another misguided recruiter

[cellio]

Like many others, I get lots of unsolicited email from recruiters who claim to have read my LinkedIn profile and have a great opportunity for me. They're almost always wrong about both. But I usually skim the tech-writing ones when they arrive, to (maybe) learn a little about the state of the field.

The latest one, about a "fast-paced innovative team", started off generic, as most of them do. (Hint to recruiters: if you want me to respond, give me a reason to. I'm not actively looking; you have to show me something interesting.) But the list of responsibilities included "work with architecture and UX teams to understand how best to organize and present the documentation" -- hey, they have a UX team! That's unusual (in a positive way). I kept reading.

Then I got to the requirements, which included:

• Experience with Cobol
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office

Ha ha, no.

Also, it's in New Jersey and the ad doesn't say anything about remote employees. Bzzt.

Comments

[gingicat]

Ha - my mom-in-law got to extend her retirement date for as long as she wanted because the company she worked for needed to get them over Y2K and it then took a long time to transition out of the COBOL-based legacy software...

[cellio]

I know some people out there are still using COBOL (on mainframes??). But "innovative"? Maybe yes and I've just never heard about it, but it's not my starting assumption. Especially given the other smells coming from this interaction.

[goljerp]

Hmm... mdlbear and gingicat got me thinking... maybe it's "Innovative" because they have a team working in PHP, trying to replicate in a webapp some COBOL code which everyone knows holds the business logic, but nobody knows what the business logic actually is?