I have to agree.

I once worked on digital equipment corporation's VAX systems. We had a VAX/VMS 11/780 which we were very proud of. It was hooked up to two others down in Mansfield MA over DECNET. One headhunter asked me if I was familiar with DELNET, and I suggested that I had used DECNET -- was it possible he'd written it down wrong. "Yeah, whatever" was likely his response.

And, not to change the subject, clients are guilty too. I had one prospect Tuesday afternoon tell me, "All the web sites right now are s***", with the implication, Build Me Something That's Not S***. Sure, all you had to do was ask.

In their defense, there is a welter of technical stuff that recruiters have to stay on top of. I'm working with Perl (of course) in standalone and CGI scripts, as well as mod_perl, MySQL through DBI, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and GnuPlot. I am picking up XML and looking at XML-RPC and XSLT after having put Java (EJB, Servlets, Applets, JDBC, J2EE) to one side because of performance issues. The recruiters barely know what these acronyms stand for, let alone how they relate to one another or what the latest news is on each thing.

Well, my bias against HR people is probably showing .. 90% of the time I think they're a complete waste of time. It's the other 10% of the time when they do the grunt work of inerviewing candidates or firing someone that they earn their bread.

Gee, I wonder if that question touched a nerve?

--t. alex

"Nyahhh (munch, munch) What's up, Doc?" --Bugs Bunny

Update 11 July 2002: Corrected a grammar mistake. 'firing' replaces the incorrect 'fire'.