Joel on Software has a great analysis of resume spam, the challenge of reaching passive candidates, and the parodox that everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1% of candidates.

In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all. I know lots of great people who took a summer internship on a whim and then got permanent offers. They only ever applied for one or two jobs in their lives.

On the other hand there are people out there who appear to be applying to every job on Monster.com. I’m not kidding. They spam their resume to hundreds or thousands of employers. A lot of times I can see this because there are actually hundreds of “job” aliases in the “To:” line of their email. (Some evil part of me wants to “reply-to-all” the rejection note I send them, but I usually overcome the urge).

It’s pretty clear to me that just because you’re hiring the top 0.5% of all applicants for a job, doesn’t mean you’re hiring the top 0.5% of all software developers. You could be hiring from the top 10% or the top 50% or the top 99% and it would still look, to you, like you’re rejecting 199 for every 1 that you hire.

The Berry Bloglines RSS reader now has the ability to reformat linked content to better fit the Blackberry screen and to reduce bandwidth requirements. You can read full articles on the New York Times, BBC, Ars Technica, and BoingBoing, not just the summaries published in the RSS feed. I expect to add support for other sites soon.

As long expected, Google will provide an AdWords API to Advertisers.

next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

– e. e. cummings

Today’s Seattle Post Intelligencer has an article entitled
Matchmaker Jobster seeks a better way to link recruiters, applicants.

My wife, Manjari Wijenaike, is mentioned in this Seattle PI story about emigres reaching out to help their homelands after the tsunami.

She will be speaking about her experience at a panel discussion at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. The talk is January 20th at 7PM.

Room to Read is a charity that is working to rebuild the education infrastructure in Sri Lanka and other countries damaged by the tsunami. It’s just this sort of long term project that is often neglected after the initial short term aid comes to an end.

Room To Read is notable because it’s overhead is so low (less than 5%). They have built over 110 schools and 1500 libraries, affecting over half a million children in Asia. A pool of donors has agreed to match the first $100,000 donated to the tsunami relief efforts.

This charity was recommended to me by Jon Anderson, who knows the founder, John Wood. Jon is a partner at Ignition Partners, a member of the Jobster board, and a great human being.

Please join me in supporting Room to Read.

My company (Jobster) is hiring for a number of positions in development, program management, and product marketing. I’d like to enlist your help in finding great people for these positions.

Jobster is an emerging internet services company with strong traction in the Fortune 1000 and solid funding. The strongest arguments I can give for working here is the team we’ve put together, the working environment, and the potential for innovation in our space. We are located in Seattle’s Pioneer Square district.

If you know anyone good for the positions below, please put them in touch with me (philbo at jobster dot com). Rather than a resume, I am most interested in seeing links to things that you’ve built and hearing about what makes them great.

We have openings in the following positions. Please contact me for additional information

Koders is a search engine for Open Source code. You can search on keyword, language, and license type.

For example, here are the search results for “skiplist”.

While I wonder about the business model (ads by Google?), it’s definitely a useful tool.

When a national tragedy occurs, a critical question is whether the long term effect on the national character is positive or negative, unifying or divisive.

Consider the United States and 9/11, for example. (Depending on your political leanings, the way you analyze the example will differ, but hopefully you get my point either way.)

At least in the case of Sri Lanka, I am hopeful that the unifying effect of responding to the Tsunami may persist to the benefit of all. NPR has an audio report on how the Tsunami Forces Sri Lanka Foes to Cooperate