Recently I received an email from what I assume is a Magic Jack phone wielding “consulting company.” Ordinarily I dismiss such poorly worded emails which don’t include a billing rate. The rates are always illegal alien wages and the “company” almost always wants you to invoice monthly giving them 45-90 day terms. That means the consultant is eating it for roughly 4 months before there is even the tiniest hope of a pay check. Of course some of these Magic Jack phone wielding “consulting companies” have a habit of getting a new Magic Jack phone right about the time you are supposed to get paid leaving you looking for a collection agency which “might” be able to find them “if” they really were in America. Fun times.

I know many of you reading this will have little knowledge about IT. That is the point. If you cannot speak the native language clearly and know nothing about the industry, you shouldn’t be in a job requiring you to create email for and speak to people actually working in the industry. This really is an industry where putting a low wage working in charge of recruiting kills you. Consider the following:

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Location: Torrance, CA

Duration: 1 Years

  • C/C++ with Linux Developer
  • Solid Experience in CV/C++ Developer
  • Working experience on IDE
  • Working experience of various GUI controls–has written his own.
  • Strong understanding of View-Model architecture
  • Knowledge of Database programming

—–

I have worked in IT for over 30 years now. My exposure to C started with Borland Turbo C under DOS in college. I progressed through quite a few C++ compilers under DOS, OS/2, Windows, OpenVMS and Linux in the decades following. I have never heard of CV/C++. I used 3 different search engines and couldn’t come up with anything for CV/C++ on the first 5 screens of results. If they meant C# that’s a long way from V on the keyboard. If they meant CodeView, that was a DOS debugger. It would have to be in a really good emulator or virtual machine to run now.

The next 3 points show the complete lack of knowledge about the industry as well as little grasp of the English language. “Experience on” should have been “experience developing an” IDE if they meant this project would be developing a new or enhancing an existing IDE. If they meant developing within an IDE (north of 80% of all developers writing software on a PC develop within an IDE tool) they should have said such.

Now we get our left hook in the final line requiring database programming. This “could” be a new IDE to graphically develop database tables, reports and entry screens OR this new/updated IDE will now be using a database for its code indexing.

Boiling a requirement down to a few disjointed bullet points ensures a few things:

  1. the people actually qualified to do the job won’t respond
  2. every seasoned developer who “might” be able to do the job will ignore the request because it doesn’t say what the actual project is.
  3. someone with a grasp of both software development and the English language equal to that of the email creator will be the most emphatic candidate responding. They won’t make it in the door at the client site though.

This post is important to writers. Many of you will have studied under learned professors about how to correctly use the English language. Some of you may well have found violations of proper language use within this post. How many of you, when writing a story, bother to learn the language of the story or its characters? That is not as stupid as it sounds. How many times have you watched a television show or read a book where the creators thought tossing in the word STAT was going deep enough into the world of the story? How many of you have watched or read part of a show/story so filled with medical jargon you bailed?

It is your responsibility as a writer to learn the language of the world and to introduce it in such a well explained way that even the hapless schmoe who wrote that email could understand. This is why shows an books always have a “village idiot” to stop the whirl of jargon in a tense scene by asking for an explanation. Hackers did this beautifully with the non-technical female boss. I’m sure you can all come up with examples now that you are thinking of it. House was pretty incredible when it came to explaining the jargon in sarcastic plain language. If you call yourself a writer or wish to, don’t be like the person who wrote this email.