I was just perusing my long-ignored Monster.com agents and saw that in the last seven days there have been about 10 jobs posted that I’m at least marginally qualified for. Not a single one am I actually interested in. To these companies I say, I would seriously rather go work at Walmart than work for you. One of them was so bad I almost sent an email to that effect. Here are the reasons:

1. You’re cheap! Man are you cheap. You want to pay a “content management system developer” with 7 to 10 years experience $25-$30 and hour? First of all, web content management has barely been around that long. Second, anyone who has been doing it half that long (and I’ve been doing it twice half that long!) is worth twice that much. And for contract work you really need to take that and double it. Third, this is Austin where commutes and the price of downtown housing double every three years. Get a grip! It’s not so much the money itself as how out of touch with reality this makes you seem as an employer. What you’re basically saying is you want only under-qualified candidates and you want them to come in and have to lie through their teeth to get the job. The fact that they’ll be living in a trailer and commuting two hours a day from Bumfuckville, Texas in a car with no a/c or muffler is just a bonus I guess, huh?
2. Your coporatespeak, it hurts my eyes! Hey, you want to talk about load-balanced server clustering, I’m fine. You start using terms like “leverage” and “business initiatives” and “market-leading” and you’ve lost me as a viewer. If you’re using this kind of language on me, a technical person you are trying to bring into the inner sanctum, I can only imagine what kind of horseshit you’re shoveling on your clients. Do you people really sit around a table and talk like this? How can you respect yourselves at the end of the day? I guess maybe the Audi and the McMansion help soothe the pain, huh?
3. You want me to work how much? Full time? Dude, that’s a real buzz kill. Especially since what you really mean is you want me to sit in a small space with poor lighting and worse air circulation for at least 40 hours per week. When things are busy, you expect me to be there more. When things are not busy, you still expect me to be there, and what’s worse you expect me to pretend to be busy! You people just suck, you know that?
4. You want me to build what? From reading your job description, and the cryptic sentence about your product, and your incredibly-sucky website* I still have no idea what you do, but I have determined that your primary goal is one of the following, or possibly both:
   1. to totally suck
   2. to be utterly evil

   Either way it’s pretty clear that your customers are going to get screwed in the deal. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I ran across an ad for a company that was doing something interesting and non-evil. Probably these kinds of companies don’t have to run ads on Monster.com. Hey wait! Evil… Monster… there could be something to this!

5. *Your web site sucks. There’s really no excuse for this. My Monster agents only track web technologies. If you’re trying to hire me, you’re looking for a web developer. If you can’t take the time to sit down and write a couple of pages of content to clearly articulate what it is your company does and if you further can’t spend the $2000 to get a decent web designer to put a pretty and usable face on it, then frankly you’re useless.

Okay, so I think those are the primary reasons. I suppose I could have been more succinct. So here’s my “executive summary:” I won’t work for you because you suck and I don’t.

I wonder if anyone is tracking this. I wonder if somewhere, buried deep in a stack of governments reports, there’s a “Breakdown of New Jobs by Industry Sector and Level of Suckage” report.