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IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

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Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#141

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 d…

This is definitely one of the biggest things holding back female applicants, as they are statistically more likely to have imposter syndrome. However, it holds back a lot of people who simply do not know that job descriptions are bullshit. Being bold is one thing, being a compulsive bullshitter is another. You probably do not want the latter on the team, unless you work at IBM specifically.

Ugh. Compulsive bullshitters are so very common (and draining) in the tech industry. Over the past 2 years, one of them has cost our company a lot of money and lost revenue. Hopefully better HR practices can help curb this problem in the future.

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#142

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 l…

I personally would respond to an email. Or, rather, ask the recruiter to send an email to the person I rejected to even meet. The common answer to this question is, it would take way too long to answer these thousands of candidates that are applying to your position. Obviously, that's nonsense unless you're Google or Facebook. At huge companies, I suspect CVs just get lost in the system somewhere when they don't have…

Small companies can get thousands of applications, no need to be Google. There was a time when you could see how many people applied to a listing on monster and linkedin, the numbers were pure madness.

As a manager, you probably only see applicants that were filtered by HR and applied for your team or department specifically, while HR has to view all the applicants across the entire company, that's a whole order of magnitude more.

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#143

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 l…

You're going through 100s of applications at a time. So many of them are clearly just spammed applications hoping something will stick. If they have a cover letter, 4/5 times its so generic it's probably the same one for every app.

Why should I respond to that? It would take me more time than it took them, and half of them are woefully underqualified. Note that for the apps I see that clearly took time, I do reach out. Sometimes just to let them know their app was well done, and wish them the best.

On the other side, when I applied I assumed I'd get no contact back. If I did get a human response, THEN I would expect a "thanks but sorry" email. But it just makes no sense when applying to a job means two clicks, to expect that every company is going to give you a hand crafted message back.

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#144
post #41

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…

I’d assume it’s a ”typo” as well. Most likely it’s not the same person hiring and writing the job ad. So a qualified guess would be that a character got lost during communication/translation.

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#145

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 G…

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.

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#146

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.

I was just thinking about this. Since a job must be advertised locally is there any requirement that the h1b holder actually has to satisfy the requirements for the job. If not, what is the purpose of the advertisement anyways?

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally would respond to an email. Or, rather, ask the recruiter to send an email to the person I rejected to even meet. The common answer to this question is, it would take way too long to answer these thousands of candidates that are applying to your position. Obviously, that's nonsense unless you're Google or Facebook. At huge companies, I suspect CVs just get lost in the system somewhere when they don't have…

Small companies can get thousands of applications, no need to be Google. There was a time when you could see how many people applied to a listing on monster and linkedin, the numbers were pure madness. As a manager, you probably only see applicants that were filtered by HR and applied for your team or department specifically, while HR has to view all the applicants across the entire company, that's a whole order of m…

Which is fine, but here's what I think should happen:

You apply to Position P. Recruiter hires someone for P and closes the req. At that point, the bot should send everyone in the wait bucket for P a mail saying "thanks P has been filled, feel free to apply to similar roles R and S".

It would take zero extra recruiter time.

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#148
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.

Re: IBM looking for 12 years’ experience in Kubernetes administration

#150

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 d…

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).

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