Tell HN: Recruiters and Bizarre Skillsets | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Recruiters and Bizarre Skillsets

2 pointswatmough8 comments

HN'ers, this is from a real email I was sent by a recruiter. What you you think if you received such a set of potential positions?

  Position: .NET Developer
  Must Have Skills: .NET, C#, SQL Server 2005 (2005 or better), OOP/OOD.
  Preferred: WCF, workflow, messaging
  Wish List: Mono or MonoTouch , Erlang, Scala, F#, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, Redis, Couchbase, Raven DB
  Years experience: 5

  Position: Web Developer
  Must Have Skills: .NET, C#, Javascript, HTML5, Jquery, SQL Server 2005 (2005 or better), OOP/OOD.
  Preferred: WCF, workflow, messaging, MVC, Mono or MonoTouch.
  Wish List: Erlang, Scala, F#, Rabbit MQ, Zebra MQ, REtis, Couch Base, Raven DB
  Years experience: 5

  Position: Mobile Developer (Android)
  Must Have Skills: .NET, C#, SQL Server (2005 or better), Java, OOP/OOD.
  Preferred: Mono for Android
  Wishlist: Erlang, Scala, F#, Rabbit MQ, Zebra MQ, REtis, Couch Base, Raven DB
  Years experience: 5

  Position: Mobile Developer (iOS)
  Must Have Skills: .NET, C#, SQL Server (2005 or better), OOP/OOD, Objective C
  Preferred: C++, Mono or MonoTouch, SQL Light, IOS 4 (or better), Core Data, Smalltalk
  Wishlist: Erlang, Scala, F#, Rabbit MQ, Zebra MQ, REtis, Couch Base, Raven DB

What are your thoughts?

If the recruiter is going to be so uneducated about the technologies that are so important in our industry, I wouldn't bother working with them. They'll surely screw up the salary negotiations and not have done the background research on the firm they are trying to place you with.

I have a recommendation for a good recruiter if you are looking for one.

I should be pretty easy to find, but if not, my email is jonathan.watmough@gmail.com, any recos or leads gratefully received.

My iOS apps are at http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/watmough-software/id302009...

I also have 10+ years oil and gas software experience, including Visual C++, MFC, .NET, Oracle, SQL Server 2005 etc., working 8 years for a big service co, and 4 years for a really great software consultancy.

Related: I was poking around oDesk for niche languages a couple of days ago and found three jobs for Excel scripting and one for a salesperson that all listed "Clojure" in their requirements. I don't know if they think it's French for "getting things done" or what, but it gave me a good laugh.

Actually, that's my fault. We (oDesk) recently introduced a job post text parser that examines the text of the job description and auto-suggests skills. The parser uses the levenshtein distance to find approximate matches, and in the cases you flagged, the job descriptions used the word "closure" which the parser converts to "clojure." I probably need to add "clojure" to the parser's stop word list...

Heh, interesting. I can't believe it didn't occur to me that an overzealous algorithm might be to blame.

FYI, you'll probably also want to add "closure" itself if a lot of people are using it in that way, since there's a Google library called "Closure" that might get added to your skills database at some point.

Thanks for the tip!

I have to confess, I emailed the recruiter back and let her know that this gave a bad impression, though in this case, it seems that it may be the company that's clueless.

Either that, or they have a bunch of H/L1-Bs that have exactly these jobs already and they are just doing the mandated advertising for 'an American worker'. Bwahaha.

If it is the company, then I feel bad for the recruiter. They're hardly to know what a dogs breakfast of requirements this is.

Is (assuming it's what it stands for) Object Oriented Programming really considered a "skill"?

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