

Tell HN: Recruiters and Bizarre Skillsets - watmough

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?<p><pre><code>  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
</code></pre>
What are your thoughts?
======
tlack
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.

~~~
watmough
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...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/watmough-
software/id302009270)

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.

------
chc
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.

~~~
john_horton
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...

~~~
chc
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.

~~~
john_horton
Thanks for the tip!

------
watmough
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.

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

