etc,
basically just "Anybody, please help!"
Even then it was obvious that many of those jobs were project-based and
transient, so anybody who posted them as PERM wasn't fooling anybody.
Don't apply today's standards to '99. Back then, employers were happy
to talk to anybody who seemed to have the right experience. They didn't
consider it a waste of time to meet with a good candidate and discuss
whether the job should be FT or contract.
In '99 I got a gig with a dot-com. They were trying to fill it as perm,
but I was able to convince them a contract was better. I didn't fill
out the job application, either.
Nowadays of course it is totally reversed. I know a few people (not all
TWs) who took contract jobs because they needed the work, but weren't
really prepared to be contractors.
> This guy was pretty clearly a dipstick.
Entirely possible. We don't know his side of the story, though.
Or at least the guy was a bad salesman; sounds like he might have had
the right experience but didn't know how to close the deal. Maybe based
on what he saw he decided *not* to close the deal.
> Some people outside of technical writing think a person with the
> word "technical" in their job/profession title should actually have
> technical skills.
And people with the word "manager" in their titles should actually have
management skills. I mean besides knowing how to fire people and file
bankruptcy petitions.
We all know what the TW labor pool is like. When you advertise for a
technical writer you should know what to expect. You should also know
enough about technical writing to read the resumes and understand which
ones have the skills you need. If you want a developer or sysadmin or
engineer, you should advertise for one and be prepared to pay the
freight.
> You're off the deep end on this one, Mike.
Always a possibility. I need to learn line wrapping, too :-)
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