Job Definitions Page: Object Reference not Set

I had to review some of my SharePoint 2010 job definitions to figure out why our social rating weren’t updating. So first place to look was the job definitions page. When I browsed there I got the dreaded “Object reference not set” error with not much more detail in the ULS.

Sidenote: Not sure why the inventors of the try\catch block cannot implement it in their own code

The error typically is caused by a null job definition. Here are the steps to find and fix:

• In SharePoint management shell run “get-sptimerjob | sort-object -property Name | ft Name, Id, DisplayName >jobs.txt”
• Open jobs.txt file and look for a definition where either the name or displayname is empty and copy the guid
• Then delete job via:$job = Get-SPTimerJob [YourGUID]
  $job.delete()