Lisp employment resources..
Coby Beck
Are there any resources out there I am not aware of?
I have explored and continue to explore:
Flipdog.com
Dice.com
Franz.com/careers
A hundred other general job sites (are there any other particularily good
ones?)
I have applications in process with ITA and Dotcast. MDL is not looking
anymore. Anyone know another company besides these that is looking?
Any good resources I have missed? I will consider relocation globally.
http://resumes.dice.com/cobybeck
--
Coby Beck
(remove #\Space "coby 101 @ bigpond . com")
Steven M. Haflich
Coby Beck wrote:
>
> I am looking for work and hoping to continue my streak with Lisp job #4.
> Are there any resources out there I am not aware of?
>
> I have explored and continue to explore:
> Flipdog.com
> Dice.com
> Franz.com/careers
> Any good resources I have missed? I will consider relocation globally.
> http://resumes.dice.com/cobybeck
Well, yes, and I have one good tidbut of info to give you. But first I
need to recount a little story why I happen to know that tidbit.
Once long ago the marketing department at a certain unnamed company I
happen to work for arranged to have me assigned a little project. I
was to write a web spider that would screen scrape Lisp-related job
listings so that company's web site could have a centralized
repository of current jobs that would be useful to the community.
We didn't intend to short-circuit the several job-listing sites on
the internet -- we only intended to put all the lisp jobs in one place
that would link to the various listings on the major job sites.
The thing was a bit tedious to code since destructuring html into
useful information more than tedious, and significant changes to the
scraped web sites could break the scraping algorithms. Still, it
worked, and the problem was interesting in a number of ways. One of
the more interesting issues was evaluating the relevance of any
particular job listing. It is easy on any of the major job search
engines to search for "lisp" in job descriptions, but that leads to
lots of trash: Many descriptions include lisp in a shopping list of
exotic background technologies, but there is really no lisp
involvement in the position. There are also a lot of Autolisp and
CAD jobs which are probably uninteresting to the CL community.
Eventually I came up with a heuristic that assigned a numeric
relevance ranking that correlated reasonably well with my own
intuitive ranking of the listings. It is also the first time in 15
years of CL programming that I have needed a function like tanh.
Anyway, the thing eventually worked, producing a web page that would
be a boon to seekers of lisp jobs (but not providing anything they
couldn't get by themselves by spending 15 minutes visiting the same
job search sites themselves). I delivered this tool to said
marketing department. That was about 18 months ago. So far it
hasn't appeared, although I am reliably informed that they still
intend to put it into production, someday.
So, finally, here's the nugget of information. Of all the major jobs
sites that I scanned in this project, by far the most productive
was monster.com. I don't know why, but they seemed always to have a
larger number of "interesting" Lisp jobs than the competitors. It is
true that a year or two ago there were more jobs than now, but I
believe this is more due to general economic conditions than the
relevance of Lisp.
Best of luck in your search.
Eric Moss
long before companies resort to, e.g. Dice, they look via word-of-mouth,
and then locally, and *then* through a local headhunter, and *then* Dice
and *then* through a headhunter that finally gives up and puts the same
ad on Dice a year later. It's pathetic to see this happen, but I did
with MDL and DotCast and so on.
Anyway, I sometimes use google to search for "Employment Opportunities
Lisp". Here's why. When the shops are first going to a public job
posting, they put in on their own website to hopefully attract people
who are interested in that particular company anyway, and who are
probably aware of them by being a local candidate. That way they
(naively) hope to find a local candidate who already wants to work
there.
Those internal URLs are often labeled "Employment Opportunities" or
"Careers" or similarly. It also helps screen out the generic websites.
It's still a crapshoot and requires tinkering with the search strings,
but it does (sometimes) get you one step deeper into the pile.
Good luck.
Eric
Mark Dalgarno
> The sites you mentioned are ok (I use them, too), but I have found that
> long before companies resort to, e.g. Dice, they look via word-of-mouth,
> and then locally, and *then* through a local headhunter, and *then* Dice
> and *then* through a headhunter that finally gives up and puts the same
> ad on Dice a year later. It's pathetic to see this happen, but I did
> with MDL and DotCast and so on.
If any employer is reading this I'd recommend posting to c.l.l as a
straightforward and inexpensive recruitment method.
I've done this on a number of occassions and had success each time - 5
of the 6 developers we've recruited in the past three years came via
this route.
Mark
good dog !
>sites that I scanned in this project, by far the most productive
>was monster.com. I don't know why, but they seemed always to have a
>larger number of "interesting" Lisp jobs than the competitors. It is
>true that a year or two ago there were more jobs than now, but I
>believe this is more due to general economic conditions than the
>relevance of Lisp.
http://jobsearch.monster.com/jobsearch.asp?cy=US&brd=1&lid=&fn=6&q=lisp
Of the 6 jobs that a search for "lisp" threw up, not a single one was
actually for lisp.
Most were for Java or C++.
"US-CA-Redwood City-Senior Architect
6+ years of enterprise-class server software development.
2+ years working as an architect on an enterprise software development
product.
3+ years of Java development experience, and 3+ years of development
experience with some other object-oriented or systems language (C/C++
Smalltalk, Lisp, Eiffel, etc.)."
good dog !
projects completed)
Must be able to understand and substantially improve algorithmically
complex Lisp code"