A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork
every month or so. The first thing I would do,
after checking to see if they had a live online demo,
was look at their job listings. After a couple years
of this I could tell which companies to worry about
and which not to.  The more of an IT flavor the job
descriptions had, the less dangerous the company
was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle
experience. You never had to worry about those. You
were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java
developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers,
that would be a bit frightening--that's starting
to sound like a company where the technical side,
at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen
a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have
been really worried.

        -- Paul Graham, co-founder, Viaweb