Gadgetopia

As much as I enjoy discriminating against the Mac folks (mostly just for the sport of it), web sites that require IE/Windows these days have no excuse save utter laziness.

Even if you feel like doing funky javascript things, it's just not that hard to write a cross-browser site that will support IE and Firefox (Safari takes a touch more work, but nothing severe). Heck, there are even libraries that make cross-browser scripting a snap. Anyone that still requires IE needs to wake up and smell the Millenium.

So Joe, are these bozo's just being lazy, or do they do it "just for the sport of it"?

I agree with Joe in that it is fun to take shots at Mac users (grin) - but, sadly, I've run across more cases than I care to count where corporate policy is to write code that discriminates in favor of one particular browser or another and one platform over another. At one company I worked for, they instructed all developers to code for Netscape for the administrative tools (or the content management), and to block IE regardless of platform - but that was a forward-thinking company with a large installed base of Mac clients (internally and externally - the primary corporate business was printing). Towards the end of my tenure there, there was a shift in thinking that pronounced "Since many of our external clients are IE/Win based, focus on them."

Just another plug for standards and sanity...

Actually, I read this last week and had a good chuckle...

As a Mac user and developer, I actually ran into this once. A company was advertising for a Mac Developer and their web-based app wouldn't run on a Mac. Talk about clueless!

Solution? E-mail the resume to HR with a little note that I was unable to use the web-based system because I use a Mac.

When I did my phone interview, the person I talked to pretty much said, "Yeah, it's the clueless IT department. They don't want to support Macs." I asked if the IT department knew they were going to be hiring Mac developers and would need support from the IT department for such things as e-mail, he did the standard "Well, we figured we'd just get you a PC for that sort of thing."

Needless to say, I didn't take the job.

Generally, if they have a fancy web-based system for job applications, I'd skip it. The idea is to stand-out. Getting mixed in with 10,000 Windows users isn't the way to do that. As always, doing some research into the company and finding a person to contact is a good way to go. Talk to that person about the position, let them know a little about yourself and make yourself memorable. Build a custom resume that will immediately show why you're qualified for the position and e-mail the resume to the person you talked to, referring back to the conversation. Suddenly, you have someone who has talked to you and "knows" you, they have your resume in their hot little hands and you have a much better chance of being "passed up" to the person doing the hiring.

Filling out a web form and hoping for a response is probably the worst way to get a job.