10 Years of Quarkus Required
The average developer job description is absurd. “10 years of Quarkus required” and other such things are easy to find. Given Quarkus has only been around for a fraction of 10 years doesn’t matter. It is “required!”
While this example is a little extreme, it’s easy enough to believe isn’t it? I imagine you’ve seen all sorts of similarly comical tech requirements congealed together in one big hash of a job posting. It’s the first real test of candidate screening in my opinion.
Your First Test
Your first test is to wade through this morass of a job posting and deduce what they really want. Sure they’ve got everything from COBOL to SmallTalk to GoLang in there, but can you pick out the fact that they really someone to rewrite their SOA monstrosity?
This is one area where larger companies are especially egregious. It must be a law that the more hands a job description passes through the more likely it is to approach an Absurdity Maximum. This gives away that a Tech Lead, an Architect, a Manager, a Director, and HR all pitch in to make the job description goulash.
I’ve found smaller tech shops generally make a better attempt at reasonable descriptions. It makes sense too. A bad hire on a small team is much more impactful than a bad hire in a company of thousands. The blast radius of a Goofus at Gigantech is pretty small compared to at a small shop where Goofus might have Prod credentials.
Gatekeepers
And then there are the gatekeepers. The Human Resources professionals whose thankless job is to sift through dozens to hundreds of resumes. It’s an extremely difficult task and one I don’t envy them.
The sheer volume of applicants necessitate that HR has to resort to unfortunate tactics such as randomly picking a sampling to visibly skim over. Advances in HR software over the past decade have surely helped ease this burden somewhat, but it’s also easier than ever to apply for jobs so they’re still fighting a losing battle.
Then HR has to attempt to determine an applicant’s legitimacy without a huge amount of pertinent information. It’s not possible to check the veracity of resume claims, especially without the deep technical knowledge necessary to do so. At best HR can only disqualify the most egregious of pretenders and social misfits.
The HR phone screen is in place to do just this. I’ve found it’s virtually impossible to be culled during this process. As long as you can put together a few sentences and aren’t a complete jerk, you pass.
In the tech world, HR can’t be expected to do much more than this. Our domain is full of deeply contextual and specific knowledge. Even a seasoned HR IT recruiter will have a tough time making sense of the alphabet soup of technologies we deal with on a daily basis.
Acronyms
Which brings us to one of the most ridiculous yet important parts of a technology job description, the acronyms. The acronym game reminds me of dueling banjos.
The company starts the music by putting out a job description that lists every tech acronym used in the whole enterprise. The job applicant answers by including on her resume every technology she’s ever worked with for more than a minute.
It takes a showdown at the Ok Corral, aka the Technical Interview, to see who’s bluffing. Usually it’s both. The real trick is finding out whether the applicant and the company are bluffing about the less important acronyms.
This is the unfortunate state of tech hiring in many places. I’m positive both sides would much rather have a better system to save each other huge amounts of time and wasted efforts.
Summary
10 years of Quarkus required is the type of absurdity commonly found in developer job descriptions. Even discerning what a company actually wants from job descriptions like these is a puzzle.
Successfully navigating the job search requires a bit of luck and some skill in satisfying the HR gatekeepers. Ticking the acronym boxes of a job description is often an unfortunate requirement to pass the initial screening process.
I suspect the friction found in this process is at least a little deliberate. It serves to eliminate candidates who aren’t serious about the job and won’t dedicate the time to jump through a few hoops to get it.
Hopefully someday soon we’ll have a better system and will look back and laugh at the ridiculous 10 years of Quarkus nonsense we used to endure.