back to article IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

IBM's Global Technology Services has posted a job ad calling for candidates with a “minimum 12+ years’ experience in Kubernetes administration and management”. Which is a little odd because the first GitHub commit for the project was made on June 7, 2014. And the feature freeze for version 1.0 was announced on May 22, 2015. …

  1. jake Silver badge

    And so it ever was.

    Since when did HR generated job adverts make any sense from a technical perspective in the first place?

    HR generated "job postings" and actual "jobs available" aren't synonymous.

    The former exists to keep HR running, thus helping keep the HR droids in a paycheck.

    The later may or may not really exist outside of an HR droid's imagination.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And so it ever was.

      Thanks for that Captain Obvious...

      1. Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?

        Re: And so it ever was.

        Uh oh, we have an AC who works in HR, mind your manners everyone.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: And so it ever was.

          I don't work in HR though, I just think this comment was rather redundant (there's your proof - HR drones don't use terms like redundancy! They say you are "affected".)

          1. Locky

            Re: And so it ever was.

            The change HR did affected your job, you are effected

          2. Stoneshop
            Big Brother

            Re: And so it ever was.

            HR drones don't use terms like redundancy!

            Some do, as camouflage.

            Anyway, they're also the origin of the redundance, a variant of musical chairs but with the number of chairs missing per round seriously greater than one.

          3. Franco

            Re: And so it ever was.

            "HR drones don't use terms like redundancy! They say you are "affected"."

            Kind of like how trolls on El Reg post as "Anonymous Coward"?

            1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

              Re: And so it ever was.

              Affected? Wot, put on a posh accent and use multipolysyllabric phoneme contructs?

              1. jake Silver badge

                Re: And so it ever was.

                It's an affectation, innit.

              2. marcellothearcane
                Holmes

                Re: And so it ever was.

                What's multipolysyllaby? Tautological, methinks...

      2. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: And so it ever was.

        And I thought _I_ was Captain Obvious!

        1. jake Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: And so it ever was.

          Sorry, bob, I didn't mean to step on your toes. Have a cold one for your trouble.

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: And so it ever was.

      In the book 'What Color is your Parachute' (a book about job hunting and the hiring process in general) the author discusses many of the difficulties in dealing with HR and resumes and interviews and all of fthat. It's like everyone knows that the "wish list" in the job ad is _PROBABLY_ not the qualifications they need nor that of the person they'll eventually hire.

      Adaptability and related experience are probably more valuable anyway than something 'too specific'.

      But yeah if you can at least get to the interview, you'll probably get the job, if you're available, on-time, and present yourself as a generally competent employee who could just dive in and start going without a whole lot of supervision and direction. [at least for more senior I.T. roles which they must have been wanting to fill, by asking for 12 years' experience, etc.]

      In any case, best to bypass H.R. whenever you can. This is also why I prefer working for smaller companies (as a contractor). Not only are you more likely to talk to the hiring manager, they're more interested in "get it done" types because they don't have money to waste on bureaucracy...

      Summary: the ad is a *GUIDELINE* and a *WISH LIST* that should filter out the number of applications they get, down to a reasonable number that untrained H.R. employees can screen by using a list of key words and tricky phrases... but I suspect that all too often it would keep "the right person" from applying.

      1. Drew Scriver

        Re: And so it ever was.

        "But yeah if you can at least get to the interview"

        Not if you run into a qualified interviewer. Couple of gems from candidates I interviewed.

        1)

        During a phone interview we thought we heard typing whenever we asked questions, so I suspected that we were interviewing Google rather than "John". My boss thought my suspicion was far-fetched, so I asked "John" a question in a specific way that would likely lead to the wrong Google result.

        We heard typing again and I turned my laptop toward my boss. "John" read the first search result - verbatim! Since we weren't in the market for a narrator we kindly thanked him for his time and ended the call.

        2)

        Another candidate claimed to be an expert in HTTP. Understood it inside and out, he said. So, I asked him to give me the meaning of some response codes. Difference between 301 and 302? He had no clue. I asked about 401. No idea. 403? "Eh - can't remember."

        At that point I couldn't resist and I remarked that he seemed to have trouble finding the answers. He didn't get it.

        Figured I'd ask him one more. 200?

        "Eh - okay..."

        I started to think that he might still redeem himself when he continued:

        "eh - server error, I think."

        If only he had stopped talking after "Eh - okay"...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: And so it ever was.

          Am I the only one thinking that whoever downvoted these anecdotes was probably one of the candidates?

      2. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

        Re: And so it ever was.

        I was under the impression that this was a common tactic used in the US by companies... claim they need XX amount of experience... get no applications and thus have an excuse to offer the job up to applicants outside of the US... that way they can apply for the visa waiver and hire much cheaper people, whilst conforming to the US rules on importing skills/employees and so forth..

        1. Loud Speaker

          Re: And so it ever was.

          Here in the UK, I suspect it is used to recruit technically knowledgeable professional liars - a very valuable resource for the sales team.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: And so it ever was.

            A technically knowledgeable person in Sales? What colo(u)r is the sky on your planet?

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And so it ever was.

      Since when did HR generated job adverts make any sense from a technical perspective in the first place?

      HR talks to the hiring managers who in most cases are not technical themselves.

      At the same time, there is a lot of skill inflation on the resumes.

      I saw this and still see this when talking to candidates about big data positions.

      They said that they worked on a project for a year, but when you drill down... while they were part of the project, their role was minimal and they didn't have the grasp of the technology that they claimed.

      Others were great at buzzword bingo.

      I've seen several presentations where the team calls out 'predicate push-down' as if it meant something spectacular and was even relevant to the work they were presenting.

      Or when I told someone about some work I did 10 years ago... they came back and said that things have changed over the last 10 years... I responded that yes things have changed, however the script calls API/Function calls that haven't been changed and that if you write you script correctly, if the call is changed, its just a quick fix in one line.

      So while we all laugh at these mistakes don't blame HR. Blame the hiring manager who wrote the req.

      Want to blame HR. Blame the algos they now use to determine who they thing is the most qualified candidates that they want to move forward because they read the resume but don't know what they are reading.

  2. tommitytom

    Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

    He created the WWW in 1989 and WC3 was founded in 1994, so it's totally plausable someone has been designing websites since 1995.

    1. hoopsa

      Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

      According to CERN's own website:

      "By the end of 1994, the Web had 10 000 servers - 2000 of which were commercial - and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second."

      So I suppose people must have been doing *something* prior to 1995.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

        I think the point wasn't a matter of timing, rather it was that the kid who claimed to have been in it practically since the year dot had no clue who Tim was.

        1. Edwin

          Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

          I think I did my first commercial website around 1995 or 1996. If you do the math, the candidate was pretty young when they claimed to start building websites, they probably used notepad or hotdog to code the HTML and upload it to the ISP or perhaps used something like Geocities (founded 1994).

          As to ignorance of Tim's existence - I'm not surprised, really. The early days of the web were pretty fragmented, so as long as you could find your way to the TUCOWS website, you could do a *lot* on the web without knowing anything about it.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

            TUCOWS? That johnny-come-lately? You mean simtel20, Shirley! Or maybe sunsite ...

            I suppose there may have been people working with WWW related stuff back then who were not aware of Tim, but it's hardly likely. His name was on all three pieces of documentation!

            We didn't use hotdog or notepad or geocities. Most of us used vi, as gawd/ess intended ... although I'll admit there were a few masochists trying to use EMACS to automate the boring bits ...

            1. Valeyard

              Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

              >I suppose there may have been people working with WWW related stuff back then who were not aware of Tim, but it's hardly likely. His name was on all three pieces of documentation!

              I did my first website in 96 or 97 and I had no idea, my "documentation" was howtos on html and FTP, to geocities then freenetname for that free domain

            2. HPCJohn

              Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

              I remember downlaoding stuff from wsmr - White Sands Missile Range - in the early days.

              I though tit quite daring to log onot a military site and download files. If I'm not wrong that was an FTP site. might have been Gopher also.

              1. Julz
                Coat

                Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                My recollection was that it was Gopher.

                Ah, Gopher, brings back memories of spending hours trying to find anything somewhat approximating what you though you might have wanted. Back when the internet was the real internet, men and women where real men and women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

                Apologies to the spirit of DA. I'll get my coat, the one with floppy with Netscape V0.5 on it...

                1. DBH

                  Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                  Upvote because I have an insatiable need to upvote any and all DA quotes, even if massively distorted

                  1. David 132 Silver badge
                    Happy

                    Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                    I’m glad that’s Somebody Else’s Problem as well as mine...

                2. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

                  Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                  I've been reading El Reg for many years now and as far as I can understand it, there are somethings you never need to apologise for when responding in the comments...

                  1. Including any quotes by Douglas Adams in your post.

                  2. Including any quotes by Douglas Adams in your post when responding to a previous post that may also contain Douglas Adams quotes. And...

                  3. Whenever there is a story about a feck-off great new supercomputer, asking the "but can it run Crysis?" question.

                  1. PiltdownMan
                    Joke

                    Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                    Exactly!

                    AND, I've been reading El Reg for over 50 years, now

                    1. Steve K

                      Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                      The WWW was all black and white then. And they turned it off at 10:30 p.m.

                      1. Glen 1

                        Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                        and you couldn't use it when University Challenge was on, or else Bamber Gascoigne's voice would go all garbled.

                      2. bazza Silver badge

                        Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                        The WWW was all black and white then. And they turned it off at 10:30 p.m.

                        TBH they should probably go back to turning it off at 10:30pm... Some of the thing you can see on late night Internet are shocking (according to a friend).

                        And the first web browser was on a Next workstation, which was grey-scale if I recall correctly.

                        1. jake Silver badge

                          Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                          The NeXT that I used at work had a colo(u)r card and monitor.

                          1. NetBlackOps

                            Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                            Same at the university. I loved those machines so much, it's my replacement window manager of choice.

                  2. Steve K

                    Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                    I think you meant Douglas Adams or Sir Terry Pratchett?

                  3. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

                    Re: Douglas Adams Douglas Adams and Crysis

                    If you'd spread that comment out over three posts you might have got three times as many upvotes.

                    Uh oh, will probably get told off now by HR poster for STBO.

              2. jake Silver badge

                Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

                The simtel FTP archive was the one hosted at White Sands, originally on simtel20.arpa and later wsmr-simtel20.army.mil ... there were what we now call mirrors, if you knew where to look.

            3. Version 1.0 Silver badge
              Happy

              Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

              You kids were playing with vi, the rest of us were happily using line editors and writing strings as arrays.

            4. Sparkus

              Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

              Sintel? newbie....

              Public Software LIbrary! Floppies by Mail!!!

              1. jake Silver badge

                Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

                Simtel started in '79 ...PSL started in '80.

                One final word: DECUS

        2. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

          That's part of it, and that does earn the interviewee a demerit. But the tweet contains three components if you ask me:

          "We interviewed a 28yo designer in 2012 who told us he had 17 years experience designing websites.": Interviewee claimed to start designing sites at the age of 11 in 1995, which is possible but unlikely.

          "I said, 'Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t have 17 years experience designing websites.'": This sounds to me as if the interviewer actually thought this was true. As it happens, it was not. If you count HTML websites on WWW, he had 21-22 years experience. If you count his previous work on CERN-specific pages that worked like websites with hypertext, it is even more.

          And then the point about the interviewee not knowing who that was.

          1. James 139

            Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

            If you read the actual tweet chain, the interviewer goes on to explain that, back in the Good Times, people weren't "website designers", they wrote things by hand in a text editor, hardly "design".

            A good or bad explanation, maybe, but it is valid.

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

              I did not read that far down; thanks for bringing my attention to it. That said, I'm not accepting that; it sounds like at best a pedantic distinction without a difference or at worst an excuse for getting the number wrong. Designing something can happen in many ways, as long as you make decisions about how a thing will look or function. It's pretty broad. When I made students write "design documents", they neither wrote the code nor used imaging software, but they still designed their programs when they wrote up some text. You can design a site in the same way, and you can also do work on making the site look exactly how you want it to. That sounds like design to me.

        3. ROC

          Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

          And the candidate would have only been 11 at that time, so the value of that "experience" would have been rather questionable.

      2. Stoneshop
        Headmaster

        Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

        "Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second."

        Plain text? Lotus Ami Pro? Scanned as uncompressed bitmaps, and at what paper size?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

      The big date for "the web" really was Mosaic 1.0 in 1993 ... by chance I strated using it pretty early as someone converted the documentation for a system I was using from LaTeX to HTML and told the user group how to use it (amazing that it was quicker to get the man page for a function by sending a request to the Uiversity of Idaho than looking up in the 3 volumes of printout on my desk!) At that time I played around with editing web pages.

      Geocities came in 1994 so then *lots* of people were doing webpages 18 years before 2012.

      So looks like lyn boyden doesn't know her history ... perhaps she's ther sort of person who thinks "the web == AOL" which did start at the end of 1995.

      N.b. as for "who is Tim Berners-Lee" ... I know who he is now but for initial years of web use probably didn't - however, I did know who Marc Andreesen was.

      1. DeanT

        Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

        Argh, Geocities websites! Oh lord... the amount of spinning wordart haunts me even now!

        1. Admiral Grace Hopper

          Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

          Sadly the autoplay .midi file lives on in the highly compressed soundtrack of the ads embedded into many a webpage to this day.

          1. Martin-73 Silver badge

            Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

            Ads, on the web? Are they still a thing?

        2. David 132 Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

          <blink>Under Construction!</blink>

          Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 1.0 at 800x600!

      2. NetBlackOps

        Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

        I created my first pages in 1993, viewed with Mosaic on an Amiga.

    3. bpfh
      Trollface

      Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

      I designed my first home page in 1996-7, so in 2012 I only had 15 years experience. Sucks to be under-qualified for a job!

    4. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge

      Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

      Indeed. I built the first publically accessible website for a large corporation in either late '93 or early '94. Hand-crafted HTML on a self-compiled/ported version of, IIRC, NCSA httpd.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

      Similarly, IBM wanted the person who'd racked up enough Kubernetes project-years: 5 on one, 4 on another, three on another, with some overlap would do. People with experience from only one project need not apply.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

    6. bazza Silver badge

      Re: Why wouldn't Tim Berners-Lee have 17 years experience designing websites?

      He created the WWW in 1989 and WC3 was founded in 1994, so it's totally plausable someone has been designing websites since 1995.

      Thank goodness for that - I thought I was going mad, I was sure t'Web was older than 1995.

  3. redpawn

    It is in base 3 for obvious reasons

    Convert to base 10 and you get 5 years which is well within the realm of possibility.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: It is in base 3 for obvious reasons

      An HR droid who knows what base 3 is?

      Pull the other one. It's got bells on.

  4. Admiral Grace Hopper

    Human Remains

    We've been joking about this since the '80s. It may have been going on before that, but at that point computing was something I did for pleasure rather than financial reward so I wouldn't have noticed.No matter when a technology was announced, as soon as a job advert went out for it the starting point was always 5 years. It was ever thus and always will be. HR aren't actually people and you can't expect them to behave like people.

    1. a_yank_lurker

      Re: Human Remains

      Or it is an attempt to fraudulently hire an H-1B visa holder because they cannot find a US citizen with the required experience.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Mandatory Experience

    I raised this at one interview. It was about a year after Server 2003 was released. The job spec said '7 years server 2003 experience'.

    I questioned the HR Drone about it not being possible and what was on the original job request.

    Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

    About a year later, I was at a conference (an IBM one) and I was approached by one of the other delegates.\

    "You came and interviewed for a job in my department. What happened? HR said that you were not qualified for the job?"

    After relating my encounter with HR he got what I was saying.

    "We hired someone while I was away on holiday. Totally useless. I gave him the boot less than two weeks after I got back from holiday. Didn't have a clue. HR told me that he ticked all the boxes."

    Don't need to say anything else

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: HR told me that he ticked all the boxes

      If HR is happy with its boxes yet hires useless people, then one would imagine that HR should review its boxes.

      Unfortunately, HR not being capable of actually evaluating people for the job (whatever the job), that would just amount to changing the order of the boxes.

      1. N2

        Re: HR told me that he ticked all the boxes

        "Unfortunately, HR not being capable of actually evaluating people for the job (whatever the job)"

        Too true, HRs sole existence is to protect senior management from their own numerous cock ups.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: HR told me that he ticked all the boxes

        My latest annoyance is the psychometric testing nonsense a lot of organisations force you through as an automated screening process. A couple years back I got automatically rejected from a position I'd been asked to apply for by the person who ran the department that was hiring thanks to one of those! I seem to remember one company finding that all their best staff would have been screened out by one of the popular ones not so long ago

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: HR told me that he ticked all the boxes

          When I was applying for jobs post-University ~35 years ago a couple of companies used paper based psychometric tests. At the first there was a huge set of questions of the form "would you prefer to do a, or b, or don't know" .... as I thought a huge proportion of these comparisons were totally stupid (e.g. seem to recall something like "I would prefer to be a Bishop to a Forester" was one) so I put down copiuous number of "don't knows" which to be was an active "this question is so ridiculous I don't know how to answer it" ... however, HR thought differently and told be I was indecsive (this came after I'd already had an argument with them on another test they'd clearly transferred from their US parent which asked candidates to agree or disagree with statements on the basis of whether they were "beneficial to the state and citizens of the USA".

          At second company had another similarish test but this time was a straight a/b choice on each question. As I filled in answers on a grid I noticed some strange faint dotted lines which zigzagged through the answer boxes to what looked like spaces for totals at the right and I quickly worked out that to score it they followed these lines and counted the number of a's or b's on it. So, I kept on answering questions leaving any where I wasn't sure of the answer blank and the went back to these, trace the two lines through that box and went with the majority verdict. HR person there said my result was quite interesting as they didn't often see people with such strong opinions! I got the job there and took that as an invitation to be highly opnionated as that was clearly why they wanted me!

          1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

            Re: my result was quite interesting as they didn't often see people with such strong opinions!

            You could have said that one of your strengths was being able to analyse complex situations and be able to join up the dots.

      3. pakraticus

        Re: HR told me that he ticked all the boxes

        Our HR person catches when the written job description does not match the hiring manager's verbal justification for the role.

        And she might argue for 30 seconds.

        Then she passes it on to the poor recruiting agency because she's got three more hiring managers in line pulling the same stunt.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Mandatory Experience

      Just pleased my comment here didn't get me being called a HR Drone myself.

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Mandatory Experience

      There are two possible explanations for job adverts like this. One is that it's down to ISO9000 and the quality documents say that every skill mentioned must be specified to have at least 5 years experience and they daren't deviate from that. The other is that the job's in sales.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Mandatory Experience

        I have taken to reading the careers pages of sites I'm already on (note to employer: I'm not trying to find another job. I just like to see what they'll come out with). There was a role mentioned on one of these pages that specified that the candidate would need experience with "algebra and geometry". Weird, but they're being clear that mathematical knowledge is required. Except that they specified the specific things you needed to be able to do, including "find real roots of a parabola" and "calculate the volume of a cylinder". I have ever since been confident that, if something should go horribly wrong in my career, I can at least go over to the cylinder place and do quadratic formulas all day. It won't be interesting, but things are never hopeless.

        1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: "algebra and geometry"

          A lot of people say that the stuff they learned at school in maths is not real-worldly useful.

          Many years ago I was approached by a well-known manufacturer of lock devices to supply them with a database which allocated and documented lock combinations to customers. Some combinations were not possible due to the holes weakening the lock. Historically they worked this out by trial and [expensive] error, but a quick pre-process using a bit of Pythagoras solved their problem automatically.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: "algebra and geometry"

            "A lot of people say that the stuff they learned at school in maths is not real-worldly useful."

            I was at school well before the "New Maths" syllabus came in. Years ago I was discussing some data question with users and summed up what they needed from the database in terms which were recognisable from their much later GCSE maths.

            "Oh!"

            The sound of realisation of what that had been all about.

            OTOH I reckon that many subjects, maths included, are taught in ways that only make sense to those who instinctively think like mathematicians, latinists or whatever so I only really grasped my O Level maths by doing A level physics and my Latin is largely botanical with a smidge of medieval admin stuff.

    4. tip pc Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: Mandatory Experience

      i've been saying for years that my CV needs to be buzzwordy enough to get through the recruiter & HR and detailed enough for the eventual techie to short list me.

      My CV is ~ 3 pages and the only ones who complain are HR droids, techies like to read what i've been through, phrased that way deliberately.

      1. Franco

        Re: Mandatory Experience

        Rather depends on the role though, and who's doing the reading.

        I had a contract last year with no interview at all. Recruiter called me to say they liked my CV, when could I start? I said the following Monday, they said fine and got the PM in charge of the project to call me on the Friday. His exact words were "Your CV says you've got the skills, if you're full of shite we'll get rid of you"

        Conversely my next role was with a recruitment company. Interviewed by a techie and team lead, got the contract, but HR weren't involved and spat the dummy so it took 2 weeks of thumb twiddling before they would approve my account creation.

  6. deadlockvictim

    Job ad requirements

    It seems to me that the job ad is a wishlist of all the things they want to have, regardless of what the position actually requires. Invariably, there are 2 or 3 things on the list that are critical, but the rest is usually head-in-the-clouds thinking. If you have those, you get through to the next round, maybe.

    And since so much of the job ad is hyperbole, I work backwards. Unless the job title is as 'Kubernetes Engineer' or explicitly mentions that, 'You will be responsible for..', I treat a requirement of 9 years' experience in kubernetes as 'I have worked with it'.

    But then the purpose of the CV is to get past HR and has to be designed that way.

    And then there is this strange obsession with degrees. We're not paying what a graduate in Computer Science would earn elsewhere, we are using Microsoft technologies which you know about theoretically and you will be more knowledgeable and qualified than your boss and the board of management, but you will still have to follow their rules, regardless of whether it is the best way to do the thing, or regardless of whether it can be done well in the timeframe they have given you. We want to be able to say that our technical staff are CS graduates.

    1. Dabooka

      Re: Job ad requirements

      At our place it's linked to the post's salary too; to draw down at a certian level you have to be qualified to a certain level. Granted I work in a different sector but we do employ a variety of IT roles at various levels.

      I don't agree with it, I've seen some great potential managers capped because they're 'too old' to bother with a degree. It's just the way it works with unions and I suspect an historical decison put in place to block a certain progression or two.

      Oh, and we always wait for the second or third revision of a job ad, the first one is recalled in 95% of cases.

    2. Sam not the Viking Silver badge

      Re: Job ad requirements

      Then there is the 'Napoleon' school of selection, where talent is trumped by luck.

      All applications are placed in a random pile which is then thrown in the air. A single application is selected from the melee.

      You must employ that person, they are lucky.

      I've come across a lot of employees who have been selected by worse methods.

      1. John Robson Silver badge

        Re: Job ad requirements

        At least you can't be accused of discrimination...

        1. Bitsminer Silver badge

          Re: Job ad requirements

          Gravitational discrimination!

          1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge
            Joke

            Re: Job ad requirements

            If floating in air is the qualification then you will end up hiring some aerosol

    3. Sanguma

      Re: Job ad requirements

      Are they asking for thermometers? Thermometers are graduated in degrees without needing any brains ...

    4. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

      Re: Job ad requirements

      And then there is this strange obsession with degrees

      It's not just degrees - any type of "qualification". All that these qualifications mean is that you've passed the exam: Not that you can do the job. Sure, the qualification can be a useful steer as to whether they have some background in an area, but it shouldn't be a deal-breaker.

      Some places I've worked at use the phrase "degree or equivalent experience" which is much better.

      1. sqlrob

        Re: Job ad requirements

        When interviewing, I've actually considered the tech qualification tests as a negative. Passing a test doesn't mean understanding, and there were enough bad practices and/or outright mistakes enshrined in these tests to be an issue.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Job ad requirements

        Some of the best people I've ever worked with had no qualifications. Some of the worst had qualifications our their ears.

      3. Martin-73 Silver badge

        Re: Job ad requirements

        The same idiocy exists in my chosen profession, electrician. Here in the UK, the old apprenticeship system went out the window a while ago. Now it's 'have you passed a 3 day course in this, that and the other...' Even C&G2391 is dumbed down to a box ticking exercise.

        The guy who taught me the tools back in the eighties was due for retirement... he often cringed when the manager would yell at me for not doing well enough in college because 'you'll never be an electrician without these qualifications'. He hadn't taken a college course, and he was bright enough to see that I wouldn't have to either, and that EXPERIENCE is what counts in that field.

        Fortunately we don't tend to have the issue with HR that IT bods seem to... most contracting companies will hire based on experience without any jobsworth involved.

  7. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
    Facepalm

    At our place they started centralising and standardising the production of job descriptions & adverts and I supported the idea of standardising the recruitment process. A short while later one of our administrators moved to another part of the department. HR's new process got on with doing the job adverts, etc and finally presented us with a shortlist of candidates we were going to interview.

    Reading the CVs it became clear that HR didn't have a clue what the original person did. They'd shortlisted systems administrators whereas we desperately needed an office administrator (ordering, billing, stock control, etc)

  8. PerlyKing
    Happy

    Concurrency

    This must be one of those "must have lots of experience in concurrency" situations :-)

    1. slimshady76
      Boffin

      Re: Concurrency

      Maybe they're lookig for people with multiple personalities. If all of them are technologically inclined, the candidate could double (or maybe triple!) the experience gained in the same time lapse...

      Icon beacuse it's in the job requirements.

  9. Dave K

    I remember once seeing an advert that requested a minimum of "5 years experience with Windows 95".

    This was in 1998...

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Gaining 5 years experience in just 3 years? It just feels that way sometimes. Probably works out about right, when you take all the overtime into account anyway.

    2. jake Silver badge

      I had 5 years experience with Win95 in 1998. Well, to be precise, I had access to the thing that became Win95 way back in '93 ...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Sure you did. Zzzzzz

        1. Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?

          Woohoo! Payoff!

          1. Kane
            Thumb Up

            Excellent!

          2. Antonius_Prime

            Do you need a towel? :D

            1. Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?
              Thumb Up

              Do you need a towel?

              I'll have you know that I'm the type of hoopy frood who knows exactly where his towel is

      2. bpfh
        Boffin

        Totally possible

        When did the first screenshots of "The OS Previously Known As Chicago" start coming out? 1992-1993?

        1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

          Re: Totally possible

          Wikipedia: "Chicago is a 1926 play written by Maurine Dallas Watkins that is best known as the inspiration for the 1975 Broadway musical of the same name. The play is a satire and was based on two unrelated 1924 court cases involving two women, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, who were both suspected and later acquitted of murder, whom Watkins had covered for the Chicago Tribune as a reporter."

          And they got away with it again! :-)

      3. Stoneshop

        I had access to the thing that became Win95 way back in '93 ...

        My condolences.

      4. NightFox

        Well I had access to a Commodore PET 2001 way back in 1977.

      5. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

        I expect it counts if you started on Windows 90* and upgraded when appropriate.

        *So to speak.

  10. Joe Montana

    Windows 2000

    I recall jobs asking for 5 years Windows 2000 experience, in 2000/2001... This is even more stupid, since the very name "Windows 2000" gives a clue as to how old it is...

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Windows 2000

      The first "official" beta of what would become Win2K was released in '97 ... Some of us had even earlier access to Redmond's initial musings, so 5 years "Win2K experience" was in fact possible in 2001.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Windows 2000

        Yes, you've already said you had access to early builds of Windows.

        Couching it in "some of us" just comes across as elitist and smug (no surprise with a Jake post!) but it's obviously not elite to be working on Windows :)

        1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

          Re: Elitist

          If someone wants to learn something I am good at I am happy to help. For some reason this makes me an elitist. (Should I be less selective in those a choose to help and include people telling me firk off and leave them be because they are not interested?)

          I do come across people who claim a skill but take every opportunity not to share it. You are welcome to call such a person elitist but please consider "hopelessly incompetent and terrified of being found out" instead.

          Indiscriminate use of 'elitist' smells of the anti-intellectualism often used to keep people away from 'elitist' medical doctors so they will buy Miracle Mineral Supplement (industrial bleach) instead.

          1. Martin-73 Silver badge

            Re: Elitist

            Oh don't, I had (note past tense) a friend who was into that crap.

        2. bpfh

          Re: Windows 2000

          Quite a lot of people had access to the beta's coming out of Microsoft at that time. All you had to do was ask nicely and be persistant, or make friends with someone in a large company and discover the panacea of MSDN, with huge binders and regular new CD drops with all sorts of goodies old to new, from Microsoft Assembler to the first "public" betas of almost anything...

          1. nematoad
            Unhappy

            Re: Windows 2000

            "Quite a lot of people had access to the beta's coming out of Microsoft at that time. "

            From what I can see of Microsoft's attempt at a rolling release they still are.

          2. Sanguma

            Re: Windows 2000

            You know, if you point that out to an HR Droid, you'll come across as significantly more aware of the situation than the HR Droid is, and the HR Droid will understandably feel threatened, and you won't get the job. Any hint that you can call their bluff and they'll send you out the door and themselves back to the factory for recalibration.

      2. Piro Silver badge

        Re: Windows 2000

        Don't be like that. You know it's not reasonable.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Windows 2000

        Once again Jake is downvoted into oblivion and with good cause.

        1. Alister

          Re: Windows 2000

          Would you like to share with us your reason for so much hatred? Or maybe you should just grow up?

      4. tip pc Silver badge

        Re: Windows 2000

        i wouldn't class using a beta as having experience of the actual publicly available product.

        lots of changes happen from early beta to shipping product.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Windows 2000

          "shipping product."

          Spot the typo.

        2. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: Windows 2000

          If you start with a Beta and continue to develop ( any sense of the word) in the release version, then that's seriously useful experience.

        3. jake Silver badge

          Re: Windows 2000

          "i wouldn't class using a beta as having experience of the actual publicly available product."

          However, watching a product move from internal to pilot to Alpha into Beta and finally start shipping gives a rather large leg-up on people who wait until it is available in a shrink-wrapped box in a shop on your local high street.

    2. Anon

      Re: Windows 2000

      Ah, how quickly people forget about Project AIRhead 2000...

    3. x 7

      Re: Windows 2000

      came out in 1999 from memory...........with preview releases earlier?

  11. TRT Silver badge

    HR droids...

    During a restructuring when my role was under threat, I went for an interview for a more senior role that fitted me perfectly with one tiny snag. The head of HR who did the interview said that I ticked all the boxes except one... they were looking for someone with experience of SQL. I hadn't got this, because my 15 years of database experience were all obtained on three other platforms that were quite common at the time.

    Anyway, I left that organisation... I wasn't going to take a £10k drop to a first-line support role which they said was all they could offer me, not after managing my own team for 5 years and with a further 10 years experience in R&D, and so I got a job on the South Bank. That interview was an eyeopener - they did some weird aptitude test which included an hour long paper in pseudocode. No warning about it beyond "allow three hours for your interview".

    About 6 months into that job, I bumped into the former head of HR in a tube station nearby, she also had been restructured out of the organisation and was now working for City Hall on a temp contract.

    "How are you? Did you find something?"

    "Yes", I replied, truthfully, " at an organisation headquartered near here. I'm managing their SQL databases."

    1. Phil W

      Re: HR droids...

      Did the exam have a grading criteria I wonder?

      A 3 hour long paper of pseudocode would be incredibly tedious to read as well as write, and given the lack of any formal standard for pseudocode the resulting papers turned in would be hard to compare.

      1. TRT Silver badge

        Re: HR droids...

        Only an hour for the pseudocode. And they gave a kind of cut down developer manual for the language on a separate reference sheet - just a load of stuff about syntax and a function description - this is how you assign a variable, this is how you form a loop, this is how you branch some code, these are the comparators used in the language, this is how you manipulate a string, this is how you write something to an interactive user, this is how you get an input from an interactive user, this is how you read a file from disk - that kind of thing.

        Another hour was taken up with some kind of test to measure IT exposure and consisted of lots of questions like "A user presents an issue with a Windows PC that refuses to boot - describe the fault finding process you would use to assess their complaint", "In developing some code, the following error is returned on execution - describe how you would locate and fix this" and "Which acronym describes the general form of user interface which comprises, for example, an on-screen arrow controlled by a mouse or trackpad? - Multiple guess answer". And there was also a practical test, involving identifying a variety of components. Another hour was taken up with a panel interview and a tour of the tin and of the offices with a chance to meet the meat.

      2. JacobZ
        Joke

        Pseudocode Re: HR droids...

        By coincidence, I'm currently working on a pseudocompiler for pseudocode

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Pseudocode HR droids...

          I did this in the 80's

          My Pseudo Echo was so good that I didn't bother with the rest.

    2. Boothy

      Re: HR droids...

      Similar to when I moved into IT around 1998 (I was an electronics engineer before then).

      I'd been asked to travel to a conference centre in Leeds for the day, where an IT agency was trying to recruit people from outside of IT. There was around a 100 applicants there that day, who were split into two groups. We were not told in advance what was going to be expected.

      The day consisted of a presentation, then two exams. One was basically a multiple choice IQ type test, the other was a pseudocode test. The IQ test was time boxed to one hour in the morning before lunch, whereas you had up to three hours for the pseudocode test, which started at 13:00 after lunch.

      For background, whilst I wasn't really a 'programmer', as part of one of my electronics engineering courses around 6 years earlier, I'd taken an optional module on machine code programming for control systems, plus I'd also messed around with machine code/assembly on a Sinclair Spectrum as a teenager, so pseudocode wasn't exactly taxing!

      PS: I got the job.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: HR droids...

        It was a bit simpler long ago. In the 70s I was called into the boss+1's office, and he said "Do you know anything about compilers?". So I said, "Well, I watched an Open University programme about it a while back". So I joined the compiler team, having done mostly hardware stuff previously with a bit of software dabbling. I think that one move really set my career on the right path.

        1. Mog_X

          Re: HR droids...

          When I was working as a student at a well-known (orange) UK supermarket in the early 80s, the manager saw me coming back into the store after lunch with a computer magazine for the VIC-20.

          "Do you know about computers then? Do you want to run the System 25 on Saturdays?"

          That's the point when I realised that IT was a lot less physical effort than stocking shelves.

          1. Martin-73 Silver badge

            Re: HR droids...

            And a lot more rewarding. I do wonder with all the huge specialization what the world is gonna look like in 20 more years.

            Assuming Godzilla doesn't turn up with rabies in september (september is the best month for horrors, natch)

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: HR droids...

        "two exams. One was basically a multiple choice IQ type test, the other was a pseudocode test."

        I may have mentioned before going for an interview with an agency which had two multiple choice tests.

        The first was the sort of questions that I originally encountered at 11+. The guy came back slightly bemused asking "Have you been practising taking IQ tests?" and said I'd only got one wrong. I was bemused that I'd got one wrong. It was a time when my son was coming up to his 11+.

        The other was a more general psychological test. I realise that these tests can't be separated from environment. A question such as "Do you sometimes have feelings of panic"?" in a pleasant office in Cambridge has a different significance when the candidate is in a job that sometimes requires an armed escort.

    3. da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709
      Facepalm

      Re: HR droids...

      I think I interviewed with that company after finishing my Comp Science degree in Edinburgh. As I'd been writing lots of assembler for Z80, 65C02 and M68000 I mistakenly used MUL for multiply instead of the pseudo-code mnemonic which I now forget - it was maybe MLT. Do a replace of all the MULs with their thing and I would have achieved a near perfect score. They failed me, I reckon, as I didn't get past that interview.

      Lucky escape IMHO.

  12. Julian Bradfield

    Age discrimination

    According to my recently completed Equality training, job ads requiring N years' experience in something are generally illegal, because they amount to discriminating against younger candidates without any objective reason - candidate A might have spent 10 years mucking around 5% of the time with application X, while candidate B might have spent one year working full time with it. A job spec should list the competencies required.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Age discrimination

      I suppose you could have explained to the trainer that the only people in the entire universe who haven't known this all along are people who work in HR. But I suppose that might have been discrimination against people who work in HR.

      1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

        Re: Age discrimination

        It is discrimination, but not against people, only against non-people.

    2. Phil W

      Re: Age discrimination

      Not to mention experience does not equal capability, 10 years experience of being shit at something is not better than 2 years experiencing of doing a good job.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Getting 12 years experience...

    ...on a technology only six years old is just a case of working double-shifts for six years.

  14. Giles C Silver badge

    A lot of adverts are more like fiction

    Having been out of work due to a contract ending there have been some really awful adverts I replied to.

    One was a Cisco network engineer, when I got to an interview I was asked about juniper experience (not really my area), I didn’t get the job because of lack of juniper knowledge. I asked why the advert stated Cisco answer, because it is easier to find Cisco qualified people. That was 2 months ago and it is still being advertised.

    Also contract jobs where the scope jumps around (6 month contract becomes 2), locations that are really strange, one was advertised as north west, Scotland. (Turned out to be Manchester) not one of the islands.

    Also job specs which reads like someone has picked up the list of topics from an exam outline, or wants huge amounts of experience and to pay £30k a year.

    And that is the ones I can recall without going through my records...

    1. calmeilles
      Joke

      Re: A lot of adverts are more like fiction

      So are a lot of applications.

  15. Halfmad

    My twin and I

    will be applying jointly as we have 6 years experience each. It would be a joy to work as one of the highly valued staff at IBM.. haahaaha

  16. eldakka
    Coat

    Ah, but if a 'years' worth of experience == 1 work-year of 40 hour weeks, then maybe they are after workaholics who did 80 hours/week on Kubernetes - working 2 jobs, or lots of overtime on one job, or working 1 job and self-studying/tinkering at home for another 40 hours/week - making it 12 work-years.

  17. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    It's 1997 and XML will surely replace software

    There are also those jobs where it says, "Must have XX years experience in XML, DTD, XSLT, and XPath". This fills me with terror, thinking of what they might be doing in XML that needs so many years of experience.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: It's 1997 and XML will surely replace software

      It takes XX years to work through the Michael Kaye books.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's 1997 and XML will surely replace software

        Michael Kay is a good bloke, and the things he can achieve with XSL are massively impressive - gave me a appreciation for the power and subtlety of XSL that I had not previously realised: Anon as worked in same office as him for a while (though my role was not very XSL heavy - I'm definitely not an XSL expert but gained a good understanding of stuff you can do with it that I never realised were possible - always a great experience seeing the brilliant stuff a real expert in an area can achieve )

    2. coderguy

      Re: It's 1997 and XML will surely replace software

      "XSLT"

      There's your problem. I sincerely hope that I never have to work with that before I shuffle off this mortal plane. /shudder

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I remember to have seen the requirement for 5+ years experience in C#/.NET

    In 2003...

    I guess they just recycled some Visual Basic job placements with Find/Replace....

  19. TobyD

    When I worked for a big multinational during the 2010’s, we were told we couldn’t put things like that in job adverts because of age discrimination - you can’t be 20 and have 12+ years of professional experience of doing something, but you may be fully capable of doing the role. What was important was the demonstrable ability to do what the job needed, not how many years you’d spent staring out of the window accumulating “experience”.

    Was my employer over-cautious about employment law, or has something changed in the past 5 years?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      >>you can’t be 20 and have 12+ years of professional experience of doing something

      Someone will come in now to say they used Windows before it was even released so yes you can they used it when they were 8 and also IR35

      1. Spiz

        /me waits for jake to repeat his comments above...

      2. My-Handle

        Still hiding behind the AC logo, I see. Funny thing, but there's just something about your posts that identifies you rather well.

        FYI, jake had full access to Windows 7 from 1982 onwards. AManFromMars1 supplied him with a copy, and god only knows where he got it from...

        1. Sandtitz Silver badge
          Trollface

          "FYI, jake had full access to Windows 7 from 1982 onwards. AManFromMars1 supplied him with a copy, and god only knows where he got it from..."

          Matt Bryant gave it away because Win7 didn't play well with Itaniums.

        2. Sanguma

          s/from 1982 onwards/from 1882 onwards/g

          There FTFY

  20. macjules
    Facepalm

    Very much a "Doh!" moment -->

    Last year IBM Interactive were advertising for a ReactNative developer vacancy, with at least 10 years experience requirement. Which presumably was very hard to fill since ReactNative has only been around for about 5 years.

  21. SotarrTheWizard

    I've seen worse. . .

    . . . like the requirement for 6+ years experience with Windows 2000 Server. . . .in 2001, roughly 18 months after it went RTM. . .

    Then again, I've long since given up on HR Staff having IQs above room temperature. . . . in Centigrade. . .

    1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

      Re: I've seen worse. . .

      Then again, I've long since given up on HR Staff having IQs above room temperature. . . . in Centigrade. . .

      Try it with shoe size ... using the American system.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    new El Reg category

    Please, El Reg, create a new dedicated category for those. So many of them I've seen.

    I was once on a contract in an Arabic state, where apparently, having a 11 pages CV was all the rage, with 10 years experience. That bad. I had to hire someone, there and was completely shocked.

    The thing was to tick every buzz word in you CV, every single language known to mankind, every technology, every vendor, every freaking legacy OS, current ones ...

    It was ridiculous. I'm sure I can post some ridiculous CV, here ...

  23. theOtherJT Silver badge

    Familiar....

    I ended up being rejected for the post of Senior sysadmin, twice, while applying for it from within the same organization. HR wanted someone with prior experience in a "senior" position and since my current title was only "Sysadmin" this meant I wasn't qualified.

    The fact that I had been doing the job for nearly 2 years since we didn't currently _have_ a senior sysadmin apparently didn't matter because that didn't fit any of the check boxes on the "blind scoring" form they were supposed to use to prevent favoritism.

    After 2 failed attempts to recruit a new person, they finally just changed my title and hired a new junior instead.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HR job listings v actual job listings..

    There are two types of jobs listings: those written by the hiring managers; and those written by HR. The first are real jobs and worth perusing if you have very solid technical experience. The second rarely are. Or rather will are very unlikely to turn in a any kind of real job lead if you have a serious heavy duty resume. They are purely box ticking exercises and will go to junior level box ticking types with little or no serious experience. Because HR are driving the process, not the hiring manager. So a waste of time pursuing for people with serious experience because HR never ever has a clue about any of this stuff. Thats why they are in HR and not in marketing. Where the slightly more competent people can be found.

    1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

      Re: HR job listings v actual job listings..

      Where the slightly more competent less incompetent people can be found.

      FTFY.

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: HR job listings v actual job listings..

      There's a third type - those written by agencies trawling for warm bodies to try to sell to potential clients who aren't even looking to recruit anyone.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Funny.

    I can't fscking find any alleged "SME" in IBM with more than 2 years experience in anything. If that. On the extremely rare occasion I *can* actually find someone to talk to that knows what they are on about, they are so overloaded it takes them a while to respond.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    I am an expert in objects, methods, variables and constants.

    I truly doubt many other so-called "experts" reading this could match my skills.

  27. GKirkwood

    When the Internet would fit on one page

    I was an IT Manager in the early 90s, and I remember Computer Weekly providing a free poster in the post one day. This was a map of the Internet - it all fit on a single sheet, and we had it on the wall in the IT department. We could see every router and server on the one page !

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: When the Internet would fit on one page

      I wonder if it had our gateway router on. I think we had a link to UCL(?) and they had a 64k satellite link to Falls Church. Behind that sat our class B flat network, until they decided to subnet it into class Cs one weekend - the very weekend we were doing a critical software release...

      Luckily the subnetting went fine, as the class B address allocation had been done intelligently, and so did our software release.

  28. gerardrg

    In the U.S. when hiring for a position you have to consider Americans first before hiring an H-1B foreign employee. The H-1Bs are at the mercy of their employers because if they quit they have to leave the country. They are perfect employees. What companies do is advertise for a position in which there is no qualified American candidate as this will allow them to bring in someone else. No American can qualify for 12 years of Kubernetes experience so the U.S. company brings in an H-1B employee. If any American were to come in to interview for the position companies can always fall back on “cultural fit” to eliminate them. Who could possibly be a “cultural fit” at their company if they lie about their qualifications.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Knowledge of Hindi will be considered an advantage." Or Mandarin, or...

      Or, within the UK, "Priority will be given to those candidates with some knowledge of Welsh."

      Aren't there programmes within the US which give an advantage to companies owned by military veterans?

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        "Priority will be given to those candidates with some knowledge of Welsh."

        Or knowledge of Irish in the RI.

  29. EBG

    simple

    They wanted someone who had been working 80 hour weeks.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    12 years’ experience with Kubernetes.

    Yeah but if I have four containers running for three years I have twelve years amirite?

  31. Noonoot

    Experience but for peanuts

    Nowadays HR and their companies are just looking for people who know everything, so they can avoid having to hire 2 extra people. Yet when you see what they're offering, you just want to laugh at them.

  32. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Linux

    My last job had old school recruiting.

    Simple advert stating what the job was. Interview was with one of the engineers. Presented with a questionnaire with about 30 different situations to answer fairly briefly ranging from Electrical safety, to PLC programming. A couple of days later I got a call inviting me to have a chat with the boss. After about 10 minutes of quite unrelated chat, he said "By the way you've got the job. See you tomorrow."

    The only reason I left (18 years later) was because I retired!

  33. lglethal Silver badge

    Back when I first moved to the UK fresh out of uni (2005 I think it was). I looked into seeing what jobs the F1 teams had available (being a mechanical engineer I thought I'd made sense). Jordan were advertising for a Junior CFD Analyst. Must have 10 years experience with CFD.

    Sorry, but if I've got 10 years experience in something I'm certainly not going to consider myself a junior in that topic!

  34. Robert Grant

    That TB-L Tweet was a bit off

    The best response to it was here: https://twitter.com/ScrawlsOfSteve/status/1282346718378504193

    "This is the type of employer you don't want."

  35. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Perfect Employee

    The perfect Employee

    18 years old.

    20 years experience.

    Minimum Wage.

  36. Blackjack Silver badge

    Maybe someone who did double shift?

    If you have a ten hour workday instead of five or six it counts as double, right?

  37. rcxb Silver badge

    Likely explanation: H1-B via fraud

    In order to get an H1-B visa and bring in a foreign worker, you first have to prove there are no qualified applicants in the USA. This is done by job-listing fraud. "Accidentally" post the job in the wrong geographic area, inflate the years of experience to ridiculous levels, require unnecessary levels of education (entry-level code monkey with a Ph.D) include typos that make it impossible for anyone to get through the HR keyword matching filtering, etc.

    So, it's very likely IBM has an India devops engineer they want to bring over. No surprise, as IBM has a huge presence in India.

  38. This post has been deleted by its author

  39. Scene it all

    Maybe it is like that Dilbert cartoon where the boss wants 160 hours per week of effort. He says he expects the applicant to work nights and weekends, and maybe other family members can help out too.

  40. nxnwest

    Just Not Possible

    Like when the cast of "American Pickers" came to do a local show with a "blooper" reel for the audience. How can you have "mistakes" on a "reality" show? Everything is real, right? A real "reality" show will only have single takes. Or it is not reality. Maybe we should call them alternate reality shows.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Just Not Possible

      It was the heavily scripted, massively over-produced so-called "reality" TV that finally pushed me into ignoring DearOldTelly.

  41. Revelation_Now

    I don't understand that last quote from Lynn Boyden about her candidate not knowing who Tim Berners-Lee is. I wouldn't necessarily expect all web developers to know that - you don't have to be into the history of computing to be a web dev. Honestly, just because you work with HTML doesn't mean you need to know about the guy who created it.

    But the thing that really interested me was that she then dismisses the candidate's experience implying that he had more experience than the Internet had been around for. The applicant had stated that he had experience with web development since 1995. But Tim Berners-Lee introduced the Internet in 1990. Clearly Lynn Boyden needs to read up on Internet history before being presented as any authority on whether web candidates are qualified. And, hopefully the editors at the Register also understand how profoundly misleading it is to include false statements in an article with correctly addressing the error.

    1. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      Tim Berners-Lee did not introduce the Internet.

      That was Al Gore ITYF. ;-)

    2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

      I was born in January 1969, so I have been around for nine months longer than the internet. ;)

  42. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    Wot's an absent time travel?

  43. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Calculating commissions

    My own job requirement has a section on financial knowledge, including calculating discounts and commissions. HR added it. Everyone has it. Very few of the people at our site actually handle money, and none handle discounts or commissions.

  44. TomPhan

    Does overtime count?

    If you're claiming a 60 hour week, rather than 40, then you get your five years experience in only three and a bit.

  45. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    Unhappy

    I gave

    up my dream of IT work after job ads such as

    'must have 2 yrs+ experience in C# ' ... which was a bit difficult as it had only been out 9 months(maybe they wanted to hire the guys who created it)

    But the real kick in the balls was

    "IT junior admin needed for the local council (basically a PFY) ideal for A level grad or someone looking to change careers" bingo lets apply

    "Must be a keen learner" Yupp Open university undergrad here

    "Must be know about computers" well dur

    "IT qualification" well a diploma from the OU counts .. right?

    "Must have 5 yrs previous experience adminning the council's IT infrastructure" YOU ****ING WHAT! well if they have 5 yrs previous , they aint gonna be a junior, and if they just got their A levels, then they started working on the councils computers aged 13......

    Just a job spec written for an internal promotion/job change for a useless twonk that they had to advertise and ensure only the internal candidate got the job......

  46. Joni Kahara
    Meh

    Copypaste-it

    I don't necessarily mean they should hire a copywriter for these, but the whole thing looks like it was copypasted together from fragments gathered from multiple sources, by someone with little or no understanding what any of this means. Would be nice to at least put the finished product for an approval round so that the people who provided the requirements could give feedback before it's published. But maybe that's not how their "process" works.

  47. TGilheany

    I once interviewed for a job requiring 5 years of experience with a particular technology.

    I had previously rolled out one of the very first commercial systems with this technology to the telecom sector 4 years prior.

    Hiring company insisted on 5 years experience, as they wanted to roll out to telecom and government sector

    (which I also had extensive experience with).

    My recruiter was incredulous that they kept insisting on 5 years of experience.

    My take was that they were EITHER going to take over a year to find someone (at which point a handful of my colleagues would have 5 years' experience),

    OR they were going to hire someone who LIED on their resume, and managed to somehow not get caught.

    I never did find out which of the two paths they wound up taking...

  48. BPontius

    Dog years?

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