T-SQL Tuesday #165 – That Job Description I read and Couldn’t Stop Laughing!

Please excuse me if this post is going to be the funny one, yes it is!

I would like to first thank my dear friend Josephine Bush for bringing up this great topic and asking us to write about how the proper job titles and descriptions should be for the job postings.

I surely have a lot of thoughts on this topic. Two years ago, I was applying for Database administrator positions everywhere. If not everywhere, almost everywhere. Linkedin, Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, etc. As I was looking at the Job titles and Job descriptions at the time, my blood boiled at the beginning looking at the requirements. More about this soon. I was already stressed about figuring out a way to get a job soon and on top of that stress, unreasonable job descriptions caused me more stress. After a couple of days, that stress turned out to be a stress reliever. Yes, you read that right. In the beginning, I was madly looking at the job description mentioned for a SQL database administrator role mentioning high expertise in the languages – C++, Java, PHP, Python, etc; but later as I was checking on many of these types of job descriptions made me laugh and had helped me filter out the companies that I can ignore applying.

The other funny thing I observed is the description mentions that the company is looking for a senior-level position and mentions the salary as 15 dollars per hour. The description for this kind of job posting also mentions the certifications as needed or preferred.

To take this to another level, I would like to show an example of postings from one of the best companies (Don’t want to point out the company name here) back in 2020 for the position of “Cloud Native Infrastructure Engineer” mentioning the requirement is to have 12+ years of Kubernetes experience when in fact the Kubernetes technology was released in 2014 which was just 6 years. Source

I believe many companies rely on people who do not have much experience with technology to post about these job openings and their descriptions. Due to this, great candidates who can be a great fit for the position would not even consider reading the entire description. This can ruin the reputation of the company.

One more hilarious experience of mine –

My first-ever job was with the title “Database administrator” but as I enter the company, the first day I received a tag with my name, picture, and with the title “Database Developer”

Hope you enjoyed reading this post and my request to anyone looking for a job actively ignore these type of job descriptions!

I am curious to read all other posts on this topic for this month of T-SQL Tuesday!

Thanks for reading!