100% Ignored

Creative Artist and PHP Developer

One can generally find an ad like this on Craigslist in about any major city at any one time.

I ran into someone that was an artist who happened to program as well. His coding interest was derived from attempts to animate his characters in Maya. Over the time that I got to know him, he told me he had earned pocket money creating CAD files and having stuff made for model railroads. He had moved to Austin to find work as a gaming animator, only to discover that the market for that had collapsed. He had work with out of town clients, but wasn't getting far in the Austin gaming scene.

At first he was reluctant to let me see his code. It appeared from the way he was talking that he didn't think his coding skills were all that good. Once I saw what he was doing, I was persuaded that his coding skills were sufficient for him to find work in a development role, and the two of us composed a resume that emphasized the C# background he had developed.

He landed a job offer in two weeks... in the town where he had come from. I was sorry to see him go, he was a great neighbor, but from the looks of it he was making 3x or 4x whatever he had been cobbling together as an artist. I followed up, finding he was still working for that employer a year later. Since I don't know who he was working for I have no idea whether they use any of his artistic talents, but it seemed like that was largely a bygone at that point.

The Aesthetics of Code

I run into programmers all the time that are ‘mercenary’, they will work for anyone and do anything, or at least anything that is not obviously illegal. I recall getting calls from recruiters for banks as the real estate market was going nuts in 2006 and 2007 - I told them flat out ‘no banks’. My issue with that at the time was that the specific financial institutions that were recruiting were central to the CDO boom, and were directly responsible for what turned out to be the crash in 2008. Plenty of programmers that work for large banks complain (on StackExchange.com, if anyone wants to find examples) about maintaining 30 year old applications in ancient languages. They are paid lots of money. Golden handcuffs.

When one adds ‘artist’ (or musician, or ‘content creator’) to the coding requirement, then one gets into the community of developers with some aesthetic sense.  These people will not only create ‘art’, their code (and their application design) will be ‘art’. This has a number of follow-on implications, one of which is that the developer looks at their work in a larger context. One of the sayings we had at an old minicomputer company I worked for was: “Something not worth doing at all isn’t worth doing well”. Certain projects appear to be either morally compromised, done to death, or simply silly. Programmers that concern themselves with what is worthwhile won't give a lot of projects a second glance.

A lot of ‘adware’ has snooping code in it for gathering page view or user information, stuff that some sites assert violates their terms of service. People make markets out of tracking various kinds of keyword searches. At one point in time someone noticed that in one particular country, the most often searched term by women was ‘how to kill your husband’. Anyone making a business out of this kind of thing is likely to experience rapid developer turnover.

Antennae

Quite often such people are ‘reading between the lines’ when they see certain details. A lot of programming languages ‘suck’ from the perspective of people that like writing beautiful code. Which ones those are depends on the programmer, but naming a language drops all kinds of hints about what goes on in the shop. Replace PHP with VBA, C++, Python, Java, or ROR. Programmers associate such languages with either work or educational experiences, some of which were frustrating. Since PHP is used for web page scripting, one presumes there will be coding in JavaScript as well, even though the ad referenced above never mentioned it.

‘Long lists’, such as MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, Python, etc. speak volumes. One institution put out an ad (in the last month or so) for a ‘DOS FoxPro programmer’. Many of the organizations that post such ads don’t realize (and perhaps don’t care) what they’re communicating to their respective developer communities. It can’t hurt to vet such ads with people that could interpret them for wider context.

The entry level programmer will take whatever is available. The experienced programmer has, most likely, worked in at least one dysfunctional shop. If one is advertising for skill and experience, then their message should avoid hints of ‘my way or the highway’ or simply management neglect. Thus the following quote means more than the poster most likely intended:

If you are a firm or company and you reply to this post, you will be 100% ignored.
If you are not in Austin or will to get here in one month, you will be 100% ignored.
In fact, if your reply does not include the exact phrase [omitted] as the subject, you will be 100% ignored.