> Bill Moore's question was "If we need you to, will you sweep the floors?"
This better be well contextualized. Does this mean, "we're a small
organization and everyone needs to be willing to pitch in as needed?"
or does it mean, "are you willing to prostrate yourself before the
altar of this organization in order to prove yourself?" If the former,
sure. If the latter, then no: sorry, I've done my time in more ways
than one, including literally sweeping and mopping the floors (and
cleaning the head) in the Marines. There's a tendency in technology to
basically haze the friendly new guy; I'm done with that.
The best programmers I've ever worked with understood teamwork and the team produced something way better than what any one of us could do (this was back in the days before egoless programming, CI, code reviews, etc), so we invented the bits that worked for us on the fly). The thing is, every single person on that team could (and often did) work on any aspect of the product, be it the documentation (though the tech writers usually did that), the code (the programmers usually did that, but the tech writers committed fixes to the example code that was in the book), to the printer being out of toner / paper, the soda supply in closet running out, the snacks that we got at costco running low, stuffing product into boxes to ship to customers, handling customer calls, dealing with talking to customers at a technical conference in a sales booth, presenting papers at conferences, etc. Nobody did anything entirely by themselves. We interviewed several 'lone wolves' that had done it all, but found the one we hired couldn't integrate into our pack because they couldn't be part of a team and put the team first and the group needs ahead of their own. That's the Genesis of my mistrust of this question, or at least the premise behind it. And Dan, these 'scut tasks' weren't about hazing, but just about doing what needed to be done...
Warner