I’m a little out of touch with what it takes to attract good programmers these days. Please comment on the following ad…
Programmer
photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for programmers, full- or
part-time. If you like the site and the community, this is an
opportunity to help out and get paid.
What are we going to be building over the next year or two?
- much better community and photo sharing services
- a system to sell stock photo rights from our gallery and share the
revenue with photographers - a system to interface our gallery with high-quality printing
services - improved content management and editorial workflow systems
- a system for performance management of the entire site and company
so that everyone involved with photo.net can see if they are having a
positive impact
Our current system is based on Oracle 9i and the ArsDigita Community
System 3.2, a free open-source toolkit that was developed initially for
photo.net. We expect to upgrade to Oracle 10g soon. Most of our
programming and thinking is done in SQL or PL/SQL. We use AOLserver Tcl
scripts for the glue code that puts HTML templates and SQL queries
together. New development projects may in some cases be implemented in
Ruby on Rails.
Experience with SQL programming is required. Experience developing Web
applications in some sort of scripting environment is required. C/Unix
programming experience is desirable, but not required.
You will report to and work directly with Jin S. Choi and Philip
Greenspun, the original authors of the photo.net toolset and the
ArsDigita Community System.
This is a job that could be done full-time or by a 15-20 hour/week
part-timer who was experienced and enthusiastic and wanted to
concentrate on one or two modules.
Please email a cover letter stating salary requirements and your resume
(in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is acceptable, Microsoft Word we
can’t read reliably) to philg@mit.edu, with a subject line of “photo.net
programmer application”
The only problem I see with the ad is that you don’t mention the job location, or if telecommuting will be possible.
I second Senastiano’s comment. In fact if telecommuting is possible I would be very inclined to put in an application myself. Also you might want to state if visa sponsorship is or is not available. Did I mention that Australia’s free trade agreement with the US makes us as easy to hire as Canadians 😉
Telecommuting is required because the company has no permanent office!
Drop the Oracle part?
Sorry … but I have to say, among every good programmer I’ve ever known, an Oracle requirement is a big minus. I’m not just being pseudo-religious.
My other suggestion would be to not be quite so wishy-washy about technology. TCL may be fine (I haven’t used it), but as someone who’s seen a lot of promises, a note about “some stuff may be written in RoR” sounds like lip-service to an idea that likely won’t turn into action.
The rest looks great, though. The first part about “if you like the site and the community” is the most important and most valuable part, since photo.net and the ACS have been around for a looong time and have a lot of fans.