I got a call from a recruiter asking if I had experience with “ETL”. I’d never heard of it, so I truthfully said no, I had no idea what it was, and she went away.
After the call, I looked it up. Evidently it stands for “Extract, Transfer and Load”. Isn’t that what 90% of computer programs do? Isn’t that what the programs I’ve written and maintained for the last god-knows-how-long to extract aviation data from various sources in various formats, transfer it into my own format (combining data from several different places into one semi-coherent whole, throwing away the data that doesn’t interest me), and load it into my database for future use does? Or when I took data from Island and RediQuote and massaged it so that it looked like what SunGard’s trading system was expecting so that SunGard UMA users could trade stocks on them? Or when I converted data from the SMPTE ShowPlayList schema and stored it into our database so we could schedule movies and disassemble and re-assemble our own concept of what a show schedule was?
So yeah, I think I understand the concepts behind “ETL”. But because I was honest to a recruiter, I’ll probably never get a job doing it when it’s called that. The problem with the whole job market is that it’s full of cases like that, where recruiters and HR departments have a checklist and are just looking for people with the right keywords on their resume. That’s why I hope that careers.stackoverflow.com and jobs.stackoverflow.com catch on with Rochester companies, or companies who understand that off-site doesn’t necessarily mean the sort of idiots you see on Rentacoder who think they can solve the Halting Problem for $500.
On the plus side, most jobs that use the phrase ETL appear to be XML mangling, so you’ve saved yourself from that cthulhic horror…
Yeah, I once had a lengthy discussion with a manager about whether I had experience with “Publish and Subscribe”. I kept talking about my experience with publish/subscribe architectures, but eventually figured out that her company had some system called “Publish and Subscribe” which she thought was a widely available commercial product.
“ETL” as jargon would refer to nightly operational database to datawarehouse migrations, possibly even more to do with products like Informatica than real programming.
The answer to any recruiter question you don’t understand is “can I call you back? I’m getting a bad signal.”
Did you ask the headhunter, how he found you? Around here, that is on the list of unallowed questions.
“Gov’t may say recession over but not job losses” ( http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Govt-may-say-recession-over-apf-3057833088.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=4&asset=&ccode= ). My government doesn’t even claim that. One company doing lorry parts went from three shifts a day to three shifts a month. So manual labor simply isn’t asked for.
And it jobs are only created in the east, meaning Prague in Czechoslovakia or Bangalore. Its just cheaper there. The language isn’t such a big issue anymore, even when it’s not english.