I'm pretty happy working at Atlassian. It's a great work environment (modulo a few air-conditioning problems), and the work is both challenging, and something I'm personally interested in. As such, there's probably fewer than a handful of companies that, if they made me an offer commensurate with my abilities, would stand a chance of luring me away.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to an email from one such company, saying they'd found my details online, that they were recruiting software engineers for "a special project", and would I be interested?

I'm not naive. I gave good odds that I was on the receiving end of a fishing expedition similar to when Eric Raymond got a job offer from Microsoft. I emailed back to say that yes, it was something I would potentially be interested in, and that I might be quite good at, but due to my lack of certain required skills (C++ was listed. Bleah) and general being-in-another-countryness, I probably wouldn't make the cut.

Come Tuesday, I woke up to another email asking me to send in my resumé anyway. The main problem here is that I don't have a resumé. The last time I needed one was two years ago, I wrote it using lyx for a laugh, and lost the LaTeX source file. So I spend an hour or so writing a new CV from scratch, mail it off... and within fifteen minutes receive a stock "Sorry, we have nothing suitable for you right now" response.

Grr. That fast a response means a first-pass rejection -- I didn't make the technical requirements for the position. Which is exactly what I said in my email before I had to rewrite my CV. I'm sure there's something in the HR manual that says to be sure you get a resumé on file for future reference, but this whole thing leaves me with a "my time is more valuable than your time" taste.