• (cs)

    Let me be the fist! to congratulate you on this new venture. I hope that it will fully leverage the synergies of this enterprisey confluence of web and comics.

  • CrazyBomber (unregistered)

    Actually, I do have a friend who just graduated, and got a job at one of those "enterprises". They put him through a quick Java course, and off he went to a client... and Java's nowhere to be found. Aparently they're rebuilding some internal aplication. He's doing the testing...

  • Brett (unregistered)

    Wow...

    That is very funny. The sad thing is it is very true.

    Alex, you need to start another artcle about moron recruiters.

  • (cs)

    Early Penny Arcade comics were rather crudely drawn. The same for early Garfield comics. Cartoonist art styles tend to evolve over time.

  • (cs)

    I agree with the premise that recruiters are scum, but the comic doesn't really do a good job explaining why they're scum. I think it might be a little confusing for those that don't have experience with them, but shrug. Good work, anyway.

    Here goes my evil recruiter story. I was just out of school (with a BS in Comp Sci no less!) and was having a hard time finding a job. A guy from a huge recruiting agency (initials RHT) calls me up and says he'd like to talk. I show up, ace the 2 programming tests that he gives me, and I'm psyched about all the phat loot that he's promised me. Only...he never hooks me up with a client. He doesn't call me once in like 6 months. Of course, after month 1 I recognize the guy is a snake so I keep looking for another job. And when do I hear from him again? Yup, the first day at my new job!

  • (cs)

    Now this is a 150+ KB PNG without any gradients. What the failure?

    (On a side note, I like the comic itself. Keep up the good work!)

  • A (unregistered) in reply to Outlaw Programmer

    I quickly learned to avoid any job postings from RHT KF and several other large agencies.

    The smaller ones are more difficult to avoid... you can't remember their names.

  • egon0119 (unregistered)

    Ignore the idiots above who are afraid of something new. It's your website, Alex, more power to you.

  • James (unregistered)

    My question is, who gets screwed more: the fresh-faced graduate, or the company he gets sent to "consult" for?

  • joe (unregistered)

    ahhhhmazing!!!

  • (cs)

    Keep it funny, or better yet, wryly on-target, and the artwork won't matter. See Dilbert for an example.

  • McGuffin (unregistered)

    Before I started performing music in public, I practiced at home. A lot.

  • Alex (unregistered) in reply to Outlaw Programmer

    Oh, come on - personal meetings with recruiters are totally useless. Last year I had like 10 of those, and none brought me a job. Nowadays I just refuse to attend such meetings...

  • (cs) in reply to egon0119
    egon0119:
    Ignore the idiots above who are afraid of something new. It's your website, Alex, more power to you.
    He's the site admin, and he does whatever he wants (content discretion, name changes, color schemes) despite us. I'm not sure what power there is to gain beyond this.

    But I'm not saying the comic isn't funny, or that I could do better, because I can't.

  • (cs) in reply to McGuffin
    McGuffin:
    Before I started performing music in public, I practiced at home. A lot.
    Come on now - compared to the likes of xkcd or even Dilbert, this is the Mona Lisa.
  • (cs) in reply to Outlaw Programmer

    Not ALL recruiters are evil, actually... well, either that or the one who got me is REALLY sneaky and has something up his sleeve! I graduated with a BS in Information Technology last June (yes, I know, it's not "real" Computer Science, just the "applied" version :P), 3.8 GPA, some co-op experience working at the university, and no one would hire me! Well, I eventually posted my resume on a career site and started hearing from recruiters right away. Granted many of them I never heard from again (though I did show up, ace the tests at RHT, hear that they needed to run a background check "just in case" since I have misdemeanors on my record - I thought it was illegal to ask about that, anyway, only about felonies? - and never hear from them again :P) - but one agency ("TS") actually pulled through and found me a job last October, and it's worked out just fine! :) Maybe I'm not getting paid what I should, I really don't know and am too polite to ask around, but hey, I found a job, I like it, and I'm getting paid! :)

  • (cs)

    I'm going to withhold judgement until we see about a dozen strips. Hopefully, this will become funnier as we get to know the protagonist.

    Like the others said, artwork takes a distanct second to the characters & story in such comics.

  • (cs) in reply to joe.edwards
    Early Penny Arcade comics were rather crudely drawn. The same for early Garfield comics. Cartoonist art styles tend to evolve over time.
    The early Penny Arcades actually looked better than the current lantern-jawed, Illustrator-enhanced monstrosities.

    And then there's User Friendly's art, which hasn't appreciably changed in years.

  • :-X (unregistered)

    It definitely has potential. This one still isn't quite there though.

  • (cs)

    Personally, I'd like to keep this off the front page.

    I surf here at work sometimes, and it is easy to say it is work related as it is a tech site that gives the anti-thesis on what should be done, which is just as important as knowing the right way to do things. This claim will be much harder if someone can come by and then claim that I'm sitting here reading some comic strip.

    So by all means do your web comic, just not here on the front page, or perhaps even not on this site. Create a new site or a new sidebar item to host these. Be aware of your audience and what the impression would be purely from a glance at the page.

  • Rev. Spaminator (unregistered)

    You know, as much as those jobs suck, they are usually the only way to get a real first job on your resume. Bonus if you stumble into a good situation and get picked up the by the organization after proving you have a brain.

    Prior to that, interviews went something like this...

    "So a degree in Mathematics & Physics, that is quite impressive. But what relevant work experience do you have?"

    "Uh, well... " Lots of humming and hawing follows. Truth be told, you were getting a degree in Math and Physics. Any spare time you had was spent getting drunk and a few other things so you could recover from partial differential equations.

  • bah (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Personally, I'd like to keep this off the front page.

    I surf here at work sometimes, and it is easy to say it is work related as it is a tech site that gives the anti-thesis on what should be done, which is just as important as knowing the right way to do things. This claim will be much harder if someone can come by and then claim that I'm sitting here reading some comic strip.

    So by all means do your web comic, just not here on the front page, or perhaps even not on this site. Create a new site or a new sidebar item to host these. Be aware of your audience and what the impression would be purely from a glance at the page.

    Is that all? Anything else they can do to keep you happy?

  • (cs) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    I surf here at work sometimes, and it is easy to say it is work related as it is a tech site that gives the anti-thesis on what should be done, which is just as important as knowing the right way to do things. This claim will be much harder if someone can come by and then claim that I'm sitting here reading some comic strip.
    I'd be more concerned about the paranoid and hostile work environment than the comic strip, dude. If you have to CYA on every web page you visit, that's draconian.
  • Ross (unregistered)

    My own first post-college job was as a consultant, working, as you say, for a Certain Company.

    Being a career student with no experience, and being a consultant, made a lot more sense when I realized that it was only the technical side of the Certain Company that called them "consultants". In this company's other (and older) business area, they used a different term for employees in the same class as myself.

    They called them "temps"

  • (cs)

    So is there an RSS feed for the comic in the works?

  • (cs) in reply to halber_mensch
    halber_mensch:
    KattMan:
    I surf here at work sometimes, and it is easy to say it is work related as it is a tech site that gives the anti-thesis on what should be done, which is just as important as knowing the right way to do things. This claim will be much harder if someone can come by and then claim that I'm sitting here reading some comic strip.
    I'd be more concerned about the paranoid and hostile work environment than the comic strip, dude. If you have to CYA on every web page you visit, that's draconian.

    You miss the point. If anyone just sees me on the site and says something I can easily say this is job related, it ends there. But if someone comes by and sees a comic on screen and says something, this becomes harder.

    We are in a very public open room and can be seen by people not in our department. Policy doesn't have to be draconian at all, but if people outside the department see this, then they go back and say "Well IT people just sit there reading comics all the time" it doesn't matter what the truth is, the draconian rules will become a necessity.

    It isn't about the rules it is about appearance that can garner a bad reputation from other departments. IT gets a bad rep often enough, reading this site doesn't need to add to that.

  • rycamor (unregistered)

    I thought the dry humor implied by the National Geographic or PBS-style commenting was a nice touch. Imagine some overly-schooled commentator describing the absolute carnage of an alligator kill with the same tone of voice you would expect in a symposium on Misesian vs. Keynesian economics.

    +1 on the webcomic.

  • DumbWebComic (unregistered)

    Please remove the web comics, they aren't funny

  • (cs) in reply to DumbWebComic
    DumbWebComic:
    Please remove the web comics, they aren't funny

    Whom do you recruit for? ;-)

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    As you can probably tell from the artwork, First Job was actually my first attempt at a web-comic, ever. Don't worry, the art gets better in #1.3, #1.4, and so on.

    This is a 1.0 version of the comic? No wonder it's making a bad first impression. I hope the tiny blank expressionless eyeslits and excessive narration will be improved in forthcoming strips.

  • (cs)

    I do not think the new comics are funny, so I recommend they be removed from the front page.

    I really miss the days when The Daily WTF contained mostly submissions of horrendous code found alive in the wild.

    -dZ.
  • (cs)

    The bottom line is obvious.

    Someone would not address the recruiting policy in a satirical manner if there wasn't a relation between recruiting/being recruited to the outcome of employment AND/OR that someone hadn't experienced or known someone who had experienced it before.

    I think it's hilarious, and the correlation is definitely evident.

    A comic quick and to the point, as they should be. I caught the point immediately, chuckled like I should at a comic.

    Keep up the good work. :D

  • Rex (unregistered) in reply to Outlaw Programmer

    Actually I just got a job with a consulting firm. C/C++. (Yup, I am fresh out of college with no work experience).

    I too aced those programming tests they gave me but I have already been at two interviews for major companies, both of which provided THEIR programming test which I aced too. I got the job offer this morning.

    I guess some consulting firms are bad and some are good eh?

  • (cs) in reply to Outlaw Programmer
    Outlaw Programmer:
    A guy from a huge recruiting agency (initials RHT) calls me up and says he'd like to talk. I show up, ace the 2 programming tests that he gives me, and I'm psyched about all the phat loot that he's promised me. Only...he never hooks me up with a client. He doesn't call me once in like 6 months. Of course, after month 1 I recognize the guy is a snake so I keep looking for another job. And when do I hear from him again? Yup, the first day at my new job!

    Funny, that perfectly describes my experience with a sleazy RHT recruiter. The only time I ever got a call back was after I had already procured a FT position on my own, and now, 6 months later, the asshat won't stop emailing me about his latest 90-day VB/Access/WTF contracting gig.

  • Nomen Nescio (unregistered) in reply to bah
    bah:
    KattMan:
    I surf here at work sometimes, and it is easy to say it is work related as it is a tech site that gives the anti-thesis on what should be done, which is just as important as knowing the right way to do things. This claim will be much harder if someone can come by and then claim that I'm sitting here reading some comic strip.

    Is that all? Anything else they can do to keep you happy?

    Yes, add a mode where all comments are replaced with "All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only."

  • (cs) in reply to Nomen Nescio
    Nomen Nescio:
    Yes, add a mode where all comments are replaced with "All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only."

    But then the unregistered users will just figure out they can scroll all the way down to read replies.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    My comic is 100000 times better. [image]

  • (cs) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    I surf here at work sometimes, and it is easy to say it is work related as it is a tech site that gives the anti-thesis on what should be done, which is just as important as knowing the right way to do things. This claim will be much harder if someone can come by and then claim that I'm sitting here reading some comic strip.

    A number of years ago (as in, more than 10) I worked for a company where the president would randomly wander around to see what people were doing, and then report them to their managers as discipline issues. One day he told off one of the engineers in our department for "looking at cartoons." Seems he'd wandered by when the guy's screen saver was on, and it featured the Simpsons.

    This was the same president who made a big point of telling everyone how important it was to "be an individual."

  • Chris (unregistered)

    You mention the artwork will improve. I like the current artwork.

    For a webcomic's art to be good, it doesn't have to be good. It can be childish, b&w, simplistic, realistic etc. Look at XKCD - it's stickfigures!

    Keep the art this way. I likes it =)

  • Roy-G-BIV (unregistered)

    Let me guess, someone was playing PARANOIA when they came up with the name? :)

  • Drongo14 (unregistered)

    I landed a "consultont" job fresh out of college as well. They - pretty rightly - told me that once I had read the SQL server's documentation back-to-front I'd know 200% more about the product than the all people in our customers' IT departments combined.

    And, as I said, they were quite right. Of course, you need other skills as well, but on that thing, they were absolutely right.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    My comic is 100000 times better.

    HOLY SH*T! Now, that is funny!

    I like the artwork too; very crude, but with style. Reminds me of early XKCD, before the fancy backgrounds.

    Thanks!
-dZ.
  • GrandmasterB (unregistered)
    As you can probably tell from the artwork, First Job was actually my first attempt at a web-comic, ever.

    probably best to quit while you're ahead.

  • ET (unregistered)

    This is worse than your half-assed text diatribes. Yeah, it's your site... but why can't you just keep it to what it's always been -- amusing anecdotes from real life IT, not weak attempts at breaking into new industries?

    You've already pimped the hell out of your little job site or whatever, and hey, that's cool. But PLEASE just stick to what we expect and don't shovel out this crap in addition to the actual entertainment.

    YOU are not why people come here.

  • Russ (unregistered) in reply to livid
    livid:
    Outlaw Programmer:
    A guy from a huge recruiting agency (initials RHT) calls me up and says he'd like to talk. I show up, ace the 2 programming tests that he gives me, and I'm psyched about all the phat loot that he's promised me. Only...he never hooks me up with a client. He doesn't call me once in like 6 months. Of course, after month 1 I recognize the guy is a snake so I keep looking for another job. And when do I hear from him again? Yup, the first day at my new job!

    Funny, that perfectly describes my experience with a sleazy RHT recruiter. The only time I ever got a call back was after I had already procured a FT position on my own, and now, 6 months later, the asshat won't stop emailing me about his latest 90-day VB/Access/WTF contracting gig.

    I had a similar experience with Robert Half Technology. I don't remember the exact details, but basically it was between an internship with a big company that paid less but could've led to a full time job, and a contracting gig for another company through RHT that paid double what the internship paid. Being a college student, I needed the money, so I took the consulting job. When I showed up at the employer the first day, I was left sitting there in reception for about an hour when my recruiter called me and told me the job wouldn't start for another two weeks. All in all, I'm still not sure which road would've been better for me, but that experience left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Of course later, after the contract when I tried to come back and rejoin the internship, they wouldn't take me back anymore.

  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to Rev. Spaminator

    Most jobs suck. Your point?

    CATCHA: "jumentum". Appropriate.

  • (cs)

    I sat here and read these comments about how many of you started out as consultants, and I was surprised.

    Honestly, my first reaction when reading the comic was "How can you actually graduate with a degree in a technical field and not have a job prior to graduation?" Has the job market tanked that bad? I had one lined up over a month before graduation, and the company said they wished I'd interviewed in the fall because they would have made an offer then.

    Then again, I graduated with a BSEE in 2000, so maybe 1. Not being comp-sci and 2. being 8 years ago has a difference. But I've watched the market some (and changed jobs last year) and it was definitely an employee market.

  • (cs) in reply to taylonr
    taylonr:
    I sat here and read these comments about how many of you started out as consultants, and I was surprised.

    Honestly, my first reaction when reading the comic was "How can you actually graduate with a degree in a technical field and not have a job prior to graduation?" Has the job market tanked that bad? I had one lined up over a month before graduation, and the company said they wished I'd interviewed in the fall because they would have made an offer then.

    Then again, I graduated with a BSEE in 2000, so maybe 1. Not being comp-sci and 2. being 8 years ago has a difference. But I've watched the market some (and changed jobs last year) and it was definitely an employee market.

    1. BSEE is way more marketable than BSCS. At least as far as VT was concerned, Engineers did actual work.
    2. The job market was better in 2000.
    3. You managed to stay with a company for 8 years without them outsourcing you to India or just going out of business. That has to look impressive on your resume.
  • SomeCoder (unregistered)

    My first and only experience with recruiters was in 2002, after the bubble burst and I was laid off.

    Got a call to come in and "interview" with them. I had only worked for one company and was still pretty green at the time so I didn't see the signs. They made it sound like it was a job interview.

    Turns out it was a recruiter. He made me take a Perl test which is aced and then continued to find me work that was in a city about 40-60 miles away from me. No thanks.

    If I ever got a call from a recruiter again, I'd just laugh in his face and hang up

  • (cs)

    Meh, I prefer the following [image]

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