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An interesting conversation at last night’s gallery opening of Osmosis 08 gave me some background context to a job I just missed out on at a government department about six months ago. I thought I’d share.

The job advertisement was specifically for a front end coder with best practice web standards methodologies, knowledge of usability and accessibility. At the interview there were lots of back end scripting questions, but I’m not a total slouch there either. In fact, if anything I undersold my ability to perform that role as a scripter.

At the time I recall the web manager saying I was by far the most qualified for the position advertised but what wasn’t in the job description - that they absolutely needed - was a backend server administration / server side programmer with Unix experience. And, although I’d done a bit of that, I really wasn’t a gun Unix guru / server guy. So, the job advertised for accessibility but they were hoping to snag someone with the skills needed for an entirely different job. It’s kind of funny. I recall mentioning job share and that the person described would be a very rare species in the available labour pool.

It reminds me of a movie scene from the 90’s where an escort madam answered the phone in front of two police detectives. The guy on the other end asked for a 16 year old blonde with supermodel features. The escort lady said yes and sent over an ordinary looking woman with a cigarette in her mouth and she was in her 30’s. Then she turned to the cop and said “What makes them think that perfect young blonde would be in an escort agency?”. So that’s how I kind of see that job role in reality - if you have guru skills on front and backend with the full backpack you’re probably not looking for more work. Right?

Anyway, it turns out a friend of mine was the one who got that job. I came second, remember. But the funnier thing is the conversation I’d had with my friend a few years earlier about accessibility. Not only is he someone who doesn’t concern himself about it he’s a developer who said to me once that “Blind People Don’t Even Use the Web”!

Yeh ummm… I’m not sure where the conversation about accessibility and usability went in his interview but it’s kind of ironic he got the job. Although it was, in his circumstance, an in-house job change. Anyway, he’s a nice bloke underneath and I’m not bagging the guy out - he’s very good at the stuff he does well. Way better than me at backend stuff.

I just thought I’d share the story of an accessibilista versus a backend scripter and how realistic job previews are probably more important than anything in defining who is really needed by an organisation.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.