[TriLUG] Have A Job ( Forwarded )

William Sutton via TriLUG trilug at trilug.org
Wed Feb 8 18:03:22 EST 2017


some nit picking (ranting??), below...

William Sutton

On Wed, 8 Feb 2017, Brian McCullough via TriLUG wrote:

> Forwarding for a friend:
>
>
> He is looking for a PHP-knowledgeable programmer, as follows:

--snip--

> Salary is MAX $70K.

--snip--

> Education and Experience
> 3 -5 years of combined experience in web based software development and
> data warehousing and Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or
> related field.

--snip--

> SUMMARY
> Responsible for the software application development and maintenance in
> a horizontally and vertically scaled environment. The Software Developer
> will develop effective information technology capabilities by developing
> processes and systems that increase productivity and efficiency.  High
> levels of knowledge and experience in open source and commercial
> products in the area of content management systems (CMS), customer
> relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and
> other solutions in a virtualization and cloud computing environment.

Oh glory.  HR-ese.  And they expect a 3-5 year junior developer to be able 
to do all that?

>
> QUALIFICATION AND COMPETENCIES
> Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or Information Technology
> related field, or equivalent, from an accredited college or university;
> AND 3 - 5 years of combined experience in application development

second time that was mentioned....

> related to CRM, CMS, and ERP solutions in an open source environment.
> Experience developing in PHP.
> Experience using AJAX, JQuery, JSON, CSS and HTML.
> Experience using RESTful web services.
> Experience developing with Microsoft SQL and MySQL.
> Experience in UI development.
> Expose to SharePoint.
> Expose to Microsoft .NET framework, C#, ASP, VB.
>

3-5 years of experience but HR threw in a buffet list of web, UNIX, and 
Windows technologies.

I guess they want a Rock Star (TM) and a few other things?

--

Some of my personal pet peeves about job descriptions and requirements 
lists is that
1. the descriptions tend to be written in HR-ese or management-ese.  If I 
have to translate between that and reasonably clear English, I probably 
don't want to bother with the job (not that I do PHP anyway).
2. the requirements sometimes bear little internal cohesion.  3-5 years of 
experience, but a skill set had by someone with closer to 10 years?  In 
particular, it often appears that HR (or recruiter) job descriptions 
evolve as a result of "This is the last requirements set we put out. 
Let's add a couple more technologies and see if someone bites."  And then 
you end up with the above, or (worse), 10 years experience with Oracle, 
SQL Server, Windows administration for XP through 2012, Linux 
administration on RHEL, knows Perl, Python, PHP, XML, J2EE, Agile, <longer 
list of buzzwords added here>, and will only work for $80k/yr.

Chances are that the extensive list of requirements is going to scare off 
the alleged target audience (developers with 3-5 years of experience) 
(because they have some, but not nearly all of the required skills) and 
get bit-bucketed by the more senior folks (I got 15 years and want $85k). 
So the folks you do get will be
1. ridiculously amazing for the specified parameters (very unlikely, I 
think)
2. puffing or fibbing on something and hoping it doesn't get noticed
3. desparate

but that's just my $0.02 from floating around the IT industry for going on 
20 years.


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