About a month and a half ago I applied for a job in Springfield, IL. It was kinda sorta related to what I do, but it required a bunch of knowledge I didn’t have. I had completely forgotten about it until today when someone called me for a phone interview.
There is a reason you shouldn’t apply for jobs for which you are not qualified… especially in IT. As previously noted, the work is sorta kinda related to what I do… sorta kinda meaning that I’ve touched work like that before, but not as a primary function of my job.
The interview went something like this…
Interviewer: The job is for a ETL BI/Data Warehouse Analyst.
Me: OK, I work with BI Tools.
Interviewer: Well, we work with the state Medicaid program to extract data from their old database into a new Teradata system.
Me (Thinking): What the hell is Teradata?
Me (Speaking): What tools do you use to do that?
Interviewer: We don’t use any tools. We program everything custom in COBOL.
Me: Uhm. I don’t have experience in COBOL.
Interviewer: So…. How’s the weather in Florida? Is it Hot?
That is all?
–sam
If they want COBOL, you’re probably better off anyway. You probably couldn’t fit your car into the stables they have in place of a parking lot. And a lack of indoor plumbing gets old pretty quickly. 😛
True Dat! 😉
–sam
COBOL is like fun, only different. We did a tiny, tiny amount of it in a freshman engineering class in college…all the real classes used C/C++ or JAVA.
I’m going to have nightmares about COBOL now. ;p
–sam
Yeah, heh, COBOL. If they need people who know that, it’s a yes or no question, so I wouldn’t feel bad about them canning the interview on that point alone.
Do you remember the Y2K stuff? Minor issue for most of the world – it wasn’t hard to write a patch to fix the windows OS, or microsoft outlook, or whatever. Where it was a real problem was for big mainframe computer systems of the type running hospital patient record databases, insurance companies, and government tax systems. These systems were all ancient, and every single one of them was custom designed and developed, usually by programmers that didn’t write any real documentation (it was before we developed even a halfway decent body of software project management knowledge).
Anyway, all those systems were written in COBOL. Even in the late 90s, no one was teaching that language, as C (and, like, everything else) had surpassed it. The hospital I was working at was trying to get guys out of RETIREMENT who coded in COBOL in the 60s and 70s to fill that need. Most of the programmers who built our MIS were dead.
To your point, though, applying to jobs you aren’t entirely qualified for isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The job I’m at right now advertised as wanting folks with advanced degrees and three years experience minimum in that area. I had a bachelors and an internship. Turns out everyone in the job had similar credentials coming in as me. 🙂 So those job postings can be pretty wildly off base.
Yeah… as soon as I heard the word COBOL I knew it was over. I wish they had put that in their job description.
Oh well… After that phone call yesterday, I found out some interesting news about a job possibility in Chicago. It would require a hefty commute, but it might be worth it. Especially the zero job options I currently have in Shampoo-Banana.
–sam
Hmmm… LJ seems to have removed my ‘Random Rant’ fake tag for the stuff in the middle. Oh well.
Companies still use COBOL?
Yeah… Who knew?
–sam