Allen Stern blogs about a sign that’s outside Rice to Riches, a rice pudding place in New York City’s East Village:

The sign reads:

Help Wanted

Start a career in the fascinating, fast-paced lucrative pudding business

• Long hard hours
• Very low pay
• Lots of heavy lifting
• Work for a ball-busting asshole
• Dead-end job
• No benefits
• No advancement
• Must be college grad

Start immediately

It’s attention getting; Allen says that he saw a number of people read the sign and as a result step into the store. There’s more in his blog entry about the sign.

I wonder how many people read it and thought “Sounds great! Where do I sign up?”

In case you’re:

• a programmer who works with the Ruby programming language
• looking for work
• available to get down to Toronto’s “West Queen West” neighbourhood soon

you might want to do what I’m doing in a couple of minutes (as of this writing): heading down to the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street West, at Dufferin) to get a look at employment.nil, which bills itself as “the first Toronto Ruby job fair”.

Organized by the fine folks at Unspace, who are also organizing the upcoming FutureRuby conference and FailCamp (where I’ll be the MC), employment.nil isn’t your typical computer programmer job fair. No computers are allowed! They’re going to be strict about it – even the use of iPhone applications is verboten. Bring printouts of your resume and some scratch paper to do “live coding”. I’m going to bring my mini-whiteboard and dry-erase markers.

See you there!