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Hiring at US$7.50/hr to do helpdesk support for Windows for old ladies with their dialup Internet. Must have 10 years of experience with Windows XP, IIS, Dell servers, and know how to fix our fucked-up Exchange server. Must be able to communicate the most absolutely complex and detailed computing concepts to people who don't care, and just want their email to work. Must have prior IT and management experience, even though you'll be the only one in the building that does any work at all. Must be familiar with different sized pieces of paper, and not get freaked out by them, printed or not. Please reply with a cover letter, resume in WORD format, salary requirements, and how soon you'll move to some ass place that nobody's ever heard of.

Fuck That Job Dotcom
recruiter-rater

Just submit your job offers directly to this website. You'll save them the trouble of tracking down your job offer and subjecting it to humiliating attention. Be sure to come visit the chat boards so we can abuse you personally, ya cheap bastard.

Your request is similar to what I see over and over on FTJ. For some reason people think that students or unemployed artists and designers feel like giving away their labor for nothing. For example, someone found a job offer up on Craig's List seeking a candidate with skills in Photoshop & Illustrator, LiveMotion, Premier, FireworksMX, FlashMX, DreamweaverMX & FrontPage, HomeSite, JavaScript, ASP/php, and MS IIS. For all this, they want to pay $8 per hour. Sorry, not going to happen. Fortunately Craig's List prohibits this sort of exploitive ad and removed it from their listings.

No, you don't get a free ride because you are producing an open source project. If you want professional quality, you'll have to pay professionals at the going rate. No, art students don't want to give you free work in exchange for a portfolio piece, they can crank out any portfolio piece they like without having to meet the demands of a cheap client. Being an art student is very expensive, art supplies and materials cost real money (yes, even computers and software).

Not to be too much of a downer, but here's one for $70 a week - and you will find lower salaries than that posted on this site here

$13 an hour? That level pay in that part of California qualifies this job for submission to Fuck That Job!.

That level pay for California qualifies this job for submission to Fuck That Job!. Why do such companies think that people should work for them for near poverty wages? Oh right, it's sooooo cool to be poor...

From the article:

Employers are most interested in what are sometimes called "soft" skills: a deep knowledge base and the ability to listen and communicate; to think critically and imaginatively; to read, write and figure, and other capabilities [...]

Sure they are. That's why job postings always ask for candidates who have read widely outside of their chosen field, who teach citizenship classes and have invented a new variation on a chess opening. What they never ask for is a laundry list of skills and years of experience.

This has got to be the most insane job description I've ever seen. There is an ongoing discussion thread about the nutball in question and he -- or someone posing as him -- has joined the thread to defend his requirements of things such as 80-100 hour work weeks and 24/7 beck and call.

For the record he's an affiliate marketer/spammer named Philip Seldon. Methinks he could use a good /.-ing...

Fuck that job

There are some good ones here

at Fuck That Job dot com ..but you know, there are so many of these postings that it's really not that funny anymore. It just reaffirms our belief that management really is trying to squeeze everything they can out of the pee-on workers.
Gotta do something to give that CEO his bonus (studies show that executive compensation has gone up over 17% in the past year. Bah.)

Well, at $14/hr I can hardly blame IT guys for not bothering to learn how to SysAdmin a mainframe!

I'd say a decent salary would be about 30,000. This is heavily dependant on where you live, of course.

I live in the Rockford, IL, area. The industrial based economy around here is notoriously sensitive to economic issues around the country. I've had machinist friends laid off, I've been laid off, teachers have been laid off, graphic designers have been laid off, etc. etc. My skill base is wide and relatively in depth, but still, places can name their price, and demand excessive qualifications for miniscule salaries. Examples? See FuckthatJob.com for a few in preferred line of work (web/graphic design). I have a degree, etc. etc., and a decent amount of experience for someone who recently graduated (actually about 2 years ago now).

I am currently underemployed as a line operator for a nationally known food maker/distributer. (Trust me, you've probably eaten their products before.) I make a little under 20,000 a year, without overtime. I've worked up to 20 hours extra (making about 60 a week) just to make ends meet. Now, because of the fiscal year's imminent demise, earnings at my plant, as all other places it seems, are being inflated by line shut-downs, lay-offs, etc. etc. Not only has my overtime been discontinued, but my line has been closed as well.

I've been without income for a couple weeks. Luckily, these weeks are the ones without the bills coming in. I think. I've applied for unemployment, but I honestly don't think I qualify. I still send out resumes and applications and so on, and I've gotten two interviews in six months since I've started at my current employer, and those are for internal positions at my plant. I have looked near Chicago and Madison,(WI) and even thought about heading back to school, but my grades the first time around were . . . explainably inconsistant. :-) I had an epiphany, where I suddenly found out that it was important to have a good time with the papers I had to write, and my grades improved, too. Law school was the thought, until I couldn't even afford to take the LSAT.

I'm glad I have a job, considering, but I haven't been able to pay rent regularly in months, it's been as much as I can for a while. This month doesn't look good either.

A decent salary is heavily dependant on where you live. There are jobs, yes, but some of them are appalling (telemarketing) or the employers are wanting way overqualified applicants for low-paying jobs because those applicants are desparate. Even after 60 hours a week, I was thinking of getting a second job. My wife won't work because because she wants to stay home with our first child. Obviously, this decision is something I'm against, but I can't force her to get a job.

In any case, the economy sucks. Tax Cuts might help for now, but who knows in a few years . . . fundimental changes are needed, and the longer I go underemployed, the more radical my politics become about the economy and large corporations. I know I'm not the only one that this is happening to. Being treated like a resource instead of a human is disheartening.

Just like the music industry is in the middle of crumbling, the pay-for software industry is also about to start the long downward slide into irrelevance

And when it finally happens, don't bitch that you can't find a programming job in the US for more than $10/hour and the jobs that are there are so few and far between that you'll be flipping burgers at Burger King so you can continue to live in your parent's basement. I could work for free all-day-long, too, but I like being able to eat.

I find it amazing that people complain about the lack of jobs and then turn around and do work that they should be charging for and give it away for gratis.

That webdesigner also created a pretty interesting website that posts over-the-top job postings along with her own snazzy remarks about it.

We have a team in India doing basic database monitoring and support (mostly to back me up, as I'm a finite resource).

They are cheap - about $1000 US a month for their services.

From their resumes and other clients, you would think that they are well trained and efficient.

Unfort, I don't find their work that valuable.

First, while their English is good, it's not good enough. The communication barrier has caused several problems, resulting in database downtime that need not have occurred.

Second, while they advertise themselves as DBAs, there is only one that I marginally trust. We have had to create detailed instructions for doing simple things. They take days to do what I can do in hours, and often fail at what I consider simple, bread-and-butter DBA tasks.

Third, we don't have much of a stick over their head. Should they walk off with our data, our schema, our code, or just trash our site, there is little if anything we could actually do.

An article (recently posted on Slashdot) mentioned that the larger the company, the more likely they were to move IT jobs overseas. In the long run, this is a counter-productive move. Firing a bunch of people will lower the demand for your goods and services; the unemployed don't have the money to spend. And you create a group of seriously pissed off people with time on their hands.

The Salon story mentioned a website called a site where people post these ridiculous jobs. Perhaps someone will come with a site that will list companies that have fired local workers to ship the jobs overseas.

The whole thing makes me wonder if it's time to start thinking about a new career. It's kind of scarey to wonder if tech jobs will become as scarce as those well paying manufacturing jobs of the 50's and 60's (you know, the ones that are now in China, Taiwan, and Mexico).

The article goes on to say a California computer science professor has statistics to show that a programmer's career is not much longer than a pro-football player.

Some people didn't even get drafted. Of the 55 people in my graduating class in the Computer Science department, approximiately five have real full-time jobs. One of them was recently laid off. Quite a few of my classmates are in the US on student visas. If they don't get jobs soon, then they'll be deported. I even have two Bachelor's (CS & Mathematics), but no one seems to care. This industry is screwed. Oh, and I graduated in 2002.

My new favorite website is this.