the poetics of programming

I’ve been getting tech recruiter calls steadily for the last few years. They’ve stepped up in the last couple of months. The deal is, I don’t have control over an old server I used to be on, and so can’t change or take down a set of old web pages including my resume from 2001! So headhunters see 1999-present as a programmer and start drooling. Since I lost my job in late 2001 in the crash, and had 6 months of futile jobhunting… I have not kept my hand in with the programming. I told this to today’s recruiter, who blustered, “Aw, you’d be back up to speed in a month!” While this is true, I’m not sure where I stand on going back into a tech job.

If the people were super smart and nice… and know how to communicate… and are sane… and the job was poking around in someone else’s giant mess of Perl hackery and twiddling it… I would likely be quite happy. There is something nice about a huge data set and messing around with it and “seeing” into it various ways. On the back end – not live. And about the process of understanding someone else’s code… very much like the logic of translation. I especially enjoyed the spamhunting part of my old job, where I could imagine being a keen detective or a spy. I’d go back to translating 1 night a week and on one weekend, like I did when I worked at That One Dead Search Engine Company. But is the company high-pressure and will they want me 12 hours a day? No way could I do that!

The thought of having oodles of money again is tempting. I could save it up like crazy. And yet I could also be quite happy with my plan of teaching community college part time and finishing the Wittig book and then the huge anthology.

going to talk to them. Mostly because their site is good and slick. If it was dumb I would not be tempted for a second.

I’m on the fence!