From: mgw@world.std.com (maryanne g wolf)
Subject: Re: Disciplines in misc.jobs.offered postings
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 04:46:07 GMT

In article <1jvaaaINNstj@gaia.ucs.orst.edu> pmontgom@math.orst.edu (Peter Montgomery) writes:
>>We presumably still want job-title, company-name, and location.
>
>>We may or may not want ENTRY or other keywords.  What about having
>>SOFTWARE and HARDWARE and NON-COMPUTER as additional keywords?
>
>        I don't need a company name (unless it is RECRUITER).
>But I do want classifications (cf. those in newspapers), such as Wolf's
>HARDWARE and SOFTWARE.  NON-COMP is far too broad, and omits fields
>such as computer administration, teaching, and computer sales.
>If the economy improves under the Clinton administration,
>then the number of job postings will grow.
>We must be prepared for the growth, both in number and in variety.
>
>        Any academic discipline, such as PSYCHOLOGY, should be allowed.
>Subdisciplines, such as DATABASES and NETWORKING, can be allowed if they
>fit in one word.  Long names like CHEMICAL-ENGINEERING and NUMERICAL-ANALYSIS
>should perhaps be hyphenated (or have other delimiters).
>They might instead be abbreviated like COMPU-ADMIN and ARTIF-INTEL.
>
>        If the discipline comes first on a subject line,
>then those using rn can (gradually) build KILL files for
>the disciplines we are not interested in.  But there should
>be only one discipline per posting.  Otherwise, if a posting begins
>
>   PHYSICS,MATHEMATICS,SOFTWARE | Satellite simulation | NASA | Houston, TX
>
>and I choose to kill everything beginning with PHYSICS, then I won't
>see the article even though I am interested in MATHEMATICS posts.
>A discipline like SIMULATION might be appropriate here.
>
>        The precise set of disciplines can grow gradually.
>If the job requires foreign language skills, then one might use the
>foreign name of the discipline.  And we shouldn't care whether
>(for example) the employer selects HEALTH or MEDICINE or NURSING
>as a discipline name, since those of us interested/disinterested in these
>professions can put none or all of those words in our KILL files.
>
>        Postings to misc.jobs.resumes should have similar keywords
>identifying the discipline(s) of the poster, but here it is
>reasonable to have multiple disciplines.  We need comments
>from employers on what they would like in that newsgroup.
>
>-- 
>        Peter L. Montgomery              Internet: pmontgom@math.orst.edu
>        Dept. of Mathematics, Oregon State Univ, Corvallis, OR 97331-4605 USA
>My visiting professorship ends in June.  Interested in program optimization,
>compilers, architecture, number theory.  PhD with 17 yrs industrial experience.
You're right about RECRUITER.  I had forgotten, but
I knew someone would improve on what I started with.

I don't feel strongly about including COMPANY, except that it was part
of the standard as imposted by the style-guide before.  I suspect
company-name is useful for people who are trying to find articles
which they have read already.  I was trying to stay near the existing
standard except for adding keywords.

I strongly disagree with allowing many keywords or unrestricted keywords.
How hard would it be to make the perl script check for
any keyword that is part of a small finite list?

If we allow employers to use absolutely any keyword they want, without
standardization, then the keywords will be a whole lot less useful for
searching.  If I wish to rule out all computer programming posts, I
should not have to place DATABASE and OPERATING SYSTEM and GUI and DOS
and PC and TELEPHONY and UNIX and COBOL and NEXT and QA and TESTING
and PORTING and so on in my kill file.  Yes, if I want only UNIX and
GUI, the keywords will not find me everything I want, but remember
that employers have the job-title field to distinguish (for example)
Professor of History of British Art and Professor of History of
Egyptian Art.  The job-title is intended to be unrestricted,
unstandardized, and more descriptive than the keywords.  Remember also
that people can search for strings within the articles to find the
things they DO want to see.  The keyword is mostly for a quick kill,
as far as I see.

You are correct that the keywords will have to evolve, but let's add
to them later, instead of removing their usefulness from the
beginning.  For the moment, the number of non-computer jobs advertized
here is very very small.  If you're looking for one of them, it won't
waste a lot of your time to go through the others, if we get all the
computer-related jobs out of your way.  If some subset of the
non-computer jobs gets big enough, we can add the keyword then.

Or at least that's what seems best to me at the moment.

Mary-Anne Wolf
mgw@world.std.com

These opinions may not be shared by Software Tool and Die.
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