Job ad promises 'Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack'

You'll need 'numbness to the absence of excellence', will be paid 'handsomely for your soul'

A job ad has appeared offering one lucky worker the chance to perform “Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack.”

The ad is real – recruiter Joshua Wulf told The Register he wrote it after a conversation with a candidate “who told me what his job is really like.”

Wulf then considered plenty of other job ads and decided they rang false.

“It's always 'dynamic' or a 'Silicon valley' environment',” he said. And this job is none of that.

Instead, the lucky candidate will get to wrestle the following:

• Multiple generations of legacy code that cannot be refactored without destroying the entire house of cards.
• Design anti-patterns as a design pattern.
• Live, mission-critical system where you develop on the production instance.
• Large sections of managed and native COBOL.
• Easily top every development horror story at LAN parties.

To score the gig, you'll need these traits:

• Experience with the following technologies: .NET, ASP.NET, JavaScript, VBScript, COBOL, Managed COBOL.
• An extreme resilience and ability to withstand intense pressure.
• A numbness to the absence of excellence.
• Wily survival instincts and the ability to keep your head down combined with a reckless disregard for type safety.
• A bonus is any political experience, whether as a candidate or as an elected official.

Wulf tells The Register the ad has succeeded. “My phone has been ringing off the hook,” he says. “People are telling me they are strangely attracted to the job because other jobs don't sound real.”

“I'm surprised by the response: it's blown up!” ®