I previously posted a rant and a bit of a story telling article about some of my horrible experiences with recruiters. Well about a month ago I had yet another experience. I give to you the proof.

I was sitting at home  and I received this email. (shortened to just useful excerpts)

Hello Erik,
Trust you are doing well. I just left you a Voice Mail.

Please let me know if you are interested in the position bellow by sending me your resume. I will call you to further discuss..

Web Developer III
Location: Orlando, FL
Job Type: Contract
Duration: 9 months
Rate: Open

.. long position summary ..
.. requirements ..
Significant experience with Content Management Systems
3-4 years of hands-on web development, including XML, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript
3 years experience with ASP/JSP/PHP or other server-side scripting language
Experience with Flash and ActionScript a strong plus
Experience with two and three tier web architecture.

Reading this I’m thinking wow, this sounds an awful lot like a position where I work, Web Developer III my work ranks our development positions I, II, III most places use Jr., Sr. etc. Ok, location Orlando, even closer. 9 month contract. Ok now this is getting eerie. Any contract position I have ever been offered is 6 or 12 months, occasionally i’ll get offered a 3 month, but 9 months is a Disney thing.

So on to the requirements, significant experience with CMS we heavily use cms’s ASP/JSP/PHP or other server-side scripting language at this point it has to be Disney, how many companies don’t care what language you have experience in? Disney has its own internally developed language so we hire from all backgrounds, but I’d guess the overwhelming majority of companies hire straight from the large pool of people that use the technology they implement.

But surely he couldn’t have emailed me an offer for a job at my current employer, after all he found me through my resume that is on monster.com (which I’d also like to mention hasn’t been updated in at least 6-9 months). I mean its the first entry in my previous experience section. Ok the suspense is killing me, lets just ask.

Dear Recruiter,

Is this position with Disney Internet Group / Disney Interactive Media Group / Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online ? Based off the contract term, the position title, skill set they are seeking, and overall job description it sounds just like it?

it did not take long to receive a reply, maybe 15 minutes.

Erik,

Thanks for your response. Yes the position is with one of the Disney groups. Would you be interested? feel free to send in your resume and I can call you back to further discuss the position with you. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. My details are listed below.

Thanks

Recruiter

This is the point where I yell some profanity, along the lines of you have to be f*in kidding me! I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. Why on earth would you not read someones resume before contacting them about a position. I’m fired up now. and as usual for me I’m pretty blunt I feel something needs to be said. So this is my reply.

I can’t tell you how much this response disappointments me. The sad truth is that this isn’t the first situation like this that has happened to me either, and is almost a daily occurrence at the office. I believe that I speak for quite a number of professionals when I ask that you please read our resume’s before contacting us regarding positions.

You are contacting me about a position that I already work in, I have been working for Disney since January of 2007, and have been a full time employee of theirs since April of 2008  and still presently working there, had anyone looked at the first entry in the employment experience section of my resume they would have noticed that.

Again, please read our resumes before contacting us about positions that we already hold, or that have nothing to do with our knowledge and previous work experience, because our resume happens to contain some sort of keyword out of the job description.

Sincerely,
Erik St. Martin

I know this probably won’t help he is probably on to his next victim, but it made me feel a little better.

I was wondering around today and happened to run into this super-lightweight cms called le.cms. Intrigued I continued to read about the benefits of the application and I read this:

The content is stored in text files, one per page, which means that no matter how many pages there are, page load time remains virtually the same, unlike a CMS with content stored in a database that takes longer and longer to query as more content is added.

I was shocked, they cannot be serious right? It seems as if in their opinion databases have been a waste of researchers time. I don’t know where to begin at dismissing this, I pose these questions?

• If flat files are so much better and faster why does the majority of software use databases, and why were databases invented?
• What do databases use to store their information? You guessed it files! except a huge amount of effort has been placed in making sure that I/O is optimized, as well as caching in memory things that are commonly accessed.

On to my question about your architecture, that no matter how many files its virtually the same load time! How much do you know about file I/O? If you have say 1,000 articles that have been placed on the disk through the course of 5 or 6 years I dare say these are going to be spread out across the disk, now your site that has 1,000 articles should have multiple users at the same time on, maybe in the hundreds? What do you suppose happens? There is going to be overhead while the disk seeks to all these different positions, maybe you’ll be in luck and the memory wont be reused by another process and the file will still be there for the second request.

On to scaling, when all this I/O and even just load becomes to much for one server, what is to be done? clustering should be fun, you will need to move these files to some sort of NAS device, and manage them from there.

/rant

It’s not that I don’t see this small lightweight cms as being useful, there are plenty of people out there that this is extremely useful for, but don’t play up your software by playing down proven technology. When using statements like this as benefits to your software you may want to do some research to see how accurate you are.

For those that have not used metric_fu (http://metric-fu.rubyforge.org/) its a great project by Jake Scruggs (http://jakescruggs.blogspot.com/) that merges many different ruby projects for measuring code performance, into one bundle of rake tasks and generates html reports. Up until now its churn feature (which shows you which of your files have been modified the most in source control) has only supported subversion. Myself I am a huge fan of Git and I use it for everything, even when I work on projects in other revision control systems I use things like git-svn and git-p4 to push to those systems as my remote. Many other rubyists share my love for it.

The other night while i was using metric_fu against one of my projects it kept complaining about my codebase not being a valid working directory, so I went ahead and implemented git support, yesterday Jake released the newest version 0.8.0 which contains my patch. So git lovers go update! (http://github.com/jscruggs/metric_fu/tree/master)

Next on my list removing the Rails dependency for dates.