Recently I have posted notices about Equal Networks looking for visualization and Lift and Scala help. Perhaps I was too oblique in my wording, but in my mind “very young startup” means “practically no money.” Several who responded to my postings were looking for well-paid positions, whether contract or as an employee. While I appreciate the interest and the contacts may prove useful once we have lots of money to hire people, these responses are less useful now.

More frustrating are the responses that admit a lack of knowledge in the technologies mentioned (though the honesty is appreciated) and blithly propose that the authors will be able to pick them up extremely quickly. In my Lift posting I specifically mentioned I am looking for someone who knows Scala better than I do.

I don’t care how good a programmer you are, it simply takes a fair amount of time to learn a language’s libraries and common idioms. If Scala is a language you would like to know and think it will not be difficult to learn, spend a day or two learning it before contacting me and then show me how you’ve already mastered it.

Scala is attracting a lot of attention from the Java world and builds off of that language in many, many ways, but extensive Java knowledge does not equal extensive Scala knowledge. Frankly, I think Java is horrible and your extensive time doing it isn’t going to impress me. What will impress me are the projects you’ve worked on, the diversity of languages you know (functional languages are a big plus!), and the fact that you’ve read my posting carefully!

But enough of my complaints. If you DO know Scala and are interested in working on a cool Silicon Valley real-time temperature monitoring startup for equity, drop me a line at peter@equal-networks.com.