Saturday, January 31, 2004

Survival

So I was talking to this recruiter in California earlier this week, who has his work cut out for him: for a startup in the SF Bay Area he's looking for a senior software engineer who has gone through full commercial product cycles on Symbian Series 60 (Nokia's smartphones OS). Good luck: I know of around four people who could possibly qualify on the whole continent, and that's because they all work for Nokia, and they are not going anywhere. All the Symbian programmers with commercial experience are in Europe, where there is a market for programs on Series 60 phones.

So we were talking around because he wanted to know what I liked for gigs -- he does some international placement -- so I asked him how long he has been a recruiter. Recently. Before that? Two year hiatus after being a project manager. So what did you do in the meantime?

"Well, you know these Aeron chairs--" he starts and I shriek with laughter.
-- "No way. You sold leftover .com Aeron chairs?"
"eBay. I mean, when the company folded that was 800 alone."
-- "You must know shipping rates to every zip code."
"Oh, FedEx and UPS make it so easy these days."

Now he's a survivor. Company crashed? Find the cash.