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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: 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?