Consider my current job situation as an example of how something like this would help. I have a "Perl nirvana" job right now; it's everything I could wish for. And in fact, I've already had the chance to hire two Perl programmers, and hope to very soon be able to add more. It's cheaper for the company to not go through recruiters (I got one programmer from the Portland Perl Mongers list, and one from the Portland Linux User Group list), and it's better money for the programmer (a year ago, I thought I was doing well making $45/hr until I found out that the company I was working for was paying $75/hr to the recruiting agency). So, when we're ready to expand again, to be able to come to PM and tell people that I have some great positions would be wonderful.

And on the other side of things, I'll have to be looking for a job myself soon. Not because there's anything wrong with my current one, but because my girlfriend graduates in May and we're planning to move to NY (damn theatre people :-) ). I've decided not to ever work with recruiters again, which makes finding jobs in an unknown city rather a lot harder. But I also know that there are some Monks in the city, and to be able to let people know that I might be looking to find something would be great.

So from my point of view, letting job issues become a part of this community can do nothing but good, as long as we can keep it between programmers.

-dlc, who wonders if he's made his hatred of recruiters clear :-)

Is it worth pointing out that your local Perl Mongers group would also be a good place to swap job requirements without recruiters getting involved?

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

There are also meta-job related lists hosted by the Perl Mongers at http://www.pm.org/mailing_lists.shtml.

That said, I think a Job Section could be useful.. but, aside from those here who have jobs to post, I can see Recruiters cluttering up the section in some way. There are MANY sites which you can search for Perl related jobs. Monster, Brainbuzz, HotJobs, etc.. are good services which you can set up job 'agents' to go out and search for jobs with your given criteria. If you are truely on a hard-core job search, I would suggest using one of those (I did, and have a great new job).

Cheers,
KM

hey your problems seem ridiculous to me, because i am a foreigner. i really would like to move to the US, and I usually bomb recruiters with my resume, they mostly even not reply to my emails. Is it a kind of american people's behaviour? :(

I cannot really imagine, if what the problem is with me. Is not my resume strong enough? They afraid of my weaker communication skills? Am I too old? Do not I have enough skills? Maybe the main point is about the lack of Java and C/C++. They say: if we hire somebody from a foreigner country, he/she must be a genie! To join the discussion I found justperljobs.com a very useful resource to find "pure" perl nirvana jobs, a company almost hired me from there. (but they disappeared without an explanation one day, funny, eh?) if you have some tips, please do not keep -- tune

I like the idea of restricting access to the jobs section, except for the fact that it is possible to reach levels 4 and 5 without contributing to the site. You can get to these levels by showing up and voting out, not necessarily adding anything to the discussion. So this would need some more thinking about before this was implemented.

Granted, "showing up and voting out" does gain you some experience, but I seriously doubt someone would take the time to get up to fourth or fifth level without posting even once. Let's take a look at how long it would take, with the recent changes to the Voting/Experience System:

Just to get to level 2, you need 20 XP. With no votes, you can only show up. If you do this daily, you have a 25%chance at 2 XP. Given that, it would take 40 days to do that.

Next, you need 50 XP (30 more) for level 3. With 5 votes a day, and a 25% chance to get a +1 with each vote, I calculate it'll take another 18 days.

But, we're still not there. We need 100 XP (50 more) for level 4, with 8 votes a day now. That's gonna take another 12 days.

Total that up, and we've got 70 days. And that assumes you log in every day. Shoot, we're still not to 'monk' level (for those of you keeping score at home, it would take another 23 days to do that). I doubt someone is going to make that kind of commitment, just to see a few job postings.

I think it's far more likely that the user will post, vote, and, in general, contibute to the site. In fact, simply the act of voting (wisely) is contributing to the site.

Cheers,
Shendal

I've been thinking that it would be nice to have some kind of aggregate reputation value for each monk to go along with level. Perhaps the average reputation of all posts by a monk would work, maybe someone smarter than me can think of something better.

This value could be very useful in allowing access to hypothetical gated areas like the Other section discussed recently or a job board. You'd need to write a bot that could pass a Turing test to get in. A reputation value would also allow one to size a monk up very quickly.