What's wrong with the market?

[KRFinch at dstsystems.com]

I agree.

Having worked for a small consulting company in the past that got run out
of business, I wholeheartedly agree.  I remember everyone working like
crazy to drum up enough business keep everyone's jobs, and there was just
not quite enough work to keep us going.  If there were some sort of
community forum out there we could have tapped into to off-load some of our
excess programming and IT capacity, I might still be working there.

The only problem is that every time that I have seen someone start up that
type of forum, they do so with the sole intention of making a profit.  They
want fees to post jobs, fees to look at jobs, and fees to take jobs.  It
ends up being cheaper for companies to use head-hunters, the local
newspaper or the yellow pages to find consultants, so that's what they do.

IMHO, the only way a forum like you describe could be successful is if the
person organizing it had no intention of ever seeing any sort of financial
rewards for doing it.  With profit out of the picture, I think it would
make for a much more level playing field.  The side effect of free
postings, however, is that every MLM/Spam/Pr0n idiot will start making
postings to the site in hopes of gaining more dupes to line his pockets.
Hence, the site would have to be heavily moderated.

So, all we need is to find a philanthropist with a webserver and a lot of
free time on his hands to moderate a site so other people can find work.  I
think that's only going to happen if you have some branch of the government
do it, because I don't know too many independently wealthy people that want
to waste their days deleting Spam for the greater good.  The other option,
of course, is to have a group take over the moderation in shifts, or work
out some sort of user moderation to help filter out the chaff...

My $0.0195, rounded up.

Thanks!

Kevin Finch
Network Administrator
DST Systems, Inc.
816/435-6039
krfinch at dstsystems.com

                                                                                                    
              
                    Michael                                                                         
              
                    <mogmios at mlug.missouri        To:     Derric Goodwin 
<Derric.E.Goodwin at mail.sprint.com>       
                    .edu>                         cc:     kclug at kclug.org                           
              
                    Sent by:                      Subject:     Re: What's wrong with the market?    
              
                    owner-kclug at marauder.i                                                          
              
                    lliana.net                                                                      
              
                                                                                                    
              
                                                                                                    
              
                    06/07/2002 05:11 PM                                                             
              
                                                                                                    
              
                                                                                                    
              

What we need is some sort of organization that lets us pool our efforts so
we can offer clients more options than any one of us alone could offer and
also make some collective effort to find new clients. Everyone needs IT.
It's just a matter of finding out what they need and delivering it. Sort
of a Co-Op agency/consultancy. It seems to me IT is still doing well but
most of the work is going to big corporate IT shops rather than us little
guys.

I don't suffer from insanity... I enjoy every minute of it.

;):):-):):-):):-)8')
Michael McGlothlin <mogmios at mlug.missouri.edu>
http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mogmios/projects/

On 7 Jun 2002, Derric Goodwin wrote:

>  The job market here in KC is terrible now for IT folks.
> I recently moved from Silicon Valley (few months ago) to KC because the
> job market out there was just plain ridiculous. I was sending 6 to 10
> resumes a day after I was laid off for weeks...
>
>  There were many jobs being posted but the HR folks were being swamped
> with literally thousands of replies to each job posting.
>
> I am just now starting to get e-mails now from my Monster account (now
> that I don't need it...lol).
>
> It does look like jobs are picking up on the west coast. Will probably
> take a long time to trickle back to us in KC...
>
>
> Derric Goodwin
>
>
>
>
>