Fear of Fish

What is it about recruitment agencies that annoys us all the most? Especially the ones that claim to specialize in Rails! For me, it’s this list of gripes below:

• They know absolutely “Jack Diddly” about Rails or Ruby, so how can they hire you someone that actually fits?
• They charge absolutely ridiculous fees, with no guarantee that they’ll find you someone.
• They hound you like rabid dogs.

In all my experience with recruitment agencies, all they do is hunt through cv’s (resumé’s for you non-Brits) for a keyword of “Rails” or “Ruby”. How do they filter out anyone from that list? When I go to a recruitment agency I have to outline what I need them to find, which usually means them searching their database of possible’s for keywords, or doing a quick dig through Working With Rails for someone who looks like a fit. However, the person searching knows absolutely nothing about Rails or Ruby and therefore can’t make a reasonable decision on whether they fit…so they gather them all and blanket email them.

Seriously fellas, what we need is a better system…one where someone with knowledge of Ruby and Rails does the searching for you, with fees that aren’t astronomical (a.k.a 25% of the expected Salary). If a company told this person exactly what their duties would be and what the plan was, then it wouldn’t be hard to do initial interviews for them also, filtering out the list to a …say… final 3 possibles.

So, I’ve outlined the problem, I’ve outlined the solution. Now just get my RSS feed added to your news reader, and keep your eye on this spot.

Now the RailsConf aftermath has calmed down, I wanted to let you know a little about a tool we announced at the conference that I’ve been working on for a while. We’ve bundled up an Engine Yard gentoo slice from our clusters and put it into a VMWare image.

Engine Yard Express

All the information you’ll need is on that page and there’s more to come.

I’ll be at RailsConf this week giving a talk for Engine Yard with other members of the team holding a Q & A after it. Come along and heckle us with difficult questions, or just watch. Quite a few of us will be at the #caboose conf meets as well, so if you’re there I look forward to seeing you!

So, it turns out both Eric Cartman and Arnold Schwarzenegger like Ruby! Who’d have known!

Eric Cartman
Arnold Schwarzenegger

There’s rumoured to be Borat, Ali G and possibly Bruce Forsyth coming too, in an extended version of the question!

I figured it was time I spent some time on my blog, and move to Wordpress.  It’s easier to maintain than mephisto, and there’s more support/plugin support for it.