Sr. Server Engineer (Vintage Systems) at Living Computer Museum,

This is all academic, since I am certainly not going to apply for said job. There's no way I could contemplate crossing the Pond for one thing. [...] Is iths a 'server engineer' or a 'sevice engineer'? My first thought is tha the latter is a better description. I don't see much that is to do with servers in the accepted sense. Ahving read the full job description, requirements, etc, I must admit I am somewhat depressed. Even if I say so myself, I think I have some clue about repairing and maintaining vintage systems. And yet I meet none of the requirements. Now you may well not want somebody like me, I can fully understnad that. I do think the 'requriements' are peculiar. For one thing you require somebody who is familiar with certain things (such as Microsoft Office). Now, I'll admit I've never used said programs, preferign to use LaTeX for test formatting, and never having had any use for a spreadsheet. But I am prepared to wager that if I had to use them, I'd be able to pick them up in an afternoon, and would abnybody else who had sufficient knowledge of computer hardware and software to be able to do the rest of the job. Alas HR departments don't grasp this. You also seem to want somebody which experience in wildiy differnt areas. If you're not carefulm, you're going to get somebody who's dabbled in all sorts of things rather than somebody who is an expert in a particular area. Maybe that's what you want. Prsonally, I'd rather have a true expert in a particular field (who is very likely to be able to pick up related fields very quicking) than a 'jack of all trades and master of none'. And you seem to perpetuate the myth that nobody can be self-taught in these fields, by requiring a degree and field service experience. With reference to the latter, I would argue that the requirements of field service (being able to get the machine up and running quickly, original spares avaialble, known-good asemblies to swap out avaialbe, etc) are very differnt form the requirements of a museum (keeping the machien as original as possible, some parts may have to be made, or adapted, no-known-good spare boards, etc) are very different. You may be good at one and awful at the other. So asking for field service experience may not be what you want I think it woudl also be useful to specify the sorts of machines (or approximate dates) involved. My experience suggests that troubleshooting a transistorised machine is somewhat different from troubleshooting an SSI/MSI based machine which is in turn differnet from troubleshooting a microprocessor-based machine. Perhaps you want to cover all of them, it's not clear. Oh well, as I said it's academic anyway. had it been over here, I might well have given it a go, though. -tony