Foreign Perspectives

I’m rather uneasy about the job offer that I quite unexpectedly received earlier in the week for a whole host of reasons.

The job description requires experience in four software products of which I’ve limited experience in only one of them. Moreover, it requires one to work 60 to 80 hours per week when I’m aiming for 30 to 37. I made all that very clear at the job interview so I was quite amazed to put it mildly when I received a phone call to say that they’d offered me the job.

The call was from someone in personnel who had spoken to someone two levels up from the people that I’d spoken to. They obviously couldn’t be expected to know anything about the software product requirements but the call was to clear up the number of hours to be worked. Somehow the people they spoke to understood that 30 to 37 hours was enough to do the work along with 1 weekend in 3 oncall. Yet, the job specification was very clear that oncall (ie being available on the phone and to come in) was required 365 days a year with regular weekend work. In fact, at the interview I clarified that this was the case and in fact the “regular weekend work” actually meant every weekend and that the weekly hours weren’t the 60 or so that I’d estimated but more like 80.

Last time I heard of such a discrepancy was when a colleague went for a job some years ago. The people several levels up assured him that it was basically a fantastic job that he’d love. In reality, when he took it on that basis it turned out that it was the worst job he’d ever had and in fact the one that I’d told him it would be. That discrepancy is just as extreme for this job offer as it was for him.

So I have an offer for a job which I know I can’t do without a fairly substantial chunk of prior training and one which almost certainly requires substantially more than the legal maximum of 48 hours a week. Actually, even the personnel people would be requiring me to sign away my right not to work more than 48 hours a week and that’s something I also made very clear at the outset that I wouldn’t do.

Why the offer at all though? Well, I suspect that the management who made the offer have made some commitment to their own management that they’d get more people into the branch pronto and will basically take anyone they can get, regardless of fit.