(no subject)

[vulture23]

Yesterday I began to create a resume/profile on Monster. I say "began to" because after something like 45 minutes struggling with the site I was so frustrated that once I had partially succeeded, I felt the need to do something else for a while until I could subdue the urge to send hate mail to Monster's entire executive staff.

• As a matter of fact, I *do* know that education is important, which is why I just completed a degree at a real (and even reasonably respected) university. I really don't need to be asked after every other page-load whether I want recruiters from some questionable online "technical institute" to start spamming me. And my mind is not going to change just because the "no thanks" button is made as inconspicuous as possible while still maintaining plausible deniability about deliberate obfuscation. (I've seen more-thoroughly hidden opt-out buttons, but not on sites that were even pretending to be respectable....)
• I'd have thought that reading a Word 2003 document and rendering it with HTML would not be a difficult thing in this day & age. Apparently this is a mistaken assumption, though, because Monster's file importer resoundingly fails to keep track of which text is (for example) boldface and which is not.
• Oh yes, you can edit the resume once it's been uploaded... in theory. The online editor on Monster, however, is.... well, I'll be generous and just say that I've seen more-capable, higher-quality editors presented as examples in introductory Windows programming books and GUI toolkit tutorials. (You know it's bad when it starts to seem like it'd be easier to re-write the editor than to use it...) The really stunning feature is that it seems that it can produce formatted text, but it has no idea what formatting the existing text already has. (So, for example, all that text that was imported as boldface when it shoudn't have been? Yeah, the editor has no idea that that's boldface, so you can't un-bold it.) Yet, it remembers well enough that when I cut and paste text, it keeps the formatting it had...
• Well, plain-text should be easy enough, right? I've got a plain-text version of my resume, specifically for pasting into web forms... Except that Monster apparently doesn't believe that plain-text puts any significance on little things like line-endings, since every single one of them was stripped out of the text I uploaded. (I'd saved the text from Notepad before uploading, so I'm pretty sure this was not a case of unix-style vs. MS-style line-endings, though I didn't specifically check. And by now I was not interested in trying to see if their idiotic editor was capable of adding line-endings.)
• The one document format that this appallingly brain-dead file importer seems to actually be able to handle? RTF. Whatever. (At this point I was just relieved that it could understand something...)

I am now nursing a fiery spark of burning loathing for Monster. And yet... I suppose it may have been worth it, as I've already got a voicemail from a recruiter at a temp-staffing agency. (Specifically the agency that is the biggest source of contract workers for the company that declined to hire me full-time last week, naturally...) Which, I suppose, is why Monster can get away with being such an oozing cesspool of awfulness -- if it gets people jobs, they'll keep using the site even if the UI makes them want to vomit.