[thelist] erika

Erika Meyer erika at seastorm.com
Thu Aug 31 17:29:49 CDT 2000


>I been thinking about the article, and it occured to me; what if your
>interviewer was playing Devil's Advocate with her questions about the text
>lining up?
>
>I know by the rest of the article this probably wasn't the case, but what
>if?


Well, then, she would have seen where I come from in terms of design 
philosophy.  And when we began the discussion, that's all I saw it 
as.  A discussion of different ways of looking at web coding -- I'd 
call it rigid vs fluid, or fixed vs flexible or... I don't know. 
Presentation vs Structure.

But she was clearly clueless about any of this, and considered my 
lack of visual precision to be a simple fault, not a difference of 
philosophy.  I eventually talked to the manager of the Portland 
branch of this company, and found they all pretty much come from the 
same place.  The manager said "you are the first one who ever told us 
the text looked smaller because it was on a Mac." (Like I was coming 
out of left field or something.)  Before we parted ways permanently, 
I sent a couple of URLs their way, as if they cared.

So yeah, if I'd hooked up with them, they probably would have had me 
dumbly coding sucky corporate sites, and I would have probably run 
screaming out the door AFTER signing a non-compete agreement.

BTW, this group, from what I understand, takes 30% of whatever a 
company is willing to pay... no small amount.  If a company wanted to 
hire me permanently, they would be entitled to 30% of my first years 
salary. (!).  And according to the non-compete agreement, I couldn't 
take a job with any of their contacts for one year, without them 
getting their 30%.  Pretty steep for an industry with such a high 
rate of turnover.

Maybe this is normal for agencies like this, but gee whiz!

No wonder they could afford such posh digs.

Erika




erika at seastorm.com
http://www.seastorm.com




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