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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) 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.