Exactly. And even when the person does manage to speak in a perfect soundbite, they're often talking to somebody who isn't an expert, and it might well get screwed up during transcription, writing or editing.
The first time I talked to a reporter, the reporter swapped my descriptions of opportunities and threats, so I looked like I had absolutely no understanding of the market at all. After that, I started taking "quotes" with a much larger grain of salt.
It's so refreshing and simplifying to look at what people need - what is actually useful and helpful to them - rather than what is technically "cool" at the moment.
"He also needs developers with open-source expertise -- a rare talent, he says" - Shane Kilgore
Surely OSS developers aren't particularly rare beasts. But perhaps they don't want to talk to him. That and the bit about AJAX the programming language make me think these folks are barking up the wrong trees.
It is pretty rare. If you hire someone with, I dunno, 5 years experience in industry X (where I mean an actual industry, not "the web industry") the chances that they were using what most people would understand as open source are pretty low. I mean, using bash as your shell or emacs or whatever doesn't count - no-one gets paid for their amazing shell and text editing skills...
As someone who does tech support for a living, I'm thrilled that it's #2. This is a job I enjoy doing and that, I believe, serves a useful purpose. Pity too many companies that supply tech support believe it's best done for pennies on the dollar somewhere else (on the basis that it's a "cost center"). The value of a company backing its products with knowledgeable, helpful staff, especially when it's accessible to the small-to-medium business market, is incredibly high.
I also like doing help desk work, so maybe I'm just crazy.
Crazy in a good way! Thank god for people like you!
Like many people here I've done my dues in tech support and I know what you mean about the difference between genuinely trying to help and train people, and providing minimal "cost centre" level support. Maybe I would like the first kind. Never seen it though.
"Demand is growing for people who know specialized programming languages like Ruby on Rails and AJAX"
So clearly clueful recruitment is not a skill in demand.