Breaking my ridiculously long blog-silence (to be properly broken soon, I promise), to reproduce this email, received earlier today from an IT recruiter back in the UK. He doesn’t know that I (a) have a job and (b) am on another continent. It strikes me as a perfect candidate for Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner.
Good Day to you Dafyd,
The conventional Digital Agency is becoming somewhat of a commonplace in today’s society. Most developers know what to expect from a Digital Agency environment……. Large windows, trendy yuppies, converted warehouses, exposed brickwork etc etc.
What strikes me when I enter a digital agency is that they are all pretty much the same. Agencies purporting to be creative, yet which in themselves are anything but ‘machines for creativity’, rather clones of the agency down the road. interior Cobblestone floors, converted warehouses and a Shoreditch location, no longer appeal to those wise developers who yearn for a working environment which nourishes the creative juices far more than an ‘open plan office with perspex desks’. Indeed, great artisans have long tended to seek recourse in a small workshop rather than a huge sprawling office. Take the great architect, prophet, luminary, painter, sculptor, furniture designer and all round Uber-Menche, Le Corbusier, a man who was given the opportunity to work in some of the most opulent and ornamented Parisian ateliers, yet who settled for a ramshackle studio in Rue de Sevres, Paris from whence, some of the most highly valued paintings were conceived.
I went to the London offices of my client yesterday to discuss a role that they are seeking to fill urgently. I was expecting, the same old Digital Agency stereotype, yet I was pleasantly surprised to enter a beautiful building which in my view served as a synthesis between the old and the new, past and present, Ying and Yang, nature and the machine. I was immediately struck by the timber framed roof beams of the main studio, reinforced with steel girders, the smoking room adorned with epoque empire candelabras and old smoking pipes juxtaposed by cutting edge orthopaedic chairs with built in lumbar supports. At the far end of the room, an interior ornamental pediment surmounted by muses caught my gaze, as if removed from atop the pillars of Athens. I realised just what an exceptional agency I had stumbled upon. What’s more, they create websites for the most well known european car brands, MERCEDES BENZ!
They are currently seeking a strong hybrid PHP/AS3 developer to join their team, somewhat of an interesting combination, but one which no doubt fits in with their general maxim of reconciling of opposites. The successful candidate would be joining a small team of very smart yet very laid back developers and designers.
Seriously? Corbusier, Uber-Menche (he means mensch)? Ying (sic) and yang? Sounds a great place to work, but, despite his wordy protestations to the contrary, I have to say that it sounds exactly like every trendy digital agency…
