From my perspective, it appears that the recruiter is the jerk and not the candidate. I have met many computer-illiterate recruiters but never one like this who would repeat the same response over and over again despite the candidate having clarified his position.
AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are bonafide Unix systems and there indeed are software developers today who work with them.
In any case, it is not very hard to write something like the following in the resume: POSIX, CentOS (Linux), Solaris (Unix), FreeBSD (Unix-like), etc. It is always good to be more specific about your skills in situations like this than being ambiguous.
The candidate is incorrect in his belief that nobody uses UNIX (or Unix) in 2017 and he could have been less flippant in his responses to the recruiter, but his technical accuracy is spot on.
Regarding the minimal distinction that exists, FreeBSD is Unix, but not UNIX, because it has never been certified as there is a cost associated but it is directly derived from AT&T Unix in its lineage. Mac OS X which is derived from FreeBSD in turn was certified and is therefore a UNIX, ironically enough.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Your school was trail blazing! At my uni, UVic, it was still all Sun and IBM Unix labs (with plaques) when I graduated in 2000.
There was even a room with NT4 - I went there once.
When I started work as a trainee at a major UK broadcaster in 2003 the news production system ran in Solaris, radio was on some vax thing, the image store ran on irix, the logging system was on aix, and there were half a dozen distros across about 20 servers with no real standards. The majority of staff were either windows IT staff (who got outsourced), help desk staff, or broadcast engineers with limited computer knowledge.
Over the next few years I changed the news system, others followed suit, and there's now 1200 ubuntu boxes/vms over 6 continents. Hooray for monoculture. Looking back it's amazing how quickly things change.
Solaris died roughly 3 times, depending on who you ask. 2002 was 15 years ago. Oracle officially killed it by laying off over 90% of people assigned to the project two days ago. Future Solaris development is deader than shit.
The only true UNIX that sees "widespread" use, and the only one that you will ever find a student with any experience with it is FreeBSD, and FreeBSD is popular because of its licensing, not its "true UNIX nature."
As somebody else said, it wouldn't have busted the recruiter's ass to forward the email to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" experience is relevant.
This line is where he started to come across as a jerk.
I think if he had skipped this paragraph and just replied with the "I've updated my resume..." bit, he would have been fine.
> Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, ..
Stanley should update his industry knowledge. My school used AIX/Solaris in the late 90s, switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000. I have friends who interned at Sun Microsystems in 2001/2 and they were still using Solaris on all their computers including what the receptionists were using.
There's an old saying about no one getting fired for buying Microsoft (or was it IBM). Similarly, the (entry-level) recruiter/sourcer would rather not get fired or get a bad rap from the hiring manager for confusing Linux and Unix than risk it believing some 20 year old jerk.