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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, Funny) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday April 18 2016, @01:37PM
I couldn't help but wonder what Managed COBOL was. This link answers my question:
http://community.microfocus.com/microfocus/cobol/visual_cobol/w/wiki/470.managed-cobol-an-overview.aspx [microfocus.com]
In other words, MicroFocus COBOL, which somehow still exists as a thing, has taken the awfulness of COBOL and merged it with the awfulness of .NET to create something that will cause me nightmares for the rest of my life. I'm not sure you could pay anyone enought to work with this.
But this is not your typical .NET code monkey job, if it requires COBOL and legacy experience. I don't know how many people have ever used MicroFocus COBOL, but it can't be many.
In the 1990s, MicroFocus made such missteps as buying the XDB clone of DB2 for developers on non-mainframe platforms right before IBM released DB2 Universal Database on non-mainframe platforms. MicroFocus was a hot potato in the M&A world in the 2000s, and I think was spun off into its own company. Both MicroFocus and Fujitsu sell COBOL compilers for non-mainframe platforms. Any time you see a news article about COBOL or migrating off the mainframe, it's almost always planted by MicroFocus. There's usually one every year or two.
I will say the original MicroFocus COBOL compiler was not a bad product. I have never heard of this .NET thing, but their Linux compiler was decent. It's just no one in their right minds would use COBOL. Especially since MicroFocus has "enterprise" pricing for what amounts to an old COBOL compiler, when Java and C# are free.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 18 2016, @02:49PM
Our Comp Sci CIS program at my 4-year college was still teaching using that when I graduated in 2012. I took a course in it :P
Apparently Object-Oriented COBOL is also a thing. Only it's some sort of horrible abomination, I was told by one of the CIS guys (well, more horrible an abomination than some people already think OO is, I guess).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday April 18 2016, @02:58PM
Thanks, now I need to get the shock treatments again. OO COBOL is a thing. It's so hideously bad I needed years of therapy to get over it. It's like any other OO thing, but with verbose keywords for everything like methods, interfaces, members, and so on. For some reason, it never caught on.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Monday April 18 2016, @03:42PM
For some reason, it never caught on.
Inexplicably vestiges of sanity remained? :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Funny) by TheRaven on Monday April 18 2016, @06:00PM
You know the old joke:
There's a new object-oriented dialect of COBOL. It's called Add One to COBOL And Return COBOL.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday April 19 2016, @01:00AM
Apparently Object-Oriented COBOL is also a thing.
Mark my words: next stop, FUNCOBOL [theregister.co.uk]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gravis on Monday April 18 2016, @04:57PM
"enterprise" pricing for what amounts to an old COBOL compiler, when Java and C# are free.
neither Java nor C# are free, they are both heavily engulfed in legal quagmires. You literally could have named several dozen other languages and called them free but you chose two of the worst ones out there. ಠ_ಠ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18 2016, @05:47PM
they are both heavily engulfed in legal quagmires.
Yeah when I am looking for a job that is the first thing that comes to mind.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday April 18 2016, @07:34PM
Java is free, since it's been open-sourced. But I meant "free as in to a manager" - a manager would see the "enterprise" pricetag of MicroFocus COBOL and the zero-cost of Java or C# (which I picked because they are "enterprise" or manager-style languages), and have an easy decision. (COBOL was free before that meant anything, a product of CODASYL, whatever that stood for, an industry group that was so tired of proprietary languages they created a common language for business.)
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2016, @02:30AM
Java is free, since it's been open-sourced
Does Oracle know that? Ask Google (Android) how that's being working out for them.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday April 19 2016, @11:26AM
Your mention of "'enterprise' pricing" made your meaning clear.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday April 18 2016, @09:10PM
So you really think any of that crap matters for the sort of internal use corporate code under discussion here? Oracle is going to start kicking down doors looking at internal code written in Java and demanding royalties? Not likely, they are unpopular enough now, the merest hint of that kind of lawfare would get everything produced by them shunned.