Recruiter fishing. How quaint:

Hi,

The Recruiting Research Team at Cisco noticed your background in the Release Engineering community and they thought you might help me if I asked nicely. 🙂

I’m hoping you can suggest individuals who’d be interested in a full-time Release Engineer role based in San Bruno (south of San Francisco) with our Ironport division, acquired by Cisco in April 2007.

This individual will work to improve, automate, and simplify the build and release process across the Ironport product line.  They will also support the tools and infrastructure necessary to support the engineering organization on tools like Perforce, Bugzilla, and Twiki.

The ideal candidate will be able to drive positive change across the engineering organization; has prior experience with the design of test, staging, and production environments for server-based apps; and has past participation in shipping releases on an aggressive schedule.

I’ve found most professionals prefer to use their network to find new opportunities.

Anyone come to mind you can forward this email to or refer back?

I can reply with the job description if that’d help.

Thanks in advance!

• At this point in my career, I had not worked in Release Engineering, nor had I managed Release Engineers. I wonder what they based my “background in the Release Engineering community” on. Perhaps one of my friends?
• Recommending somebody to fill a vacancy in a recently acquired company is a good way to lose friends. Especially if the acquirer is Cisco. I watched them acquire engineers and spit them out on a regular basis.
• Release engineers don’t often drive “positive change across the engineering organization”; they have to have a manager or project manager or engineer as a champion.
• I hadn’t heard of Ironport before I got this mail, and I never heard of them again!
• Yes, most professionals prefer to use their network. Duh.

From what I can tell, I did not even bother to respond to this one.