Job hunting …

Not long back from attenting a “selection interview” for an IT recruitment agency in Tolworth. I’ve been looking for a proper job for ages, half-heartedly because I’m not very good at interviews and writing crap on job applications. I saw this ad in the Surrey Comet for this IT agency, offering to train people to be web designers or network engineers. So, given that computers are really my main interest now, I thought I’d call them up.

I have to say, nothing about this company impresses me much. It’s all Microsoft. The web design course is about ASP and .NET (who thought up that stupid name?), the database module is about SQL Server (by the way, if you’re running a web service with my hosting company, MySQL costs £25 per year whereas SQL Server costs £15 per month, so you really should think of whether you need a SQL server database …). Now, all this is lock-in technology – yes, Novell does a freely-available clone of .NET but how widely used is it?

The interviewer told me his company had gone the Microsoft route because the vast majority of the industry want that. Which begs the question, why is “the industry” spending loads of money on inferior, proprietary, lock-in technologies when there is stuff available for free? Linux is free, BSD is free, PHP is free, and there are web-service databases available for free. Windows costs money, particularly at the server level, and SQL Server costs a whole lot extra.

They also told me that the training would require a “contribution” of nearly £3,000, which is money I simply don’t have right now. If I remember rightly, the money which my tuition at Kingston University cost my parents was less than that (and I don’t want to ask them for that amount of money again), and that lasted a year rather than just a few weeks. They do say that they’ll refund people’s contributions if they don’t get them a job within 60 days, but I wonder how many strings are attached. If the job they get me is with the defence or gambling industries, neither of which I’m prepared to work in for religious reasons, I’m sure they wouldn’t refund my money.

Altogether I don’t think I’m going to take them up on this offer.