Tech Job Postings are Funny! Post 1 Amazon.com

I get a lot of recruiters emailing me and I get job postings in my RSS feeds.  Many of these postings are unintentionally funny, some are downright embarrassing, and some just leak a lot of information about a company.

I've decided to start posting some of these with commentary.  The one that finally made this decision for me is from Amazon.com . A copy can be found here. I've added bold for emphasis.

The almost certainly illegal and super ageist posting title is what caught my eye: "Systems Engineer - AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) -University Candidate: May 2014 Grads Only".

It was the wonderful nonsequitur requirements for job experience that really hooked me.

• Experience running and maintaining a 24x7 Internet-oriented production environment, preferably across multiple data centers, involving (preferably) at least hundreds of machines.
• Demonstrable expertise around specifying, designing, and/or implementing system health, performance monitoring tools, and software management tools for 24x7 environments.
• Experience with very large distributed systems such as multi-terabyte storage farms, and/or horizontally scaled request processing fleets

Sure, there are plenty of 2014 Grads with expertise in the book sense and maybe some even in a more practical sense, but, really how does a grad get to a place where their college and work lives intersect with a large 24x7 operation?   Maybe I need to open my mind.  Maybe Amazon wants a 12th year senior who has been working in enterprise architecture while going to school at night?   That eliminates the ageism too!!