No, not another conspiracy theory about Microsoft, and not another rant about Silverlight, just my latest, somewhat delirious, job search. Few months back I’ve sent my resume to only one HR company. In my resume I’ve clearly stated Flash as my top skill, and oddly enough my first call was from Microsoft. It’s not exactly Redmond but Microsoft Israel also has it’s standards, I guess. I surprisedly asked the person on the other side. – Microsoft is interested in Flash ?! – You’ll be surprised… he replayed. Microsoft, as expected looks like a very nice place to work in, with extremely nice people, there were also some open XBox and joystick boxes that were probably being plugged somewhere. Though there were many motivations, I had to move on, since this was my first offer I had to check some others.

I was overwhelmed by the amount of offers I got, but really got surprised when I’ve asked for a salary which wasn’t that modest at all and got offered more then I’ve asked for. After that I’ve continued to raise the numbers with every job interview and was still getting the flattering OK. It reached to the point when I was uncomfortable to name a figure and felt the need to deeply apologize before doing so.

Another interesting aspect is that even if the company currently isn’t using Flash at all, they seem interested in this “new” cool technology that no “serious” developer seem to know much about. It goes something like “we’re also interested in doing some stuff in flash” or “do you know, what is it called, Flex… ?” and then I start babbling about Flex 2 and Flash 9. Just give me a chance and I wont stop .

Obviously it seems like the most interesting places to work in are these risky startups. You can sometimes get to these by using something like jobs@companyname.com. At the young companies there is probably no HR department and this email address is routed to the CTO or even the founders. See an interesting startup on techcrunch in your area? just send ‘em your resume to the jobs address.

At the end it become too stressful to handle, with too many good options and my ex-employer pushing all of my sentimental buttons in order for me to stay. I’m glad I’ve made the right decision and signed up with JAJAH, an exciting Austrian-Israeli-American VOIP 2.0 / Web 2.0 startup. While my original role is an AJAX developer, we’re already looking at ways we can leverage the Flash technology to our needs.

You may call this Bubble 2.0 and you’ll be somewhat right, but theres a big difference this time it is much more realistic. For once, we now have a deadpool.