A software developer in the U.S. apparently outsourced his six-figure job to China so he could spend all day reading Reddit and watching cat videos, the BBC reports.

The developer was working with secure files on a company VPN. No problem; he Fedexed his RSA (security) token to the Shenyang-based consulting firm, whom he paid $50,000 a year to do his job for him.

The security breach was discovered by Verizon after the unnamed infrastructure company asked Verizon to check out some “anomalous activity.”

The open connection from Shenyang to the employee’s workstation had been open for several months.

This enterprising employee may even have been “working” at more than one job, earning several hundred thousand dollars a year to do nothing, the BBC notes.

Hilarious, but not smart.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Yet master resume writer Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter says that “you might actually land a job” when you stop looking for one, so, yeah, just quit your job search.

Should you “[p]lay hard-to-get by being nonchalant about job offers that do come your way”? This, Barrett-Poindexter says, will make you “be seen as a challenge, and the competition to hire you will heat up.”

No, no, no. Nonchalant is bad in today’s market. Overly attached, clingy, and needy is also bad, but there’s middle ground. If you need a job, present yourself as excited and passionate and energetic—not hard to get.

Oh, and Barrett-Poindexter also says that in times of real stress, just stop job-searching altogether. “The perspectives you gain during this time will more than make up for any perceived time loss.”

Agreed…if you’re talking about a couple hours. Maybe even a day, if you’re having a really wretched time and need a mental health break. In fact, we support the general idea of approaching the job search from a place of calm, a place of positivity, etc.–not a mental state of stress and negativity. That stress will spill over into the way you present yourself to employers, so coming from a good, happy place is good. But that doesn’t mean just to quit when it gets rough.

Job searching is a job, as anyone who’s done it for an extended period of time knows. Without discipline and putting in regular hours, you’re less likely to achieve the result you want–a job. Yes, people get called out of the blue by headhunters, and sometimes the perfect job falls into your lap, but The Secret isn’t real and you’ll better your odds by sticking with it. A job search is not like looking for your car keys.

Finally, Barrett-Poindexter also lists a bunch of tips about quitting your job search by using social media, volunteering, and going on job interviews. Funny, those things sound a heck of a lot like….job-searching. So maybe you don’t want to quit your job search after all.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In what has to be the weirdest intern recruitment video ever*, TheStreet reporters talk about….everything besides why you might want to intern here. The tongue-firmly-in-cheek video has reporters talking about how their interns from last year “can’t be working” (“actually, they’re interning at Bloomberg now,” says another), points out that the Wall Street bull statue’s “bollocks are bigger than its brain,” and then shows viewers how close TheStreet’s offices are to Zucotti Park, where “thousands of jobless kids just like yourselves rose up against the greedy investment banks. The same greedy investment banks that keep business journalists like us employed.”

*Ok not really. This video aired at the 2012 Financial Follies, a sort of White House Correspondents Dinner for New York financial journalists. On the other hand, it’s all about interns, and can’t help but leave some sort of impression in interns’ brains. Do you find the jokes funny? Does the vid make you more or less likely to want to intern at TheStreet?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The reason we suspect it might be taken down is because it looks like an intern took a boss’s musings and posted them as a job ad with scant editing. Read:

Martha Stewart is looking for a FREELANCE (ON SITE) HOME PAGE EDITOR.
Must have digital editing experience.

Must have experience with Omniture – the web tracking tool.

The person hired would have to have experience as a home page editor. Also the person should have experience with content development and writing headlines.
Really exciting time to join marthastewart.com as we are in a complete re-design phase.
Position is on site and can be 40 hrs per week but could be less ie 20 to 30 hrs a week and will depend on workload / how fast person hired is etc

It would be for Martha Stewart.com so the ideal personwould either have experience in LifeStyles verticals or a strong interest inlifestyles / food et.

Will monitor website traffic –see how many hits website is getting – see what headlines written are getting hits etc etc

SO basically it would be agreat headline writer who also ideally knows how to use Omniture.

Hourly rate depends upon experience

Forget the lack of punctuation and the typos. Have you ever seen a job ad that includes the words “So basically”? From a respected, oldschool brand like Martha Stewart?

We e-mailed Martha’s PR people to ask how this made it onto LinkedIn. If they respond, we’ll let you know.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Just yesterday we issued a friendly reminder about the importance of submitting accurate job applications but a student at York University in Toronto made a major blunder while sending an e-mail.

As a job seeker, the last thing you want to do is make a mistake (let alone have it go viral), but in the spirit of keeping things light with the job search, we can’t resist from sharing.

The Wall Street Journal reported Vanessa Hojda accidentally attached a photo of Nicolas Cage to her job application. She e-mailed the career center at York regarding an administrative assistant opening. In lieu of her resume and cover letter, Hojda attached a deer-in-headlights headshot of the actor! continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Washington Post is getting a feature in the April Issue of Vanity Fair. An excerpt shows how investor Warren Buffett thinks that the Post’s business model is not working: “The Washington Post is a local newspaper,” he said. “The newsroom, kindled by what happened at Watergate, liked to think of themselves as national. And they are national, in an important respect, but they’re not national as a business. And they don’t have a business model that works nationally.”

As proof, he cites an anecdote about punking Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post for two decades.

““We were flying one time to Omaha on United Airlines, back when I used to fly commercial,” he recalls. “I said to her, ‘Kay, that pilot looks a little inexperienced.’ I said, ‘I’m not sure he’ll really be able to fly to Omaha.’ So, I said, ‘Do me a favor. Would you mind drawing a map of the United States that we could help him with, showing where Omaha is?’ Well, she started drawing a map, and of course she got as far as Chevy Chase, Maryland, and she didn’t have the faintest damn idea.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to today’s issue of satirical newspaper The Onion, a 25-year-old employee “died Wednesday after being sucked into the website’s powerful news-repurposing turbine, where his body was immediately torn to pieces.

“The 200-ton content-compiling device, developed by Greek multimillionaire and site co-founder Ari­anna Huffington, sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company’s home page.”

I heard this grinding noise, and then I saw all these Washington Post stories, sexy pictures of people in the workplace, and celebr­ity anti-vaccine editorials start to back up on the factory floor,” said Huffington Post editor Emily Paxton…”We couldn’t shut it down,” continued Paxton, adding that the smell of mutilated remains mixed with raw Internet media was gag-inducing. “If we had, it would have taken a full day for the technicians to reset it, and we couldn’t risk missing a breaking story on Brody Jenner.”

Since The Huffington Post was founded in 2005, its headquarters has consisted of two rooms: Arianna Huffington’s spacious, lav­ishly appointed office overlooking New York City, and the windowless 10,000-square-foot subterranean warehouse that houses the turbine. More than 700 low-wage workers, known as writers, clock in every day, and, dressed in their Huffington Post hard hats and coveralls, work in dark, unsafe conditions to ensure the machine runs smoothly and constantly churns out content.

…”In a way, though, maybe it’s a good thing he was ripped to shreds and killed,” added Thomas, later saying that because The Huffington Post didn’t provide Evers with health insurance, he wouldn’t have been able to afford his hospital bills, anyway. “Working the HuffPo turbine is no way to live.”

Plenty more at the original source.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The above recruiting video for Twitter is bad. Purposely bad, of course, but it’s still cringe-inducing. Hey, nobody wants to work at a company that takes itself too seriously to make a video this bad, right?

Most of the social network’s open positions are for engineering jobs, as you’d imagine, but we found a few for media pros, like this one for a copywriter/editorial manager.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

She discussed this phenomenon on her blog Monday. She doesn’t frame it like we are doing.

She first gave Lauren Rae Orsini $100 to write a piece for Breslin’s blog. Orsini soon landed a job at The Daily Dot. “I don’t think I got Lauren that job. I think Lauren got herself that job,” Breslin says.

Okay. But then Breslin wrote about Frances Bridges, who kept bugging Breslin until she got some decent advice out of her (which is all she wanted to begin with). Bridges then landed a blog on Forbes.

Finally, Breslin wrote about seeing a needlepointed “Hire me” sign in a window. The creator of the sign had almost no experience (working in a popcorn shop for $9 an hour excepted) and no college degree. After Breslin wrote about him, he got three jobs. Three! Two are more physical (baker and robotics teacher) but he’s also doing web design, web programming, and social media marketing.

The moral of the story is that if you want a media job, get Susannah Breslin to write about you.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After William Saroyan wrote to H.L. Mencken in 1936 to ask the man’s advice on starting and editing a magazine, Mencken responded with the following:

Dear Saroyan,

I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to hell and learn from other editors there how dreadful their job was on earth.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

But their latest top 10 list, “Top 10 Jobs That Burn Calories,” which is arguably one of the most ridiculous lists we’ve been emailed*, they got something seriously wrong. Okay, two things—first they ranked “firefighter” lower than “valet”—you guys are joking, right, Glassdoor?

But more relevant to this blog’s audience was #4 on this list: news photographer. Yeah, it’s a gym workout and a job all at once, though as prosumer cameras get more and more capable, there’s a lot less gear-lugging than before. But here’s what Glassdoor said:

“Breaking News! Who responds? News Photographers, that’s who. With fewer newsrooms these days and a 24/7 news cycle, news photographers are on the move at all times to capture life’s moments unfolding before it’s too late. They’re constantly moving, running, rushing and lifting heavy equipment to make daily deadlines. You’ll burn some bulge with an 8-hour cardio workout (aka: your normal shift).”

Yep, they said an 8-hour shift is “normal.” Ha ha.

In case you were wondering, the other calorie burning jobs (in rough reverse order) were: personal trainer, landscaper, retail sales, firefighter, nanny, tour guide, roofer, furniture delivery, and the aforementioned valet.

*Who’s seriously going to change their cushy desk job for one where you move furniture around all day? There are easier ways to trim your waistline than making a career change.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“Consider a vocation in a religious order,” he said. “Then at least someone might feed you.”

Tee hee.

After the jump, a few more choice excerpts from the interview:
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The year this was written: 1991.

Things don’t change fast, do they?

Image is from Writer’s Digest, May 1991. Thanks to a friend of MJD for the scan.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

An art director takes to the Xtranormal (talking animals) movie engine to make this clip of an art director home for the holidays trying to explain to Mom what it is, exactly, that he does. “Did you take the picture of the steak in the ad?” “No, a food photographer took the picture.” “Did you cook the steak?” “No, a food stylist cooked it.” And so on. Har har. Having a job nobody outside the ad world understands is definitely a bummer.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“The idea with Curators of Sweden is that each curator will share both their own and relevant third party’s thoughts, stories, information and other content that is somehow linked to Sweden. The idea is that the curators, through their tweets, create interest and arouse curiosity for Sweden and the wide range the country has to offer. The expectation is that the curators will paint a picture of Sweden, different to that usually obtained through traditional media,” says the website explaining the change.

That’s an understatement. The first guy to have taken over @Sweden describes himself as “Writer and marketer based in Stockholm. Has been called fascinating as well as ass face.”

His Tweets…are clearly not screened. They’re coming over the official feed raw and uncensored, and in our opinion, hilarious. But we’ll let you see for yourself:

Yet this is NOT performance art, as far as we can tell, or even a way to give the “official” voice of @Sweden a vacation. It’s bold, to be sure, and is certainly polarizing opinions across the ‘Net. What do you think? Is this a viable social media strategy?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.