[legion]

Unfortunately, it's an employers market right now, and if they asked you to eat a steaming pile of dog $h!t in the interview, I'd bet half the applicants would because they need the work.

I work in an industry (IT) that has seen wild swings in the past ten years. When I was hired in 1999, I think the chief qualification was the ability to turn on a computer. My company was losing 400 IT people a year at the time (height of the dot-com boom) to greener pastures in Silicon Valley. For the past two years, we've had a hiring freeze and even internal movement within the department has been tight. Heck, we've also been overstaffed as we hired people anticipating some retirements, and people just stopped retiring. I've got a long list of friends looking for an "in" and I can't do a thing for them.

Companies that can be expected to even exist in a year are able to hire top talent for bottom dollar right now.