
IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration - tosh
https://intellijobs.ai/job/IBMCloud-Native-Infrastructure-Engineer-Architect-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP
======
juped
> I saw a job post the other day.

> It required 4+ years of experience in FastAPI.

> I couldn't apply as I only have 1.5+ years of experience since I created
> that thing.

[https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830](https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830)

~~~
af65t34f75693
The only thing I don't like about it is how every line in this tweet ends in a
'fitting' emoji

I'm not even that old (born in the 80s), but is that the style adults use now?

~~~
dharmab
Adults have been using emoticons in casual online conversation for decades.
Certainly for most of your lifetime.

~~~
gruez
But do they put one at the end of every sentence like it was punctuation?

~~~
monkpit
Sometimes :)

------
codingdave
Recruiters putting silly time requirements on skills is nothing new. My
favorite moment of this type was at a meetup for .NET, where a recruiter came
in and asked for too many years of experience, and the entire room burst out
laughing. She just smiled, accepted the grief we all were giving her, and
changed the job description to be accurate. I forget the exact wording she
used, but I remember the gist of her response was, "Thanks for correcting me -
if I was an expert in the technology I'd be doing it, not looking for people
to do it, so I appreciate it when you all help me understand it better."

~~~
mcherm
I get that she was actually a nice person who simply didn't know when .NET was
invented. But I do not accept that she made a harmless and easily fixed error
on the job requirements because of this.

Frankly, I'm not that concerned that the job requirements demanded more years
of .NET experience then it was possible to have. I am more concerned about all
the other requirements that were listed on that job description which were
just as wrong but in a way that was not obvious.

Consider the analogy to all of the exonerations of convicted prisoners we have
had since DNA analysis became possible. The minor problem is that hundreds of
innocent people were held in prison for years before DNA analysis proved they
were innocent. The bigger problem is that we have now demonstrated that the
legal process has a significant rate of error, meaning that there are tens of
thousands of innocent people serving years in prison whose cases didn't happen
to permit exoneration by DNA.

That line in the job requirements that specifies you must have a college
degree -- is that unnecessarily excluding a lot of qualified candidates? The
general tendency to request more expertise and years of experience than are
really needed -- is that driving off candidates with lower levels of self-
aggrandizement? If it is, does that have anything to do with the deplorable
number of women succeeding in our industry?

Asking for 12 years experience in Kubernetes isn't just a silly error: it is
an unmistakable sign of a much deeper problem.

~~~
koheripbal
If you are expecting perfection then the world is going to be disappointing,
in general.

~~~
mcherm
I am sure perfection cannot be reached. I am hoping that we can recognize how
far from perfection we are and adjust our systems to take account of that.

For the criminal justice system in the US, one of the clearest implications is
that we should allow lawyers -- or at least judges -- to inform jurors about
the basics of what we know about witness reliability. Because a huge portion
of those we now know to have been falsely convicted we're convicted solely or
primarily on the basis of witnesses.

For hiring, I think it means we should deemphasize filtering out candidates
using some basic thresholds (like X years experience with Y) and emphasize
opportunities for the candidates to demonstrate the skills they will use on
the job.

------
VLM
A lot of very young people on HN. From my jaded older perspective this is VERY
common when they want no external applicants.

So we can't call it a corporate reorganization for Dilbertian process reasons
and we're only transferring one person anyway, so we'll abuse the
hire/fire/transfer process and put in hilarious requirements like a decade of
experience with javascript react framework or this K8S ad.

Or the bosses nephew intern'd with us and we have been ordered to make sure
the nephew and only the nephew get hired full time and his resume hilariously
listed he's been "doing computer stuff for more than ten years; also does
react framework" and we'll translate that into a minimum of a decade of react
experience LOL.

This also shows up in stealth ageism. The last I18N guy doing the Spanish L10N
project acted too childish for a professional office causing expensive chaos;
OK then the next hire "needs" at least 30 years of experience in Spanish
language I18N and L10N projects; really all we wanted was a bilingual
translator who was not childish by nature of being at least 30 years old. The
world's full of 30-something children but the odds are better than
20-something children. We already decided to hire one of the dev's friends who
was 35 so all we need to do is make sure nobody else applies. So this project
"needs" someone who's spoken Spanish for 30 years to translate stop and go to
pare y siga, LOL. Well L10N always ends up being a lot more than merely
translating words but whatever.

~~~
swebs
>From my jaded older perspective this is VERY common when they want no
external applicants.

Or when they want _very_ external applicants.

~~~
VLM
True, if there's a H1B audit, its much easier a drone to prove to its auditor-
drone that there were no local applicants for a job, than to explain the
technical details of how there chronologically could not have been any
applicants.

------
jasoneckert
Overstating requisites, or asking for far too many requisites for a particular
job and then settling for less has been a widespread practice since for as
long as I can remember in technology fields.

When I was younger, I never thought of it as a bad thing, since it scared away
those who weren't bold enough to apply for the job - ultimately reducing the
competition for the jobs that I've applied for.

Over the past 3 decades, I've never met the qualifications for any job that
I've landed, and I always tell others to apply for tech jobs even if they only
meet a small number of the requisites for this same reason. Most are surprised
to see how many times they get contacted for an interview.

Of course, this practice is slowly changing today since many talented
applicants don't feel comfortable enough to apply, which ultimately equates to
lost opportunity for the organization. For example, an HR manager recently
told me that she doesn't put the word "rockstar" on developer job ads anymore
because HR studies show that the term turns off the female and Gen-Z
demographics.

~~~
janoc
Well, seriously, if some HR drone puts "rockstar", "full-stack" or similar
buzzword on the job posting, it tells me one thing - the HR person is
incompetent, most likely has no idea what the real needs of the company are
and is filling the job advert with meaningless filler, especially since at one
point everyone wanted only "rockstar" developers.

And if it is a company itself advertising like this, that reeks of the "bro"
culture, crazy hours and similar problems.

That's pretty big red flag for me and I am certainly neither female nor Gen-Z
(up in my mid-40s now).

~~~
gruez
>Well, seriously, if some HR drone puts "rockstar", "full-stack" or similar
buzzword

"full-stack" is a buzzword now? How else would you describe a role where
you'll be doing backend and frontend?

~~~
EliRivers
Full-stack always has been a buzzword. It means everything and nothing. I've
seen full-stack mean "assembly code to screen pixel", I've seen it mean LAMP,
I've seen it mean three or four specific technologies that the candidate is
presumably meant to guess are the technologies being used.

~~~
0xfffafaCrash
Almost no full stack developers are expected to work with assembly (unless
explicitly stated) so that seems more than a little hyperbolic.

Full-stack in its common usage doesn't mean "everything and nothing." People
might disagree about where the exact boundaries are, but there are a lot of
people who definitely don't count by any definition so it does convey
information.

Those who only work with HTML & CSS & client-side javascript are definitely
not doing full-stack development. Nor or those doing purely server-side work,
database administration, cloud computing, systems/network programming, etc.
that never involves a UI with user interaction of any kind. That's quite a lot
of people who would immediately understand that they don't meet the
qualifications for a position that requires experience as a full stack
developer.

~~~
com2kid
> Almost no full stack developers are expected to work with assembly (unless
> explicitly stated) so that seems more than a little hyperbolic.

In the embedded world, a full stack developer would be someone who can read
electrical schematics, write drivers, write libraries, and by the time you've
done all of that the UI part is, comparatively, trivial.

Been there, done it, would 100% recommend it. You feel much closer to your
code than when 10 abstraction layers are in the way.

------
knowhy
Obviously a typo, they probably meant 1-2 years, which is realistic. While
this is probably not actually the case here, I see it quite often that
companies have unrealistic expectations when it comes to work experience with
technologies like k8s. For example it is quite common here in Berlin to expect
4+ years of k8s experience. Which is unrealistic to find taking into account
that k8s initial release was 6 years ago. It is paradox that companies want to
use the latest technologies and require years of work experience at the same
time.

~~~
frankie_t
Sometimes they just look for a reason to cut the salary or make you more
overtime-compliant, or something else. Basically a tool to squeeze out more.

The routine is to take you but make you feel like they do you a favor by
taking you with less exp than it was originally stated.

~~~
knowhy
Yes, you are right, that might be a reason. But work experience is a huge
factor in infrastructure engineering. From my perspective it is what counts
the most. Companies usually would like see that a candidate already worked on
a similar stack, so that she/he won't make stupid beginner mistakes on your
payroll and potentially ruining your business.

------
imglorp
Speaking of dubious recruiting practices, can anyone explain why applicants
frequently get ghosted? I mean some companies give zero reply after the
workflow system acks receipt of an application.

I feel this reflects poorly--in public--on a company's culture. The glossy
"work here" page means nothing if there's no follow through in practice. A
human may have spent days researching your company and preparing a cover
letter, and you can't even click the "no" button?

The workflow system, at the very least, should provide state feedback:
received, in review, no, or "let's talk".

~~~
vrutberg
After I had worked as a software engineer for about 5-6 years, struggling with
impostor syndrome during portions of that time, I decided to apply for a job
at Google mostly just to see what would happen. Guess what happened? They
ghosted me. Nothing. No 'thanks, but no'. Just nothing.

I remember that it I felt embarassed and was frankly a bit ashamed that I
hadn't received a reply. It took a while before I realized that I had in fact
gotten ghosted as well. I waited for a reply from them for weeks. My self
esteem took a definite hit from that. This was about 5 years ago now, so I've
since gotten over it - but it changed my perception of Google as an employer
from a place I'd be lucky to work at, to a place that I would have a really
hard time applying for a job at again.

~~~
imglorp
It's tough. You can't take it personally. Most likely if you have a good
buzzword list you're worth a conversation at least.

Another data point: 30 years exp, I just finished a job search for remote s/w.
Total time to sign was about 5 weeks.

* 10 cold applications, all with good fits and detailed covers and research: 1 cold no; 1 few interviews then a no; 8 ghosts after bot ack

* 1 internal referral: got to final talks

* A few external recruiter engagements: two final talks; accepted one of these; and a few ghosts

External recruiters can be a pain but they have one superpower: the ear of
their client.

~~~
vrutberg
Yeah, no, I know. Google is a big company and my application probably got
lost, overlooked or buried in a sea of applications. Still, I think it
reflects poorly on a potential employer to ghost candidates.

------
nix23
22 years in-deep Kernel development NOT older than 30 years.

Fluent English (please Scottish accent), Chinese (Teochew) and Yarawi (written
and spoken)

Additional bonus >22y in a DevOp leader position.

We welcome you in a team of hard working individuals, we are a startup so
please bring your own chair and table and computer, but we have a really good
coffeemaker (bring your own beans/milk/sugar)

24x7 Availability....

~~~
mlthoughts2018
This is so painfully accurate. The company will also say you need to be
“passionate about their mission” and “ready to disrupt the future” - for a
company that makes cell phone cases or an app to subscribe to your favorite
candy.

------
kabes
I had a recruiter call me to ask if I'm interested in a job for "c hashtag"

~~~
repsilat
Best I've heard is "coctothorpe" but I think it was tongue in cheek.

~~~
LanceH
C plusplusplusplus

------
8organicbits
I recently reviewed some resumes a recruiter (clearly) wrote for their
candidates.

The recruiter must have thought that listing every tech the applicant ever
used was a good idea. Even long discontinued products. And they seemingly
added typos, turned things into acronyms incorrectly, listed tech under
incorrect categories, etc. They were so painful to read and I'd imagine would
have embarrassed the candidates if they ever saw them. I was going to give a
"no" for all of them before I caught on that the recruiter was butchering
them. With that context, some were OK and some of those passed the interview.

I suspect the reason for this is that some companies just do keyword matching,
so the resume becomes tech jargon word salad to survive poorly written
filters.

Seeing this process has convinced me that engineers should review resumes (and
in the context of the IBM post, write/review job descriptions). I've gotten
fast at it, but only when the candidate writes their own. I think next time
I'll ask the recruiter to send a resume the applicant wrote, or just default
to "no".

~~~
webmaven
Your keyword matching hypothesis is likely correct, but doesn't that make the
typos _more_ damning?

~~~
pas
Yes, but since so far they had success, how would they really know? And
computerized search is getting more smart, not less, so .. even less incentive
to be precise.

------
cmrdporcupine
As obnoxious as postings like this are, I actually miss the era when the
interviewing process was based on evaluating job experience and references
rather than forcing people to answer skill testing questions, write code on a
whiteboard, and having people with 15, 20 years of experience "prove
themselves" to the interview panel by playing games with linked lists and for
loops.

And so if it means there's recruiters asking for dumb things like this, sure,
that's bad, but at least they're looking for experience and skillset rather
than mental gymnastics. Though I suppose they could be looking for both. That
would suck.

------
YesThatTom2
If you are shocked by a job ad like this you haven’t been in the industry very
long.

In 1995 a recruiter called me saying he has a position for someone with 5
years of Windows NT experience. (WNT shipped officially in 1993)

I told him hat if he finds someone, _I’d_ him them myself! I’ve never met a
person that owns a time machine!

He was very gracious about it.

~~~
meddlepal
Maybe they were looking to hire a NT core dev. Cutler started working on NT
around 1989 if I recall.

------
Ensorceled
I attended a testing conference in 1990 (might have been 91) where John
Ousterhout gave a talk on Tcl and Expect. His opening slide was on how Tcl
"had arrived" and showed a job posting looking for 5 years of Tcl experience,
to which he quiped, "in 2 more years, I'll be the only one qualified for the
job"

I'm sure Gosling, Stroustrup, etc. have all been in the position to make
similar jokes.

~~~
MandieD
I was in a CS class with Paul Gosling at Johns Hopkins circa 2000, and the
professor read out a particularly egregious example, finishing with “and
_maybe_ Mr. Gosling's father would qualify for this entry-level position...”

(By the way, he never went on about who his father was, at least not that I
heard, though occasionally wore Java logo stuff, because who wouldn’t...)

~~~
Ensorceled
I managed to snag one of the Java One t-shirts that Gosling used to illustrate
and throw into the crowd.

------
northern-lights
Some are also designed to be impossible to satisfy so that they can bring non-
local talent to satisfy Labour Market tests. Not sure if it is in this case,
but there have been plenty of such cases in the past.

~~~
metaphor
Given 12+ years requirement with tech that was initially released 6 years ago,
the only "non-local talent" this listing would bring in are time travelers
from the future.

~~~
northern-lights
I'm not sure how exactly it works but if I had to guess, the non-local talent
would have fudged resumes showing they had the relevant experience. It's not
like the relevant Labour departments would actually do the background check on
hired candidates. All the companies/consultancies need to do is to show that
they couldn't find a relevant candidate locally to satisfy the sponsorship
requirements.

Note that I'm not just talking about US. Most countries in Europe have the
Labour Market tests requirement before a foreigner can be sponsored for the
position.

~~~
vsskanth
You have to provide evidence to USCIS (letters from past employers) that you
worked on kubernetes for 12 years. They don't simply take your assertions at
face value.

~~~
gruez
Do they take the letters at face value, or do they do some basic sanity checks
to make sure the technology has been around as long as the experience you
claimed to have?

~~~
runawaybottle
I can promise you immigration services are not verifying if someone really
knows Kubernetes.

~~~
HelloNurse
Well, maybe this time there'll be more interest. The immigration services
officer who fines IBM millions for this kind of illegal immigration scandal
should expect a good career.

------
dreamcompiler
At first I thought "Even if you excuse this gaffe, who would consider a job
with IBM these days?" But then I noticed it was in India, to which IBM has
been outsourcing all their positions. Maybe a job at IBM in India is actually
a relatively safe career choice? Definitely not in the US though.

Edit: Reread this and realized it might sound like I'm anti-India. I'm not.
I'm American but if I was in the job market and could get a work visa I'd
consider moving to India. It's a beautiful country and it's a lot cheaper than
the US.

~~~
humanlion87
India is definitely a beautifully and diverse country. But living in urban
centers where these technology jobs are located is becoming tougher day by
day. Crazy traffic, high real estate prices, air pollution, etc affects
quality of life negatively.

------
daneel_w
This sounds like 4-5 years longer than Kubernetes has existed, and is
definitely in the 40+ aged senior developer sphere. And at the same time
they're busy doing damage control on multiple accusations of age
discrimination against older employees. Bra-vo.

------
zmmmmm
Almost as silly is to demand kubernetes administration as a primary skill at
all from someone whose main job is (apparently?) to use "an ensemble of Deep
learning and LSTM models" for "anomaly detection".

------
AdmiralAsshat
I wonder how this squares with job application disclaimers that try to
convince you that:

a) You must not apply unless you meet all of the minimum prerequisites as
stated on the listing

b) Lying in any way on the form is tantamount to committing a felony

If IBM realizes their mistake and corrects the listing, are they obligated to
immediately reject all of the previous applicants who knowingly submitted
false information on their application because the claim was, by definition,
impossible?

------
jarym
No doubt someone is gonna update their CV to show 12 years of Kubernetes,
apply, and get the job being the only suitable applicant with the required
experience.

~~~
chedabob
Ah, we're now at the "eBay typos" stage of the job market.

------
dreen
Isn't the whole X years of experience with kind of silly anyways? You grow as
a programmer by exposing yourself to new ideas and ways of doing things, but
this pretty much gives you a low number of years in a bunch of stuff, not
impressive on a resume.

~~~
irl_zebra
I have become less and less convinced on this. Most recently I had choices for
what would ostensibly be a Go-centric job between generalists who had a little
Go experience, and people really good at Go, but not as much at the rest of
our stack.

We went with the generalist under the theory you’re advocating and it was a
disaster. The people we hired learned Go, but it takes a while to grok the
paradigms and really develop a mental model for what’s going on under the
hood. Those hiring choices cost us a lot of grief and probably several months
of development time as they made choices that were ostensibly reasonable in
other languages/frameworks, but didn’t necessarily hold in Golang.

In the future if I require someone for something specific, say k8s, I’m hiring
someone with direct lengthy experience in k8s and not a devops expert who has
some experience with k8s.

~~~
cameronh90
The optimal strategy depends on the timeframe in which you're looking for the
employee to provide a net contribution and how long you expect them to stay,
among other particulars.

If you're scaling up quickly or employing a bunch of people to immediately
work on a new project, and expect them to stay an average of 2 years, you need
preexisting experience.

If you're in a company where people stay on average 4-5 years and, and there's
already a well established team with a good set of conventions and technical
leadership, a generalist is probably a better call.

------
lcnmrn
Probably just time dilation from those quantum computers IBM is working on.

------
jpswade
Since that job advert hasn't been removed yet, I'm guessing it's not by
accident.

That being the case, I imagine that sometimes these things get lost in
translation in large corporations and don't literally mean what you think they
mean.

I imagine what they are looking for is someone who can demonstrate how their
12+ years experience can be applied to that technology.

~~~
dharmab
It’s Sunday, nobody in the corporate HR world is at work.

~~~
jpswade
> India, Post Date: June 27, 2020

------
raghava
This problem of such a mad job description arises because of the disconnect
between the hiring manager and the recruiters/sourcers (often aided by
extremely broken tech).

Hiring Manager: I need a person with 10+ years of exp

Sourcer/recruiter: Ok, what skillz?

Hiring Manager: Cloud, Dev, Ops, SysAdmin - 10 years

Sourcer/recruiter: mhmm, what else?

Hiring Manager: Oh, also, someone with good k8s experience will be great!

Sourcer/recruiter: so, that's like, how many years?

Hiring Manager: one or two on top of the ones I said before

Sourcer/recruiter: Got it!

This "12+ years with k8s" "15 yrs with React" "10 years with Powershell 5"
situation is because of such disconnect. Having worked in that industry sector
has made me so aware of how broken hiring is, it is such a dark and gloomy
present and future - aided by more tools that get put by people who do not
really want to solve the problem but just make it someone else's.

------
willvarfar
I recall field-engineer lore about a particularly bullshity salesman claiming
in a meeting back in the day that our company had “been doing Java for years!”

Field engineer stares at table and wants it to swallow him up.

Sun rep just smiles back like nothing is wrong.

That salesman was hugely successful, btw.

------
PaulHoule
That job listing doesn't give specific credentials for it, but it seems to
also involve:

"...anomaly detection solutions ... leveraging an ensemble of Deep learning
and LSTM models. Natural Language Processing for entity, topic clusters and
relationship extraction. Text Analytics in human generated tickets and
correlation with event tickets for event noise reduction. Apply Natural
Language Classification and RNN algorithms to automatically route tickets...
Text mining, message clustering / templatization, Logs to metrics, anomaly
detection, event annotation and sequencing... for each mainframe batch job ...
Identify Anomalies ... using sequence mining techniques"

In all it is an interesting product but it is going to take a lot of people
with different skills to make that happen. Many of those areas such as "entity
and relationship extraction" and "anomaly detection solutions ... [for] event
noise reduction" are still almost pre-paradigmatic from the viewpoint of a
working engineer.

The best interpretation I have is that they are hiring a large platoon or
small company of software developers, data scientists, project managers, you
name it. They are probably using a distributed version of UIMA that spins up
at least one container per dev in the production system (because
"microservices".)

The person they are hiring here is in charge of keeping that monster going at
the K8s level. They may need to settle for hiring 12 people with 1 year of
experience, but that would blow their budget -- if the whole team worked that
way it would get bloated to a mid-sized or large battalion.

I don't see why they don't just run the system on one of the mainframes it is
monitoring. With Parallel Sysplex, Workload Manager, etc. IBM had better stuff
than VMWare, Docker, K8S, Zookeeper in the 1990s when they made the transition
from bipolar to CMOS and had to go parallel to make up for the single-thread
performance loss. z15 mainframes are just crammed with PCIe slots so they
should have no problem attaching a tensor accelerator to one.

Trouble is, people who know how to administer mainframes are even harder to
find than K8S experts.

~~~
brnt
Pretty sure the neural network they're working on wrote this ad itself.

------
harrisonjackson
I interned at IBM my 4th year of college. I was hired directly by the team I
was working for but still had to submit an application through their external
hiring board.

Took 5 tries with my new manager filling it out for me because even he didn't
know the requirements. This was an internship that assumed the applicants were
in college but still required 4+ years in java and c++ - neither of which I
touched the entire time I was there.

------
sokoloff
If you have twice as much experience as anyone else in kubernetes, apply to
IBM! Principals only, please; we expect to be inundated with applicants.

------
iaml
I'm 99% sure they knew, they did it so you would post it and other people
would upvote it and we all would see it on front page of hn.

~~~
phenkdo
well played

------
gHeadphone
My 11 years doesn’t quite cut it.

I’ll have to apply for the RUST job I’ve been keeping an eye on. 12 years
experience should put me on a short shortlist.

------
rs23296008n1
Rookie recruiter mistake. They should demand 20 years to get someone who has
appropriate deep-level experience that can fulfill their mission-critical need
for requisite synergistic juxtapositional operational efficacy.

This will pre-select suitable candidates that can spout as much gibberish and
misunderstandings as their bureaucracy is obviously already used to.

------
jaclaz
Only as a reference/comparison:

[https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/employment-and-
career-i...](https://www.forensicfocus.com/forums/employment-and-career-
issues/message-to-recruiters/)

------
compsciphd
hey, I joke that I'm the only person on the planet with 10+ years of Docker
experience.

[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf)
[https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/atc10/tech/full_papers/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/atc10/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf)

------
iceman2654
I went through a resume building seminar once, and the instructor mentioned
years of experience are often inflated to deter people from applying. She
worked in HR for over 20 years and she said, if a job is looking for 1-2 years
then it really means entry level. 5 is more like 2-3 years. I'm not surprised
anymore nor do I let the years of experience stopping me from applying. Also,
just a tip to those looking for jobs. Most places will bring you to the front
of the list if you know someone at the company.

------
brookside
I learned why my boss puts “extra” years of experience from what he is
actually seeking.

Doing so enables him to get higher pay band set for the position and get
better candidates who might accept, even if they have less experience.

------
tzs
If I wanted to apply, I’d just evaluate the definite integral of Km(t), the
number of Kubernetes systems I managed at time t, over my lifespan so far and
put that on my resume as my years of experience.

E.g., if I had 6 systems for 3 years, that’s 18 years experience on the
resume.

PS: I'd only do this on resume copies sent to companies with obviously
impossible experience requirements like this one. For companies with
experience requirements that are actually obtainable, I'd just put the usual
number of years of my lifespan I've worked with the technology.

------
k_sze
If you work 16 hours a day for 6 years on Kubernetes, you would have the
equivalent of 12 years of experience of a normal person who works 8 hours a
day. ;-)

~~~
a012
There's a joke: "Lingling studied violin 40h a day"

------
blickentwapft
Meh. It’s probably just 2 years mistyped.

Shouldn’t be on front page HN.

~~~
john_minsk
This. To all the people who call this job post "silly", imagine how silly it
is if a simple mistake of missing "-" like in "1-2 years" is overblown out of
proportions and half the internet is discussing it. I've stumbled upon this
"news" a few times during past 2 days. What a waste...

~~~
0xFFC
You clearly has not been on job hunt :)

------
ChrisMarshallNY
It's like asking for ten years' experience with Swift.

The job descriptions (especially in hidebound companies like Big Blue) tend to
have mandated experience levels.

HR folks aren't engineers, so they should not be expected to know.

However, this should be highly embarrassing to the hiring manager, who I'm
sure, was handed the ad text for approval, and probably rubberstamped it
without thinking.

~~~
christophilus
It would be trivial for someone to Google it, then make a canonical list for
the entire HR department. You’re talking about maybe 30 minutes of work to
prevent your company from looking like corporate clowns.

~~~
BossingAround
You're underestimating the amount of friction at most companies. For all your
recruiters to use your measly google sheet, it has to be encoded somewhere on
your intranet, a memo has to be sent by the director (whom you have to
persuade that this is the correct thing to do) that there is this sheet, and
you then become the point person to approve all the job ads because "you took
initiative in the area."

------
ghj
If you include Borg (Kubernetes' predecessor as an internal tool at Google),
then the tech has been around since 2003:

[https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-
kubernetes/](https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-kubernetes/)

I am sure that's not what they meant though!

------
raverbashing
They just seem to have a table like:

\- Senior: 10+ years

\- Principal: 5 years

\- Junior: 2 years

and fill their job postings like that

Seems like it's a template filling system with that logic

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
They probably got Watson to do it.

------
throwawaygh
FoxConn^1 was similarly looking for a research scientist with N years of
experience using PyTorch when PyTorch was N-2 years old.

[^1]:
[https://wisconnvalley.wi.gov/Pages/Home.aspx](https://wisconnvalley.wi.gov/Pages/Home.aspx)

------
rasjani
Seen this so many times in my LI feed and people point out that kubernetes
wasn’t even out 12 years ago.

So that’s the joke of course but to make this even more sweeter I’d point out
that even Go wasn’t publicly available. Wikipedia mentioned that first remarks
about Go where from 2009 :)

~~~
tannhaeuser
K8s was originally written in Java, and then ported over to Go.

~~~
YesThatTom2
Really? I haven’t heard that before. Citation, please.

~~~
tannhaeuser
[https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/kubernetesclu...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/kubernetesclusterfuck/)

I'd like to add that I find it scary that this basic info can't be found,
neither by a cursory web search, nor on wikipedia. Makes you worry about a
future generation raised in naive march-of-progress narratives wondering about
how things came to be during the "dark ages" (= today) of the web

~~~
smarterclayton
All of the patterns and default code referenced there were things I wrote or
helped write or reviewed, and while a certain “java patterns” mindset was
common in early devs, I can assure you we didn’t transcribe it from Java, we
simply used patterns we were familiar with from previous languages. None of
the open-source Kube project was “transcribed from Java” to the level being
described here.

Kris isn’t wrong, but the details are far more nuanced than that. This talk is
a non-primary source :)

~~~
tannhaeuser
Understood, just mentioned it in this context. Actually I find the honest "our
codebase sucks" attitude a good sign for a proj FWIW.

------
lousken
someone dedicated his entire channel for all kinds of HR bullshit
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Tychos1/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/Tychos1/videos)
this is just one of them

------
moralestapia
Similar anecdote, I started developing apps for the iPad as soon as it came
out (2010). Around 2014, a recruiter didn't want to give me a senior position
since "they usually look for people with 8+ years of experience". ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
raverbashing
In these cases (or, in most cases) I think it's fair to consider previous
related experiences.

In this case: iPhone development or even MacOs development.

(Of course it's hard for recruiters to see this, that's why I usually just say
I have it, but yeah, ridiculous requirements gets ridiculous answers)

------
hi41
Does anyone know why the recruiter vigorously tries to reduce the salary one
is asking for? Do they get a portion of that “saved” amount as a bonus from
the company? I had a hard time negotiating the salary.

Edit: spelling.

------
pseudonymousgun
I just hope companies get rid of the "hr recruitment" team. These people are
utterly clueless folks, who hardly know anything about technology and worse
these people call the shots when the time comes to settle on pay package.

------
SecurityMinded
Im sure some fake resume from Indian owned sweatshops will have an H-1B visa
holder with the non-existent 12 years kubernetes experience. Isn't it how they
operate for any position anyways ? Good grief IBM...

------
marvinblum
I don't understand what so hard about looking up this kind of stuff. And
someone who is not in HR requested this resource, at least the should now what
they're doing.

------
aikah
I applied for a front end job once in 2011, it required 5 years of experience
with AngularJS. Pretty sure AngularJS released in 2009...

And no, the ad wasn't written by a recruiter.

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)

------
teliskr
Counting in dog years?

------
nkingsy
These discussions go alongside MacBook trackbar discussions in my mind.
Everyone has stories of clueless recruiters. It’s sad. I also interview about
1 utterly unqualified candidate per month at a big tech co that has this
pretty well streamlined. There is need for filtering. That’s what recruiters
are paid for, and it’s not at all surprising that they’re terrible at it.

It seems to me a real licensing process with GRE style in person exams is
needed to solve this problem.

Maybe we could even include sections on standards in the licensing process so
I don’t have to spend my days fixing needlessly “creative” code.

~~~
janoc
Passing an exam or getting a degree proves only one thing - that you can pass
exams. It doesn't prove the ability to think and actually solve real-world (as
opposed to often contrived exam) problems.

It also doesn't prove anything about the individual's abilities today, only
about what they were able to do at the time of passing the exam. How do you
know that they didn't become sloppy and aren't spending their days high
producing BS?

A successful exam has pretty much zero correlation with the (non)appearance of
"creative code". E.g. if you expect a developer hired freshly out of school
with no experience to write reasonable code, you are being completely
unrealistic (and have already forgotten your own career start). But they did
pass all their exams, right?

Yes, there are many incompetent fools in the field. But most of them likely
hold degrees already and one extra exam wouldn't solve anything there. E.g. I
know a civil engineer who has passed all the required exams, holds all the
required diplomas and professional certificates, has 20+ years of experience -
and one of his buildings has collapsed and two more had to be torn down
because of fatal design mistakes in them.

This is why one hires for a trial period and asks for references and work
portfolios at the interviews.

------
tofflos
Does overtime count towards the total? ;-)

Let’s say an applicant had put in triple overtime for four years would that
count as twelve years of experience?

------
RocketSyntax
that's only 1 year executed in parallel

------
jmnemonic2021
This is a buffer overflow type of scenario where you apply and say you have
that experience even if you have none.

------
tonymet
This is funny, but the artificial talent shortage created by the recruiting
bureaucracy is real.

------
villgax
All MNCs tend to hire HR from local companies & the backwardsa$$ mindset
follows.

------
yodelshady
It also includes "Deep Learning, LSTM, RNN, and NLP" in roles and
responsibilities.

Really?

------
soobrosa
Easy sign to know who to fire even at IBM where it's way easy.

------
marm7
I’d rather hire a junior with ambition to learn and work, than a fantasy

------
LatteLazy
Wanted: someone willing to lie on their CV.

------
aaron695
Rather than taking the clichéd lesson that recruiters are not humans and evil.

How about, apply for jobs even if you don't have the skills they are asking
for.

~~~
wbl
These sorts of inflated requirements disproportionally discourage women and
other underrepresented minorities.

~~~
waheoo
Care to source that myth?

[https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-
unless...](https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-
theyre-100-qualified)

------
PopeDotNinja
It’s base 3?!

------
olaf
maybe they mean 12 with base 3, that would be 5 decimal years ;-)

------
ClumsyPilot
The meme strikes again!

------
tankenmate
maybe someone forgot to convert from quaternary to decimal?!?

------
kgraves
somebody’s going to be disappointed.

------
jacknews
An obvious typo is worth a HN post now? And I'm replying! ye gods.

------
syastrov
Us programmers tend to be very literal-minded, but my understanding is that in
some parts of the Middle East, it is common to exaggerate numbers to provide
emphasis, where it’s understood that it’s not to be taken literally. So maybe
they just wanted someone with “a lot” of experience in Kubernetes. (Strange
idea: Maybe writing it this way even acts as a filter for literal-minded
people). It probably works better in-person though :)

~~~
computronus
I see it as coming down to honesty. When a job requisition has a quantitative
requirement that I cannot meet, then absent any ability to double-check and
see if there's any wiggle room there (or it's a mistake), I'd have to pass it
up. They need x, I lack x, OK, I'll move on, because I won't claim I have what
I don't.

From the hiring company's point of view, this is bad, not just because of the
people who they miss out on who are still highly skilled, but because those
who do interview might not be the most honest. If they are willing to claim
they have experience that they can't, then how will they be as an employee?
Will they give trustworthy status information, or honest estimates? Will their
interactions be customers be forthright? How will their social interactions
with their coworkers go?

If a hirer won't take the time to be quite sure they have accurate and
realistic requirements in their requisitions, they may end up with quite a
problem on their hands down the road.

------
pythonwizz
This has little to do with IBM but much more with HR.

Based on my experience, the second most stupid people work in HR. Most stupid
people? Real Estate.

I am not saying that people in HR or RE are stupid by definition, I am sure
some very smart people work in these fields. But it is a question of entrance
barrier. You can get into HR from nearly any background. Yet, some kind of
degree is required in most cases. In RE you do a few weeks training and you
are ready to go.

Other fields have tremendous entrance barriers. Lets say a professor in a STEM
field. You can find average people there but stupidity is rare.

