I saw this article on Pando when it came out yesterday, and you've nicely explained something that I've been wondering about. There has to be some explanation to the beer trend other than frat-boy insanity (and yes, I like a good brew too). I think you've hit it.

If you contact the manager/VP directly, then as long as you write a good email and include some professional links, you'll usually get a response.

Contacting a peer has advantages, but on the other hand the manager gives you a straighter path to a job -- if you decide that that's what you want.

I see you've got green energy and medical technology jobs there. Why not jobs where you can commit to open source projects? Now _that's_ what I can a "job with meaning".

Sure thing, take a look at http://open-source.fiveyearitch.com/us

What's needed is more jobs that pay people to write open-source -- for example, but contributing libraries back to the community, or at least bugfixes.

Yes, definitely. My personal experience is that it's not always missing appreciation but more practical issues that keep companies from contributing more (money/time/developers). My clients usually understand the benefits of using free software and express an intention to contribute back, but the process of contributing is not well understood. If you take some piece of open software and customize the hell out of it for a few months, you can't just expect the upstream project to gratefully merge all your stuff because it's "free features". So it takes time and energy to work with the upstream project to identify useful parts and carefully integrate them into the upstream project, all while the customer is already in "works for me" mode and doesn't care to change already deployed software....

This is absolutely true. People worry about building on top of platforms, but when it's an open source platform, they don't seem to perceive it as having the same risk.

They just don't have the time or the tools. But if you can make it easy for them, then wow! This is a big win for everyone.

Resumes, recruiters, job ads -- yuck! Hacker communities -- yay!

Nice site! I signed up -- great idea!

The graphic design is quite good as it is, but a graphic facelift is not that expensive, so long as you stick to re-skinning the site -- CSS, images, etc. -- as opposed to major layout and content changes.

So, yes, go ahead with that. It's at least worth trying.

Right, I signed up after trying out the quiz. It was the cute idea that brought me in, not the graphic design (though that's pretty good).

I'd say that FiveYearItch exists to get people job offers. So, the graphic design is not core, and you don't need to sweat it.

The short answer is: Yes.

But what really should matter is the market -- i.e., your options. Learn what your opportunities are, and take the best. Did FiveYearItch send you some other offers? How do they compare? Did you look for options elsewhere?

Thanks, yes, FiveYearItch got me some other good offers. Some had significantly higher pay. But at this point, that's not my top priority. It's a choice between the comfortable job I have now and the "hot startup" in SF