Embedded Software Engineers, needed in Seattle

Following the furore over the last job posting, which contined all the relevant information that anyone could want, we get this crap from a recruitment spamhouse. IMHO the pair make perfect example of what should and should not be posted.

I was a real hotshot at Space Invaders and Asteroids back in the '80s. Does this count?

Ian

And that is the main reason why I would prefer not to see *any* job posts - accepting it legitimises the spam.

--

John Devereux

CB! Go ahead and criticize this one -- I bet the OP never responds to _anything_ said here!

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Posting from Google?  See http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" came out in April.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

... spam snipped ...

Once bitten, twice shy. However criticisms are better sent to the above mail address.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
   Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.

Spoken as someone employed. ;-)

Has anyone tried, well, the thought experiment of simply not being

*crusty* about Usenet posts? That they don't all require a response? That you can ignore what you don't wish to read?

I've seen so many newsgroups where techies get crusty with any kind of job recruiter, no matter what they say, that it's sickening. A lot of techs aren't basically polite. My answer on the moderated gamedesign-l was to expressly condone commercial posts, and to reject any posts getting toasty about "evil suits."

Cheers, Brandon Van Every

The problem with that approach is the camel-in-the-tent effect. You let the camel poke its nose into the tent, and sooner than you'ld like, you have a full-size, live, steenkin' camel pooing on your dinner plate.

Some developments have to be killed in infancy.

Ok, but why indiscriminate grumpiness? The original post was a legitimate job post, whether or not it conforms to anyone's personal cranky ideal of what a job post should be. I'm just getting tired of "jobs are a threat!" posts. It's asinine. It's not curing anything and the cure is worse than the disease.

Cheers, Brandon Van Every

Well, yes :)

I don't bother responding to them either - it is a waste of time with most anyway since they are of the "fire and forget" type, where the poster never reads any of the groups spammed. Ironically it is the "borderline" cases that are worth complaining about (here), where the poster actually has an interest in the group.

The thing is there are already websites and newsgroups for job hunting. Do we really want to add comp.arch.embedded to the mail lists of the all the worlds recruitment agencies?

--

John Devereux

Yes, if it means more money for people who frequent here, and more jobs for people who don't have one already.

I get tired of the complaints about bandwidth. This is not the late

80s. We have bandwidth out the wazoo. The number of totally irrelevant things posted in a newsgroup, even a newsgroup such as this with a high signal:noise ratio, is astounding. Job posts are not totally irrelevant, when they have something to do with embedded programming. This one did. I say, quit bugging the legitimate job posters. You might actually see better quality job posts, if communities weren't in the habit of getting crusty with every recruiter that comes their way.

Cheers, Brandon Van Every

To see how bad it can get, just monitor a few newsgroups with 'jobs' in their name for a few days. You will find them full of repeated automatic postings, where every idiot head hunter tries to get his post up as the most recent one.

The transmission time for all this junk is not negligible, especially on dial-up. Synchronizing a newsgroup probably takes about 1/4 sec per message. This adds up, and also requires local storage. Meanwhile the wife and kids are complaining bitterly that they can't gab with their best buddies, and causing retransmissions by picking up the phone to check.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
   Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.

I agree. Instead of posting here, anyone who does not feel this posting should have been made to this group should contact the OP directly at the email address provided. Preferably as a candiate who the OP would actually spend time trying to contact.

There was a time when I got SPAM email with an 800 number for contact. I would always call the number and when I got a person I would let them know how I felt about SPAM.

Nose of the camel... nose of the camel!

Now that is an image I didn't need early on a Monday morning!!! }^P

Then maybe we should start making technical discussion posts to Dice and Monster?

If users of this group are too d**m lazy to find work without having to rely on a technical discussion newsgroup, then they deserve to starve!!!

Heck, I've had people complain that I used to post with a 6 line signature, because it was too commercial!

The bottom line is that any post to a group that is not strictly within the topic of the group should be actively discouraged, preferrably by multiple means.

Spammers aren't paying attention to anything anyone posts in response. You aren't "nipping anything in the bud" by talking about it here. You are just scaring off acutal human job recruiters, who could be an asset to this community. With spammers, the semi-productive course is to chase down their ISPs. But it's only semi-productive as they'll find another one and it wastes your time. The path of least resistance is to use a spam filter. You've been on Usenet a long time. You should have learned by now that Usenet is an anarchy and you cannot control people the way you'd like. Ceremonies of complaining don't change a darned thing. Spam filters may not be "morally correct," but they do work well enough to alleviate the problem, so people use them.

It is negligible on broadband. You are complaining about dialup. I'm on a cell phone dialup myself. It has the virtue of being 3x faster than a land line. I get about 15K/sec. I got 5K/sec with a 57.6K modem.

Multitasking also helps. I've been reading docs on the desktop, compiling in the background, and downloading something else since 1993. When the big excitement was having a 14.4K modem, instead of driving a few miles to the lab with a box of 30 floppies to round-robin my downloads on empty PCs. People were just as verbose then as they are now.

Then perhaps you need to learn how to schedule a cron job. Somehow I think you know how to do it already and just haven't gotten around to it. If you're not going to get a 2nd phone line, then it would be kinder to your family to schedule your downloads for off-peak hours.

You could also use Google Groups as your newsreader. Then you don't have to synch anything. You do lose functionality: no sigs and no filters. Also you're online for the duration of your readings, so depending on how important you think it is to read and respond to newsgroup posts, it may be a wash.

Cheers, Brandon Van Every

You could, but you wouldn't gain anything by it. No one would be listening.

I'm wondering when the last time you hunted for a job was, or went through an economic downturn. For people who aren't in a permanent long-term employment situation, and for people who consult, it is important to develop business contacts in every channel they spend time on.

So? That doesn't mean their complaint was reasonable. It only means that people on Usenet feel they have a God-given right to bitch and moan.

The bottom line is that lotsa Usenet people have too much time on their hands to complain about things. If you're serious about community rules, you don't keep debating stuff in unmoderated newsgroups. You start a moderated one, and people decide during the RFD what is and isn't going to be allowed by the charter.

Cheers, Brandon Van Every

Whoa! Don't blame us for having dialup!!! I bet you pay for every minute you are connected with a cell phone too, right? Then you are paying for all the SPAM you get.

So the solution to SPAM is to read a magazine while it downloads??? You have an interesting set of priorities.

Yes, that is what it is all about. We should change the way we use newsgroups because you don't like that we don't want SPAM here.

I actually don't know why some newsgroups get inundated with SPAM and others don't. But I don't think it is a good idea to welcome any sort of commercial posting to this newsgroup, and that includes job announcements. There are groups just for that, why do we need them here where many of us don't want to see them?

How about a year ago? I never once posted a job wanted ad to the newsgroups. I also spent a lot of time on the sites that are intended for job listings. That was actually productive since that is where employers post jobs now. Seems the paper is nearly obsolete in that regard.

It means that there are any number of levels of tolerance for commercial activity. You seem to be at the 99th percentile given that you are the only person here defending the OP.

Seems you are one of the people who like to complain. What have you done about the issue?

Not everyone are lucky enough to live somewhere, where bandwidth is not a problem anymore. Wasting of anything is bad in any case, which includes bandwidth.

Regards Anton Erasmus

... snip ...

I've got lots of filters. The original is long gone here, but IIRC I gave some advice to readers about how to discourage this sort of thing. Without which the posting would have been pointless.

... snip ...

And I used to download in .arc format from the Fido node off which I was pointing, at a screaming 1200 BPS. on my latest thing USR Passport, which cost about $450, and was a great improvement over

300 baud. Later I advanced to 2400. All on an 8 Mhz XT with a Herc display. So what? Fundamentals remain. Just because you want to bend over for the spammers doesn't impose any such requirement on the rest of us.

And yes, I can do something else during the one to 5 minutes the newsgroups are usually synchronizing. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to do such. I could multitask (with limits) on my Kaypro 83. Better on my own 8080 hardware from 1974, which had better interrupt handling and adequate timers.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
   Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.