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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: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2016, @12:59PM
You'd be surprised the shit we are willing to put up with, if we're just told about it up front.
In the old days, where nearly every job was manual labor, we had apprenticeships -- but more than that, we saw first hand how the jobs were done in the first place.
The fish skinner knew every gory detail. The young apprentice swung the heavy blacksmith's heaviest hammers to rough in the shapes the master smith would finish off.
Contrary to popular belief, most men are not afraid of hard and thankless work. We've been bred for it, and have sacrificed thus for millions of years to get to this point.
What causes us to leave is not the hard insanely tedious and soul sucking labor, but the deception and backstabbing and gossip... Interestingly, the things women are naturals at from the time they're young girls.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 18 2016, @01:16PM
Aside from the gender side track AC might be on to something. I mean, all enterprise software smells enterprisey. You're statistically not going to get a java or .net job that isn't like that. Maybe its assumed it'll be agile (aka micromanaged implementation of the opposite of the original manifesto) and it'll be some kind of open office hellhole where no one concentrates.
The other reason for the popularity is people probably want to hear the rest of the story. Surely there's some legal challenge somewhere and this is going to get entered as evidence where 90% of the current employees signed a statement that there's nothing factually inaccurate about the working conditions portrayed in the advertisement, therefore the contract is invalid or the former employee deserves compensation. Of course it'll probably get settled out of court before we get to hear who did what to who, but it sounds like fairly normal megacorporation enterprise software development.
I took two semesters of COBOL back in the school days and I don't even know what "managed cobol" is. Might be some kind of USA/UK separated by a common language thing, where all the UK know that "UK managed" translates directly to a dynamically linked library or an API on the USA side of the pond.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by niceholejohnson on Monday April 18 2016, @01:37PM
I took two semesters of COBOL back in the school days and I don't even know what "managed cobol" is.
Based on the .NET qualifications, I'm guessing it's COBOL for .NET.
Microsoft likes to refer to things as "Managed vs Unmanaged" instead of ".NET vs Native", possibly for clarification, since .NET bytecode is JIT-compiled into native machine code which makes the term "native" a bit more ambiguous. Basically, it's "managed" because it's managed by the CLR (.NET's equivalent of the JVM).
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday April 19 2016, @12:45AM
I took two semesters of COBOL back in the school days and I don't even know what "managed cobol" is. Might be some kind of USA/UK separated by a common language thing, where all the UK know that "UK managed" translates directly to a dynamically linked library or an API on the USA side of the pond.
I hadn't heard of it either so I looked it up. Managed COBOL refers to COBOL implemented on either the CLR (.NET) or JVM with extensions for interop with the platform it's on. I'm guessing that it's called "managed" (as opposed to "native" COBOL) because those platforms are VMs with built-in memory management, but I couldn't find anything explaining the naming choice so that part is just speculation.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 19 2016, @12:54PM
Hmm interesting from the two responses I got, I now understand Microsoft Marketing Dept would call Clojure something like "managed lisp".
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday April 20 2016, @12:37AM
Yeah, that's how I took it, too. In fact, I almost made that same comparison in my comment since Clojure's pretty well known and has both JVM and CLR versions. I took it out, though, because I was concerned it might just stir up off-topic argument about Clojure vs. traditional lisps since Clojure is sufficiently alien to both CL and Scheme to be considered a not-lisp by a lot of people.
I'm guessing those same marketing types could safely call IronScheme (.NET) or Kawa (JVM) "Managed Scheme" though. Tried to find a similar comparison for Common Lisp but wasn't having much luck with .NET versions; JVM has ABCL though, so a marketoid could call that "Managed Lisp" I suppose.