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El Reg reports Job ad promises "Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack"
You'll need "numbness to the absence of excellence", will be paid "handsomely for your soul".
"Grease the wheels of capitalism with your tears ...we will pay you handsomely for your soul."
A job ad has appeared offering one lucky worker the chance to perform "Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack".
The ad[*] is real. Recruiter Joshua Wulf told The Register he wrote it after a conversation with a candidate "who told me what his job is really like".
[...] The lucky candidate will get to wrestle the following:
- Multiple generations of legacy code that cannot be refactored without destroying the entire house of cards.
- Design anti-patterns as a design pattern.
- Live, mission-critical system where you develop on the production instance.
- Large sections of managed and native COBOL.
- Easily top every development horror story at LAN parties.
To score the gig, you'll need these traits:
- Experience with the following technologies: .NET, ASP.NET, JavaScript, VBScript, COBOL, Managed COBOL.
- An extreme resilience and ability to withstand intense pressure.
- A numbness to the absence of excellence.
- Wily survival instincts and the ability to keep your head down combined with a reckless disregard for type safety.
- A bonus is any political experience, whether as a candidate or as an elected official.
Wulf tells The Register the ad has succeeded. "My phone has been ringing off the hook", he says. "People are telling me they are strangely attracted to the job because other jobs don't sound real."
"I'm surprised by the response: it's blown up!"
Ever seen this kind of honesty in an ad? Did you have the foresight to have archive.is save a copy? Do share.
[*] Ed note: In accordance with the original ad:
Copyright (c) 2016 Joshua J Wulf / Just Digital People.
License: Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 AU.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday April 18 2016, @12:56PM
But do you have 10 years of experience in this specific type of meaningless work that has only been around for 2 years?
Do you have experience doing meaningless work in in DFSDFGWREG, Fakuinternaldb, Madeuptech Web Shite, and NobodysHeardOfThis meaningless applications?
Then don't even bother applying! We are not going to train! We are not going to permit you five seconds to get up to speed. It is impossible for a smart person to quickly learn new tech, my MBA training says so. We don't care if you have extensive experience in dozens of similar tools, if your skills aren't an exact precise match then you WILL be ignored.
Oh, did we mention experience must be with Fakuinternaldb version 43.3.1? If you only have experience with Fakuinternaldb 43.3.0, then you are also not qualified.
And then we will complain about not being able to find qualified employees in the US and outsource to some golden brown PC-rebooters.
THAT is the problem with most job descriptions these days.
It is impossible for an actual honest human to find a job these days.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 18 2016, @01:20PM
And then we will complain about not being able to find qualified employees in the US
But, luckily, the bosses frat-bro and/or nephew just happened to apply and the boss can personally verify his qualifications... Also see diversity hire, if you can prove no one can meet the qualifications, then anyone can be hired, and if you have an extensive quota system based on the usual demographic groups, then any equally unqualified diversity hire will do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday April 18 2016, @01:41PM
I should point out that many ads like this one used to be created to legally demonstrate that there were no qualified citizens available to take a position, and the company was left with absolutely no choice but to hire somebody from overseas that they can pay a fraction of the price and threaten to deport them if they complain about the 85-hour standard work week.
You're actually seeing less of these, in part because companies seeking to hire from overseas no longer have to demonstrate that there isn't a citizen willing and able to take the job.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 18 2016, @03:51PM
There are still plenty of positions required to advertise where the hiring manager already knows he's going to promote from within: Well, we interviewed the 5 best qualified candidates from the field and none of them hold a candle to John here, so we're just going to go with John.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2016, @04:26PM
There are still plenty of positions required to advertise where the hiring manager already knows he's going to promote from within: Well, we interviewed the 5 best qualified candidates from the field and none of them hold a candle to John here, so we're just going to go with John.
I had a manager who was in the opposite situation, he wanted to hire a qualified local for a field position but upper management insisted that he get someone already in the company to accept a multi-year assignment in the middle of nowhere. His solution was to cherry-pick the people who thought were unlikely to accept to assignment and after several saying no he was finally able to hire the person he wanted for the job.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday April 18 2016, @01:41PM
Nothing sadder than to see a company stuck with some legacy system that lost to some other technology years before most people were even born. I saw a job posting for a company that was stuck with a multi-value database as the foundation of their whole company and felt a sort of compassion. But not really. If you want people with legacy technology skills, you have to pay enough to lure them out of retirement. I think this probably where the "shortage" myth started. A whole lot of companies pick loser technologies and stay with them, only to see skills dwindle and disappear. Even if we taught a billion people how to "write code" they still wouldn't have niche skills that companies want - and you're right that no one will train anyone. They want an expert to come in, do work, and go away. But after a while, there are no experts, but the loser technology remains. Sad. Well, not really, I didn't know this company stuck on a multi-value database still existed, but whatever. I'm trying to be compassionate.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Monday April 18 2016, @03:46PM
I saw a job posting for a company that was stuck with a multi-value database as the foundation of their whole company and felt a sort of compassion.
I was responsible for moving my company from UniVerse (a multi-value database) to PostgreSQL. The data conversion was a bitch, as UniVerse is perfectly happy with putting the first paragraph of War and Peace into a date field (or any field, for that matter). Data dictionaries are just for human consumption, whereas the database doesn't give a shit what you actually put in there.
We were stuck with UniVerse until our last Pick programmer (UniVerse is derived from Pick) retired suddenly. Then it was a race to modernize.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2016, @06:21PM
I don't think it's so much of a problem of needing to pull anybody out of retirement for those systems as it is that companies don't seem to want to give somebody even a week to learn about their proprietary whoosawhatsit. I have yet to come across an information system that, no matter how shitty, proprietary, and stuck in the 80s (as in vendor is allergic to expose any kind of API or hooks, more talking about the mentality than any specific technology here) I couldn't figure out given reference materials and time.
Management most places seems utterly unwilling to realize that it's not experience with Enterprise Dsfargeg 16 Pro that makes somebody competent, it's competency with information systems in general. The specific software platform doesn't matter. Somebody can be a certified Enterprise Dsgargeg Black Belt Kung-Fu Master or whatever and still be utterly incompetent and only going through the robotic motions they learned in their Black Belt Kung-Fu Boot Camp.
So I think it's 100% that employers are unwilling to train. Not only that, but employers are unwilling to even allow a new hire to "train" himself! This whole tech shortage would go away overnight if 1.) employers would allow more telecommuting and be open to an employee that lives 2k+ miles away where the cost of living is reasonable 2.) hire tech workers on a probationary basis to allow them to learn whatever it is Enterprise Dsfargeg 16 Pro does and perhaps receive guidance and tips and tricks from whoever they have currently handling Enterprise Dsfargeg 3.) along with probationary hiring, gain a little fucking bit of sense about what it is that tech workers do and what a competent person behind a keyboard can add to an organization if they weren't dead-set on rejecting his every suggestion as "Oh, he's just a computer nerd."
Specifically about telecommuting, I can bet that perhaps companies in places like Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Boston really are experiencing a shortage. Well, duh. Why would I want to live somewhere that the cost of living is sky high? If companies in Seattle or the Valley in particular were more open to hiring remote workers (and really, I'm mostly a software developer so just about nothing about what I do needs more than git and ssh access). If the technology is mature enough that it's trivial for me to play Monster Hunter for example with the roommate on the couch in front of our sort-of video conference setup (just a big flat-panel TV and a webcam strapped to the top) and friends of friends from North Dakota, on the other side of the state, down in Atlanta (all in the same night!) face-to-face essentially (so much easier for somebody to call out that they're mounting or about to use an attack that may hit other players if not careful--also makes group communication about who needs what drop from what monster so easy), what's the big challenge for employers to have remote workers?
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday April 18 2016, @10:48PM
...I didn't know this company stuck on a multi-value database still existed, but whatever. I'm trying to be compassionate.
Why? It's a self inflicted injury.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1) by fubari on Monday April 18 2016, @03:11PM
Maybe the job description writers are smarter than you give them credit for - video link [youtube.com].
excerpt: "Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers."
Is every overly specific job description fake?
Probably not.
Are some fake?
Maybe.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 18 2016, @10:51PM
Yeah, that video's out of date. You now no longer need to show that there aren't qualified Americans.
I looked that up after I started seeing ads pop up for agencies that quite specifically said they wanted H1-B visa holders only, and I immediately questioned their legality.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2016, @06:14PM
>experience doing meaningless work in in DFSDFGWREG,
No, but I have experience in DSFARGEG. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dsfargeg [knowyourmeme.com]