Last month, an outfit in Iowa contacted me concerning an AI-oriented job in
the financial domain. I'm an engineer by education and that tends to
discourage folks in the financial and bioinformatics areas. I am gainfully
employed at the moment (emphasis on moment), so it is of no special interest
to me. I am skeptical about the AI part of what they (the folks in Iowa) are
doing, but it's a good company and they sound like they are honest about
wanting to implement something special.
The jobs are now listed on Dice by two different head-hunters. One reads:
:: This is a 3-6 months contract-to-hire opportunity for two LISP
:: Consultants with a big Financial Company. The consultants should have at
:: least 3 years of Common LISP experience, working with AI systems. The
:: LISP experience should be in the last 4 to 5 years.
In the last two months, I have been contacted by organizations looking for
Lisp programmers. These organizations claim that they can't find qualified
people. In all but ONE instance, they found me purely by accident, and that
was via the Franz site, not Dice or Monster -- where my CV is pretty
carefully indexed. So, it appears that these job posting sites are not
particularly effective unless you are advertising yourself as a C# weenie OR
potential employers and headhunters don't know how to mine the site for the
talent they want OR they really don't know how to read resumes and ask the
right questions.
In any case, it appears we need to market ourselves and the technology a
little better. If one of you out there can help out the folks in Iowa, you
might be doing us all a favor in the long run.
sl