Here's what not to do if you want to hire me

Published 2 June 07 by Justin French

We’ve got a rails/ajax project and found your name on rubyonrails.org. Email me if you’re interested.

I don’t care about the technology. Of course I want to work with Ruby/Rails, of course a little bit of AJAX here and there would probably help the user experience, but that’s all tech. You’ve told me nothing about the company, it’s goals, the value proposition or anything of real substance.

Oh, and you’ve also made it seem like you’ve basically screen-scraped the Rails wiki and chosen to email everyone “available for hire” because you haven’t shown any indication that you know me or my work, in which case I can only assume it’s not me you want to hire at all — it’s someone.

Maybe that’s the problem. They want people to work for them, and I’m used to working with them. Perhaps I’m spoilt.