IBM has put out a job advert calling for a candidate with over 12-years of experience with Kubernetes administration and management. 

It looks like a fairly straight forward ad, except for the fact that Kubernetes has only been a thing for the last six years.

The advertisement, which is still live, calls for a “minimum” of 12 years experience in Kubernetes, including “hands-on” experience setting up Kubernetes platforms, deploying microservices and other web applications and managing secure secrets along with container orchestration.

It requires someone to have earned at least six years experience before the first GitHub post about the project was made on 7 June 2014.

As the Twitter account ‘Really Bad Job Ads‘ shows, it’s very common to make typos or strange syntactical errors in job ads, but nothing on its feed comes close to a giant tech company getting in a muddle over new technology.

In this regard, IBM is not alone, as developer Sebastián Ramírez pointed out on Twitter. He applied for a role that asked for over four years of experience using FastAPIs, but Ramírez knew all too well at the time that no one could have more than one and a half years experience of it because he created it. 

This also goes the other way with job seekers sometimes getting it wrong. Replying to Ramírez, researcher Lynn Boyden recalled an applicant in 2012 that said they had over 17-years of experience with web design.

“We interviewed a 28-year-old designer in 2012 who told us he had 17-years experience designing websites. I said, ‘Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t have 17 years experience designing websites’. ‘Who’s Tim Berners-Lee?’ he asked. So yeah.”

Again, this goes the other way as further down the replies, App designer Jens Ravens explained that he was once told he didn’t have enough experience with a certain iOS library during an interview, despite the fact he developed it.