Montreal: Director of R&D

This posting looked rather appealing until I discovered it was posted for Montreal.  Not that I mind Montreal, it’s a nice city, but it’s not Toronto, where I live, and for which I’m in the habit of looking at opportunities.

Still, if you’re in Montreal, do feel free to check it out.

Career Fulfillment

It’s always interesting to see the varying motivations for working.  For instance, David Heinemeier Hansson argues for finding something you love:

When you do what you love for the sake of itself, the rewards are so much greater than if you just do it for external incentives. For lots of measures of “winning”, we’ve long since won with Ruby on Rails. The impact on the industry, the adoption by thousands of companies and developers, the books, the conferences, and all that jazz. And yet, it doesn’t really matter that much in the end. What matters is getting excited about continuing the work.

While I certainly love writing software, I haven’t yet found the perfect combination of ingredients to make me love “my job.”  Some people would argue that that search is fruitless, that you should be content to show up, get paid, and go home, and others really strive for that love-of-work, possibly in vain.

I’m more of the latter, but I’ve worked with people who fall in the former category, including some people who were also good at their jobs, so I can’t knock that approach entirely either.

Jobs: OTN, Quest, CBC, Fuel Industries

A release engineer for the ontario telemedicine network.  I’m starting to see more of these build/release positions regularly, which is an interesting niche.

It’s too bad that Quest let Sitraka/KL Group’s performance tool suite die such an ugly death, or this Foglight posting, what with the reference to Groovy, might be appealing.

The language of the posting doesn’t really do it for me, but if your French is up to scratch, a Sr. Applications Manager for the CBC doesn’t sound like a bad position.  I worry that like some government-related opportunities you might be hogtied by procedure and underpaid, but you’d have to inquire to find out.

Flash/Flex/Air/Silverlight development with some backend components for Fuel Industries.  Foosball and bubble hockey skills a bonus.

Scrum Master / Agile Lead, .Net/Ruby, travel required.  Despite being posted to Craigslist Toronto, this seems to be based out of Calgary.  ThoughtWorks, maybe?  If so, they’re not posting the same job themselves.

Jobs: Axsium, Sigma, PHP/Air/Ruby

This is an unusual opportunity - a director of technology for quick-launch project. Sounds interesting, but also sounds like the typical startup opportunity - high-risk, low reward.

Reasonably well-paid Ruby job, for Toronto.

I don’t see too many Air jobs, so that makes this mildly interesting, particularly with the server-side connection.

Corporate Espionage?
In some ways, keeping an eye on the job market tells you a fair amount about the boom and bust cycle of companies in Toronto. For instance, Sigma Systems (picked up by Noramtec as well), Route1 and Axsium (solution developer, technical consultant) are hiring for a few positions. Incidentally, Axsium looks misspelled to me, even though it isn’t.

Jobs: Intrafinity and 4 Architects, 6 Developers (Route1?)

Intrafinity’s looking for a Lead Technical/Software Architect, which sounds … ok.  Well, first of all, it’s .NET, which is pretty much an immediate knock-down for me, if for no other reason than I don’t have enough experience with .NET.  Secondly, it looks like a “writing documents, not code” position, which can be a dangerous position for an architect, depending on the team and the company. But, then, a lot of people work that way, it’s just something that’s a warning sign for me.

It also came through Craigslist,which specifies 70k+++, the low end of which is less than I think a good architect should be getting, but that’s your call.

I suspect this posting is from Route1, but whoever it is, looking for six developers at once is pretty ambitious — they’ll be lucky to find half of that who are worth hiring in the short term, but I guess there’s no harm in asking.  Adding four architects to that seems excessive, but good luck to ‘em. Finally, this looks suspiciously like The FeedRoom, but otherwise doesn’t leap out at me.  Doesn’t help that jburst typically sends off red flags for me.

Friday: Bell, System Core, Deloitte, Sigma Systems

Jobs of interest:

• Bell Canada is looking for an Associate Director, Technical Architect - basically somone with security expertise. I’m sure it’s pretty corporate, but otherwise looks vaguely interesting.
• System Core does a good posting (Java/J2EE team leader), but I know someone who talked to them, and they’re online gaming (aka gambling), which many people take issue with, as a job. And, knowing someone who used to work in that industry, I’m not sure that I’d be happy with it.
• I’ve heard good things about Deloitte as a place to work, so although their Senior Consultant, J2EE or .NET doesn’t leap out at me in other respects (in particular, it looks like a “make sales, not software” position), it mightn’t be a bad choice.
• Both datalist and nexstaff seem to be advertising the same position for a Project Lead / Development Manager. Distributed development and PowerBuilder may be bad signs, but the pay looks decent.
• W5 has this Development Manager position (which I believe is for Sigma Systems, which seems interesting because it seems as if the development manager here would also be in charge of the quality process, which is a little unusual (although I’m not necessarily disagreeing).

Welcome to Toronto Technology Jobs

There were two motivations for this:

1. There are a ton of technology jobs in Toronto, but very few of them are visibly interesting. Since watching them go by seems to be something I spend a fair amount of time with anyway, I decided that I might as well share the interesting ones I find with the rest of you.
2. I wanted to try WordPress. No, really — I’ve been using Blogger for the last few years, and I’m happy with it, but i’ve heard a lot of good things about WordPress and wanted to give it a shot, see what I thought about it.