Job hunting via founder blogs
Just got an interesting question in by email. The person has a friend who's job hunting, and interesting in working with all kinds of high-productivity web stuff: microformats, site APIs, free/open-source databases, REST, XHTML—you know, all of "Web 2.0" except for the curvy pastel box layout thing.
So how do you find the companies that are looking for people who work on this stuff? I tend to hear about a lot of those kinds of jobs, even though I'm not looking for one. Today's question made me think about how. First, if I use and like a new web service or technology, I usually subscribe to the founder's or architect's blog. Then, just watch those blogs for links to job postings, and links to the services that people who make good new web sites use. Tree, fruits, and so on.
Company founders are not just blogging for investors and customers. A good founder's blog is a recruiting tool, too. In the new software market, you can't just be a Code Monkey. Catchy song, bad career advice.
Code Monkey: "Maybe manager wanna write goddam login page himself."
Web 2.0 developer: "Maybe manager wanna not reinvent the wheel, login-wise, and just use LID or something—check out the discussion on this feature request page."
(IT Journalism trade secret: the most informative web pages about a company are usually in the "jobs" section. What they're looking for in an an employee reveals technical info there that would never get past Marketing.)
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Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
