IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – it is six years old | Hacker News Reader

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – it is six years old

theregister.com

67 pointsivalm41 comments

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Previously discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23810519

I missed it! I don't think I can delete my submission but if moderator wants to that would be totally good.

Perhaps there’s 2 ways of thinking about it.

Critic: One year working with Kubernetes just feels like 12 years of stress.

Fan: One year working with Kubernetes gives me 12 years of productivity.

Could be at least one valid reason: They put high number of years to make people feel inadequacy about their experience level to make it easier to low ball them. Of course it doesn't work in this case now that EVERYONE is memeing it, but it might have been the original intention.

Or maybe they just recycled an old openstack job posting and didn’t clean it up properly.

yea, its more likely that someone didn't watch what they were doing.

Hardly counts a valid reason now, does it?

from the perspective of an employee it might not. If your goal is to get the best people at the cheapest prices it's logic to do things that will make them accept lower salary (ideally you do it without making a meme, but eh, can't win um all I guess)

This reminds me of Chris Lattner's tweet saying he was the only one with 7 years (at the time) of Swift experience.

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877353276676612102

Let's say that Kubernetes is 15 years old - just for the discussion.

Why did they land on the number 12? How much difference does 12 years yield, compared to 10? or 8?

When I see these somewhat arbitrary large numbers of years, I can't help but think that the laws of diminishing returns start to kick in.

Maybe instead of years, they should look at the actual work and experience people have done. Instead, use seniority levels.

It's the fault of the "Outliers" book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

The argument was that all you needed to become an expert was 10,000 hours. It's since been debunked, though, but HR is a little behind in... EVERY EFFING RELEVANT THING

Since there are 2080 work-hours in a year (40 hours/week * 52 weeks/year) wouldn't that translate to roughly 5 years experience? But yeah, agree on HR.

I'm guessing 12 years is intended as a proxy for a seniority level.

They should just write "a dozen". I have a dozen years of experience with this and that ...

Clearly they want someone who has been working with Kubernetes for 80 hours a week

The jab ad for anyone that wants the link

https://intellijobs.ai/job/IBMCloud-Native-Infrastructure-En...

My own opinion, but software APIs change over the years, experience from 8 years ago may not be relevant for a product with the same name.

Wait a second...

"We interviewed a 28yo designer in 2012 who told us he had 17 years experience designing websites. I said, “Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t have 17 years experience designing websites.”

“Who’s Tim Berners-Lee?” he asked."

2012 - 17 = 1995. I was making websites, or at least pages, in 1995 and I didn't invent the WWW.

Is this intentional irony? If not, it's really depressing.

Good point. Tim Berners-Lee apparently put the first WWW page up by Christmas 1990, and Mosaic was released 1993.

Here's the web from 1992...

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Circa 1993, I was "browsing the web" on Lynx (IIRC) via dialing the local public library. That was, however, before I had created any web pages. And before I had any graphical browser running on my own computer.

I think I still have a physical book claiming to be a complete listing of the Internet from that era, when the WWW existed, but was a rather small portion of a 2-3 inch thick directory.

But it was still considerably more than one CERN site.

Ah yes, the Internet Yellow Pages by Harley Hahn. Literally thousands of sites catalogued for your browsing pleasure.

No, it was "THE INTERNET DIRECTORY" by Eric Braun. From 1994.

Mea culpa, it seems like the World Wide Web section was a list of public clients and I don't see a listing of websites. However, it did attempt to list most other resources on the internet.

"The guide with the MOST COMPLETE LISTINGS for:

1500+ Internet and Bitnet Mailing Lists

2700+ Usenet Newsgroups

1000+ Online Library Catalogs (OPACs)

100+ Anonymous FTP Archives and Archie Servers

300+ Gopher Servers

Wide Area Information Servers

World Wide Web

E-text Archives and Resources Project Gutenberg, CETH, OTA, etc.

250+ Electronic Journals

And more!

Getting access to the Internet

Finding resources on the Internet

Reaching other networks on the Internet

ALL ADDRESSES FULLY VERIFIED!"

But if you had been designing web pages since 1995 and still didn't know who Tim Berners-Lee is, then maybe it makes you look un-observant.

I was questioned by HR hiring manager for not having "enough" experience in K8s. That company was IBM.

This is a well known phenomenon in Canada at least.

They write impossible job specs on purpose so that they can turn around and claim there is no suitable talent in North America, and then outsource the work to India/bring in temporary foreign workers at pennies to the dollar.

Right now I finishing my MSc studies in Canada and I am at job hunt with pretty solid background.

It is unbelievable. It seems all the ads are literally lie. Nobody answers any email. Nobody even invites to any interview. I am starting to think all the ads are lie to import foreign workers.

P.S. I don’t know why my parent comments got negative vote. But I totally would vouch for his/her estimation.

Judging from your post, your English grammar could use some improvement. It's possible you're experiencing discrimination for that reason. Have your resume and cover letter edited by a fluent/native English speaker, and you may see increased response rates.

Your point about grammar is correct. But you have to take to the account I am not going to proof read a comment. I just don’t have that much time. But I totally get your point. When I am applying to job I at my best.

>It seems all the ads are literally lie.

As someone who's been in tech for over 20 years, let me explain. There are many reasons why job ads get posted, and not all of them involve the existence of an actual job that a hiring manager is trying to fill. In some cases, it's just a staffing agency trying to build a resume database. In other cases, it's HR conducting market research on compensation levels and talent depth in a particular geography. Sometimes, as has already been noted, it's to fulfill a legal prerequisite to bringing in visa holders. After awhile, you sort of learn to spot the fake postings.

Thanks for your thorough explanation. Can you point to me what should I look at when I want to spot an actual job from fake one?

No no, the problem is that you're a lazy entitled millennial of course.

Maybe you are right. But I don’t want to admit it. But I would not call someone with two publications in MICRO and a lot of coding experience (with demonstrably coding skills) and MSc from top tier cs school in Canada a lazy millennial.

(I was of course being sarcastic and making a joke, in case it wasn't obvious)

If you can't find anyone in North America with skill set X, so you bring in foreign talent, shouldn't the foreign talent have to have skill set X? I mean, to take it absurdly far, I can't find Kubernetes programmers, so I get a visa to bring in a foreigner, and I bring in a janitor? That sounds like a serious loophole in the rules.

AIUI, there’s two separate things happening here. You can ask for “X”, with an inability to find “X” leading to permission to sponsor. But there’s also nothing saying that your visa candidate actually has to have “X”. If they have “X/2”, then they only need to pay the prevailing wage for “X/2”.

Or, to ctrl c/v from Wikipedia, the former is the labor certification and the latter is the labor condition application (LCA). In the US, your employer is required to post LCAs in a public location at the job site. It’s always a good idea to watch those, especially if you’ve been in your position for a while. This is the amount of money you should be getting (at a minimum).

> pennies to the dollar.

Wouldn't that be against wage laws? (unless those don't exist over there)

Nope.

https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/servi...

Those pages seem to relate to foreign workers, I was thinking in the direction of the wage laws in general that don't allow you to pay someone less based on their origin, gender, religion etc.

Great way to cull out the liars.

Either that or sheer stupidity. With a big company, you can never tell for sure.

Reminds me of ads asking for 3 years of Java experience, in 1997.

If you aren’t giving 200%, you are probably not IBM material.

Or if you're over 30.

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