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program all day
Thursday, March 15 2001
As I was biking over to the main building this afternoon for yet another distracting mandatory meeting, up in the sky over dotcom-rich eastern Santa Monica floated an ominous sign, a big red Monster.com blimp. If dotcoms are dinosaurs in an economic Cretaceous Period, then here's the kind of monster that is Monster.com: a ravenous scavenging Tyrannosaur moving hastily from carcass to carcass, picking over the bones. The blimp didn't really need to say any more than that simple URL to remind us all down here on Earth to update our resumés and check the listings once more on our favorite job site. Oh yes, and beware the Earth-crossing-asteroids of March.
During the mandatory meeting, the Grand CTO (not to be confused with the UK CTO) asked the assembled developers if any of them ever knew of a product on the site that required the simple deployment of static HTML documents. No hands went up at all.
Meanwhile, in my cubicle, frustrated by delays in development inherent under this new multi-tier SQL/COM/XML/XSL architecture, I wrote a whole library of VBScript functions to do to the XML what I need done, not what some COM developer thinks I need.
After the Monster.com blimp had left the skys, a cold overcast dragged itself in from the ocean. I went home for a late lunch and a recruiter was lucky and got me on the phone. He asked if I'd accept an annual salary for 5K less than I'm currently asking if it meant working in nearby Culver City. I shrugged and said sure. I'm aware that times are tough, it being Bush Recession II and all.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010315 feedback
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