Latest recruiter to blow smoke up my ass

[unixronin]

"Having most of these skills makes you a good match for the role," says the recruiter who emailed me this morning.  What role?  "Senior-Principal Device Driver Software Engineer."  Uh ... OK, what skills?

• Six or more years writing device drivers for Ethernet switches
• Hands-on proficiency in layer 2/layer 3 switching
• Familiarity with MCP854x processors
• Experience with writing drivers for large Ethernet Switch FPGA's [sic] or ASIC's [sic], including writing shim APIs
• Ability to troubleshoot complex routing/MPLS/L2/L3 problems and debug protocol and data-path problems
• Skilled in C, RTOS VxWorks and Tornado
• Familiar with IXIA and Smartbits

Needless to say, I have NONE of the above experience, although there are a small handful of keywords in common.  OK, I have some proficiency in C, and I've poked around and fixed bugs in a couple of pre-existing device drivers ... but, really, that's the extent of the overlap between my skillset and what he's looking for.

I wonder if any of these headhunters whose idea of matching skillsets consists of doing a search for a few poorly-chosen keywords, followed by either not actually reading the resulting resume hits or being unable to understand the big words in them, have ever considered what it does to their credibility to constantly waste people's time with positions for which they are obviously totally unsuited.  Those of us who have a good idea of what our actual skill sets and experience really are don't appreciate having smoke blown up our asses.

Maybe this is how incompetent boobs like Mike Brown end up in charge of FEMA.  Or, for that matter, how incompetent boobs like George W. Bush end up at the helm of the three or four corporations he rode into the ground before moving on to bigger and better failures.

Comments

Re: Not the right place, but...

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

I'll make sure he sees it. Still no phone/internet access at home.

He's done work from home before with occasional trips to Sunnyvale, CA (we lived in Tracy, CA. :-)

He'll probably not apply because(!) of J2EE (JBoss or Weblogic preferred) &/or EJB experience and Familiarity with MS-Windows user environments, including MS-Windows-XP, MS-Windows-2000, MS-Office and MS-Project. He's trying to stay away from anything M$.

But who knows, the * Include your resume ONLY in plain text (ASCII) format. Resumes submitted in non-plain text formats will not be considered for this position. might persuade him as it indicates old school engineers.

Re: Not the right place, but...

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Doug, our list administrator, does not suffer fools gladly. I am not sure if that is because he CAN, after doing support, but he usually calls it like he sees it. I think the M$ requirement is not so much about direct support, but being able to fix problems that it causes.

I was more concerned about it being a support position, rather than and administrator position. I really do understand about wanting to avoid M$, I just think all 10 of those positions on this continent are filled.