An outside recruiter tried to hire me for my own opening.
They had found our job post, rewritten it, and started sending it around Manhattan. Then the message landed in my inbox.
“Are you interested in a Linux Administrator Job?”
Very interested. I was the person hiring for it.
The rewritten version had other problems. Zenoss had become “Znos.” The actual title would be WebOps Administrator or WebOps Developer, depending on the person. The recruiter had flattened a role we were still trying to define into something easier to blast across email.
I checked with the team to make sure it really was ours. The mistakes were recognizable, but I still had to ask. That was how far the posting had traveled from the job.
I forwarded it to the team because it was funny.
It also showed why hiring technical people was hard. We did not need a list of keywords. We needed somebody who could work across production, deployment, monitoring, Linux, and the growing overlap between developers and operators.
The title mattered less than how the person thought when the site was slow or the graph looked wrong.
That was difficult to capture in a posting. It was apparently even harder after an outside recruiter ran the text through whatever process produced “Znos.”
We were trying to build WebOps as an actual function, not rename a traditional administrator job. The person needed enough development instinct to automate work and enough operations instinct to respect production.
The good news was that the market had found our opening.
The less good news was that it had found me too.