That sounds like Corporatese for "the pay is low and the hours are long".

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The Toad team is looking for a high quality Delphi engineer/bigot with very strong Delphi OO and database experience to help maintain and continue to build Toad for Oracle, the world’s number one tool for Oracle development.

Here’s the skinny on the position, folks. I need someone with at least several years of very strong Delphi programming experience. We are definitely not looking for "component droppers," but someone who has strong OO engineering skills. Component development experience itself is not necessary, but a strong knowledge of the VCL and Windows API is needed, as well as a strong commitment to engineering principles. Toad is not built by plopping components on forms but rather is engineered

using OO design. This is not to say that there isn’t poor quality code in the product (which you will have to participate in maintaining) - a product with over 10 years of legacy code is bound to have some. But our current team of 4 developers are skilled at their craft and it’s necessary that we hire a dedicated software engineer. As far as database experience goes, some good strong exposure to Oracle is almost a necessity. Knowledge of relational databases is a must, including

some knowledge of SQL. We don’t need an Oracle expert - oddly enough, our users know a lot more about Oracle than we do. Working on Toad is about exposing Oracle to the user, so we tend to get deep in to the

internal system views and utilities and surface those to the user. But we have only one DBA developer on the team so DBA experience would definitely be beneficial. Deep knowledge of Oracle would be very attractive.

Toad is around 1.7 million lines of code. We have four developers. Do the math and you can see it’s an enormous challenge to maintain and continue to refactor/build this product. We have 15 or more third party libraries, including Developers Express and ODAC as our data layer.

I don’t micromanage. The incoming person must be very self-directed, mature, and highly self-motivated. I’m looking for the person who drools when told, "here’s the debugger module in Toad - you own it now."

We interact with our users daily via the two Toad Yahoo Groups. There is a very high degree of identification with the product. Our users own Toad, we do not. They tell us what’s what, not the other way around. Accountability is very high. This means job satisfaction for the right person is through the roof. For the right person, this is a dream job. The developers here have said, "you couldn’t pry me from this job with a crowbar." I need the kind of person who recognizes the type of opportunity we have here and would do anything to get it (assuming the skills are present).

The office is in Cary, near the Maynard/Kildaire Farm road intersection.

We’ve got 8 folks here, a support person, a doc person, several QA and several developers. We have one remote developer in Texas (our DBA-developer). We each have our own office, with very nice furniture.

We can sometimes be found in the parking lot tossing a frisbee, or taking morning coffee walks, or walking to Goodberry’s. It’s a small, close-knit team, so chemistry is important to us. We work hard, we play

hard. Hours are somewhat flexible but I ask that folks generally keep to the 8-9am arrival. Work attire is shorts and Tshirts.

Toad has a cult-like following among the users. It’s an extremely important product to Quest - one of it’s biggest. That means if you’re good, you could be here a very long time. It’s a very safe position if

the fit is right.

Email me directly if you need more information. Mark.lerch (at) quest (dot) com.

If you don’t hear back from me in a timely fashion, please contact Quest regarding the position.