positions vacant, a job in the IT / surfing industry

The Ad

Sellnowt’s hiring! We’re looking for a full time developer with extensive Ruby On Rails knowledge to join us in our trendy inner city office. Email us if you’re interested and want to find out more, just don’t ask about money – that comes later.

The Response

Two men and one woman sit on uncomfortable seats in an outer office on the third floor of a dingy walk-up in Surry Hills. The Applicants. They are waiting for the door into an inner office to open and the soft welcome handshake of Styron Neddle, the Editor in Chief of the Sellnowt website.

Mr. Neddle is indisposed at the moment; a small overnight spike in the swell has interfered with his normal commute to the city and there are certain obligations to be met down by way of offshore Cronulla. Apologies.

The Company

Sellnowt is one of approximately 267,987 Australian websites that cater to the generally uncaring and chronically out-of-pocket surfing population of this great island nation girt by sea. The proprietor, who must remain nameless, so let’s call him Den Batson, was born to wealth and indolence and is rarely seen in daylight hours. The site reportedly attracts about 115,000,000 dedicated page views every ten minutes and as a result attracts a solid and golden stream of negotiable instruments from Google. This windfall is deposited into a secure holding tank, in cash at the Star City Casino in Melbourne for reasons not widely known but widely suspected.

The Editor

Mr. Styron Neddle, an avuncular fellow with an unfortunate lisp and a tendency hum whilst deep in thought, has fought his way to the apex of this business by cold-bloodedly double dealing every surf industry executive who thought that by taking him to lunch would result in some commercial favours with regard to advertising rates on his website.

However, and as a favour to some of the website’s larger advertisers Mr. Neddle is not averse to leaving a few rags of old Tracks magazines about the outer office.

Applicant 1

Name of Greg Darke. Thin, tall and impossibly introverted. Greg knows that Ruby on Rails (RoR) is an open source web application framework, he knows that like many contemporary web frameworks it uses the Model View Controller (MVC), he knows that it is intended to emphasize Convention over Configuration (CoC) – but he doesn’t give adeleted you see, because like all good developers all he wants is a lot of midnight shifts so he can play his Terry Reilly CD’s and chew Acid, you know; sugar, wedding bells, sunshine, tabs, ticket, twenty-five. That stuff.

Qualification enough. Greg immediately short-listed. Good material. Solid performer.

Applicant 2

Name of Ramone Diaz. A very chunky little Mexican, or so he says, Neddle doesn’t do work visas, too busy. Diaz knows that RoR is up to version 2.3 as at March 15 2009, he knows that one development of this version is that engines let one reuse application pieces complete with routes, view paths and models. But he only knows it in Spanish. The Engleeze she’s not so good.

Mi Inglés no es bueno

This confounds Neddle but for a moment, the applicant is obviously better suited to dealing with creditors – where by coincidence there is a vacancy after the unfortunate murder of the previous payables manager, a moody Yugoslav with a few personal issues.

Qualification enough for that particular position. Ramone is immediately short-listed. Excellent material.

Applicant 3

Name of Mimi Saravanalanganingham. Sri Lankan born accountant who could never understand the occasional necessity of making 2 + 2 = 5. This being the basic accounting principle of corporate profit reporting that has made this great island nation girt by sea a haven for so many free market entrepreneurs and liberal minded labour Prime Ministers. Mimi was well aware that RoR has been criticised for issues with scalability, in particular the Twitter outages in 2007-2008 which resulted Twitter’s transition to Scala. (not the opera).

Nevertheless Neddle and Sellnowt, always a friend of impoverished Asian nations and an eager recipient of displacement Federal funding for the hiring of attractive young women in sarongs and young male Islamic fundamentalists with no home to go and a fondness for hooning around on high powered motorbikes, did not hesitate to shortlist Ms. Mimi as IT Surfing Person of the Year. Displacing young Layne Beachley, the perennial favourite and 15 times World Champion. A worrisome loss, but livable in a commercial sense.

Thank you for your applications, the job is taken, you are out of luck, get a life and go north, there is nothing for you here.

Management.

Sellnowt.

reprinted without apologies and without shame – reply at own peril