So, almost a year into Lombardi, I got this email:

Hello.

My name is _______ _____. I’m recruiting for Vmware’s R & D Engineering team, Monitor-Guest Components, and ran across your website.

A few things first: 1) your children are gorgeous – I especially like the one of your (two-year old daughter) going for a ride in Daddy’s sportcar. :). (and further comments about the various notes about music on my old website)

But the real reason for writing to you is that we’re looking for a strong Windows developer to work on a new project, Windows Debugger Integration, giving the debugger the ability to debug in an enhanced way in virtual machines. This person needs an understanding of processor architecture and low-level Windows kernel internals, including memory management, debugger support, network stack & interrupt architecture. Also they need to be an experienced implementer of Windows-hosted debuggers.

I saw on your resume that you might know people who could be interested. If so, please feel free to share my information with them (and/or your referral of them would also greatly be appreciated!)

She then attached a full, detailed job description, with a list of requirements a mile long. I cannot imagine that there were more than a few dozen people in the world with the necessary experience for the requirements. I knew quite a few debugger people, but I don’t think that they were Windows experts.

But I am really surprised that she is just pumping me for names. It was clear from my resume on my now-defunct personal website that I was not qualified for the position as written. So, she was just getting in touch with me after looking at all of my baby pictures to see if I knew anybody and if I would give her any names out of the kindness of my heart.

In my reply, I made social noises about her comments about my website, and then wrote:

Ooh, I don’t know many people who fit that bill. (A former Apple coworker) works there, right? (Say “Hi” for me). He would not be able to recommend his former debugger engineers because of affiliation with Apple. I would, except that I know that they would not ever want to work on Windows anything ever again. They like the Mac, and they like Linux, and there is not much you could pay them to do anything else.

I then gave her the name of a debugger engineer I knew who was still at Red Hat (who was not likely to want to do the position either), telling her to get his email from the gdb mailing list at the Free Software Foundation site.

If I think of anybody, I’ll let you know.

Looking back on it, I am so glad we have sites like LinkedIn and Indeed to circulate resumes with having to build a website. I am somewhat horrified that this person look at my baby pictures while downloading my resume. Times have changed; those kinds of things are all on Facebook now! (which is creepy on a different level I guess…)