About 3 weeks before I was to leave to start my new job in Austin, I got this:

I am a working with a Silicon Valley profitable start-up company that is looking for full-time Software Manager

Our client’s customers are worldwide leaders in wireless, cellular, avionics, military, video entertainment, broadcasting, automotive.  Their breakthrough patented coding technologies are now being implemented as worldwide standards for upcoming communications designs in international standards bodies. Their technology allows for reliable transmission of data on unreliable wireless or wired networks.

Primary Responsibilities
Drives the delivery of embedded software products for IP-based streaming and file delivery applications. Ensures customer success through the delivery of well-designed, flexible, extensible, robust and richly supported software products.

Leveraging past product successes, provides domain expertise in the area of IP-based networking architectures and protocols. Provides technical guidance on multimedia session/transport protocol implementations, limitations, and applications including IP/UDP, RTP/RTCP, firewalls, and performance enhancing proxies.

Works closely with development team to ensure that core technology implementations are highly portable and scalable to a broad range of client and server environments.

Required Skills & Experience
An innovative and technical professional with a proven track record as a technical software manager in the area of IP-based networking protocols. Minimum of 12 years relevant experience, including at least five years experience in a management capacity.

Depth of knowledge in many of the following protocols and technologies: IP/UDP/TCP, NAT/ALG, firewall, VPN, RTP/RTCP, FTP, DHCP, FTP, DiffServ, including a comprehensive knowledge of the architecture, design, development, limitations and use as applied to streaming and file broadcast applications.

Proven technical manager; must have practical, hands-on experience in leading teams in the development of complex multimedia networking solutions. Demonstrated success in the early stages of product development through participation in product and roadmap definitions with product management. Strong project execution skills covering task definition, team mentoring, and recruiting. Demonstrated success in delivering best of breed solutions and ensuring customer success.

Bachelor’s Degree in CS or EE

If you want to apply, reply to this email with your resume.

Well, it’s an engineering manager position, which would have been better than QA, in my experience. However:

• I was committed to moving to Texas already. House was on the market. New job already lined up.
• Lots of embedded networking software. Not my strongest muscles as a developer.
• 12 years of networking software dev as a matter of fact. I had basically zero? 10 years as a general developer, but not networking.
• 5 years as a manager. I had 3-4 not continuous years as a manager, but only 2 as a dev manager.

I was not qualified for the requirements listed, and I was leaving California anyway.

Some other little things: There is inconsistent punctuation. There are changes in tense and mood in the text. Whoever it was was still trained to type two spaces after a period. And I hate it when they don’t tell you who the company is.

The recruiter left their LinkedIn profile in the email. Ironically, they work at Apple now! Still, I often wonder how recruiters could think that I would be qualified for a position like this when they look at my resume? There is very little overlap in specific skills…