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Wanted: Ninja Rockstar Code Monkey Hacker Unicorn

rkoutnik.com

65 pointsgandalfar61 comments

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Job Ad Title: Warp Engineer with at least 5years hands-on needed

You should have a solid knowledge of operating Planck length structures.

N-Dimensional and Indeterministic Modelling are mandatory.

Apply fast, ship will leave earth within the next 2 weeks.

I have 5 year of OS/2 Warp experience. Does that count?

I'm your huckleberry. I can do such a ridiculous Scottish accent that when everything is going right, it still sounds like it's all gone to hell. And when it all goes to hell, no one will know the difference.

Slight problem with voice-activated devices.

I'm betting "Yes you’ll get all the usual benefits, but if you’re really going for perks, Google is your best bet! If you want to make an impact, then please apply." and "We’ll have a large variety of alcohol in the office as well as an assortment of video games for the perfect frat environment" are the two sentences from real job descriptions

My guess was the Google line and "Plan on working ~100+ hours a week during sprints. If that scares you, don’t apply." The 100 hours is a little extreme, but I've seen things similar to "If that scares you, don’t apply." in descriptions before.

Sad but true :

http://www.indeed.com/job/javascript-nodejs-socketio-ninja-9...

https://www.codeeval.com/company/EmailCherry/

Both from the same company? Wow.

I believe it's called hedging.

From the first link:

> Plan on working ~100+ hours a week during sprints

And the second:

> A lot of companies equate putting in long hours with productivity. We think thats nonsense.

wow.. so many gems in there

advanced JS (jquery doesn't count, cmon).

A big plus if you've scaled products to tens of millions of users

We'd love it if you've dealt with optimizing DB clusters, hadoop, relational DBs, Mongo, Node.js

~100+ hours a week during sprints

Unlimited vacation days

it's like someone had a brain fart of a job description during a drinking session and then went "fuck it, hey Bob watch this. <submit>"

And with less than 3 years experience!

Author here, nicely done. That's the two sources for the real quotes.

Does the idea of beer and video games in the office really bother anyone? Sounds great to me...

wouldn't you rather do that at home? or outside the office, at least? but since you're working 60 or more hours a week, I guess in the office is the only opportunity...

eh it's okay if you are 20 something and single. If your goal is to fill your office with 20 something single workers, it seems fairly effective..

You can have it both ways. I don't think older and attached people would be put off by that necessarily, you would just have to encourage them with other perks.

So I have worked in the young hip free beer in office environment full of 20 somethings.

I have worked in the Fortune 1000 company full of older "lifers"

I think it would be really hard to mix both together? Like just the offering of free beer and encouraging employees to stay after work and work till sundown.. that is going to build social circles among those people. How do you get the unwanted older guys with families to stick around? Pay them more than their worth to make up for it?

You give them windows to socialise during office hours like potlucks and other organised events. I've never worked somewhere where I am not the youngest person upon joining so I'm on the other side of this, but that seems to work.

If people don't want to associate with coworkers and just clock in and clock out I think they probably don't belong in their job.

No, not really. I enjoy doing those things in the office.

Cracking open a free beer and playing COD on a console somebody else paid for at 5:01 PM on a Friday sounds fantastic to me. Working with people you consider friends is awesome, and this sounds like a great way to facilitate that.

30-something with kid here...

I enjoy cracking open a beer and playing some foosball with my team members before going home. I don't get to go to meetups as much as I used to and it's a good chance to socialize.

Also, as a manager it helps me keep my pulse on things. People open up after a beer. Foosball has become a problem... I've gotten really good and sometimes it takes some coaxing to get people to play... "hey, if you don't play you can't get better"

I doubt it's just the beer, associating with your subordinates 'outside' work as a peer when nobody is being paid is good leadership and earns you trust and respect.

Yeah, I wasn't really saying it in a "alcohol loosens you up sort of way"... no one really gets too buzzed on one beer. More of a camaraderie sort of way.

Sounded great when I was in my early 20s. Now days, not so much.

I have my own hobbies and friends to do them with. I prefer to get my work done, then leave and go do my own stuff.

I don't necessarily mind beer and video games being available at work, but listing them on a job posting is a red flag that the company wants people with no social life, willing to work long hours for relatively low pay.

It's also a red flag that you may be working with people who consider beer and video games a perk...

Fair point, because I am all of those things. If people like me struggling to make a place for themselves in this world are a red flag... I'm not even remotely apologetic.

I didn't mean it as an insult, but I guess I phrased it poorly. Calling out non-work stuff like beer and video games in a job posting promotes monoculture.

Yes and no. I'm not hyper-competitive, so I don't really care what the office score is.

And the whole alcohol thing can lead to things happening that can't be unhappened.

I think "If that scares you, don’t apply. We don’t want people who are scared by silly things like reality." sounds more real than advertising a large variety of alcohol.

Must have "White" - W T F? Are you serious?

Edit: Not that 'Male' is any better...

Edit2: I came to the link without context - That was the first thing that shot in my eyes and I didn't realize that this actually wasn't a real job thing. You got me there -.-' Not meant to be trolling ;)

you are either an expert troll or...

I read the linked article on Implementers, Problem Solvers, and Problem Finders. I think that, given that the job market is very much on the side of programmers, that people need to be more choosy with what they take. You usually know going into it what you're going to be working on and what kind of company it is. Applying for an iOS job at a place that sells dog toys? I bet you're not going to be feeling like you're using your creative side...

> given that the job market is very much on the side of programmers

I think this is seriously oversold. Outside of the Valley, or outside of certain skillsets, the market is not on the side of programmers.

I'd say even inside the Valley too, depending on your tech stack, major, university pedigree, or stars on your open source github project.

But then again, the market is not on the side of employees in general - we are many, positions are few. AFAIC, programmers, developers, hackers, etc. still have it pretty good relatively.

It's definitely a myth. There may be a lot of companies with job postings and interviewing, but not a lot of hiring. Sure, HN posters will tell you all about the mythical "shortage of engineers" and how everyone is hiring. Also, everyone on HN has $200K salaries, can get their next job in 1-2 days max, and has a supermodel girlfriend. In reality, the hiring market really just doesn't seem to be that healthy. Still much better than the market for textile or factory workers, but not great.

This.

I got laid off a few months ago. All in all, I was unemployed for about three months before landing a new position.

Whenever I checked Indeed or Monster, I saw lots of positions that required extensive J2EE or .NET skills, plus a bunch of webdev and a handful of mobile jobs. None of those I have. I have lots of Java experience, sure, but it's all core Java and thoroughly divorced from the web. I was passed up for some jobs I thought I was going to get because the internal recruiters were really excited about me only to get shot down by the hiring manager because I had no webdev background.

My background is half in core Java and half in Linux platform and Python development; almost nobody in Dallas wants either. And, no I'm not interested in leaving Dallas, and even if I was, I certainly wouldn't move to the Valley. If I ever set foot in California at all, it'd be SoCal.

What finally saved me was when an old friend of mine found a position open at his company and put in a good word for me. I got lucky. If not for him, I'd be staring down another two-year period of unemployment like I had in 2010-2012.

Yeah. Two aspects of that:

- there's a shit ton of programmers on the market now, with universities producing more and more like sausage factories

- the job market is getting super-specialized - once they'd ask for JavaScript programmers, now they ask exclusively for "Angular experience" or "React experience" or "$random_two_weeks_old_framework experience"; whether demanding such specific skillsets buy companies anything over asking for just a $language programmer is arguable

> the job market is getting super-specialized - once they'd ask for JavaScript programmers, now they ask exclusively for "Angular experience" or "React experience" or "$random_two_weeks_old_framework experience"; whether demanding such specific skillsets buy companies anything over asking for just a $language programmer is arguable

Honestly, this just aggravates me so much. I'd like to learn some of these technologies! But, no, even though I'm a solid programmer and I have a history of picking up new things as they get thrown at me at a company I'm already working at, nobody wants me if I don't already have a lot of experience with that one specific library under my belt.

Also, on a similar note, I've noticed this being done with IBM software for years. So many job descriptions I've had to pass on because they want specific experience with WebSphere and other software. I've seen this as early as 2010...

And what about Red Hat? They do search Java, Python and Linux people all the time, and even Remote

I... honestly didn't know they had offices here. Never saw them post anything on the job boards, either, at least not with the search terms I was using.

I'll keep them in mind if I find myself unemployed again or if I ever decide I want to leave this company.

Read through that article as well and I have to say it rings scarily true. To use the article's vocabulary, I wish there were more "Finder" roles out there. Most companies have plenty of "Implementor" and "Solver" roles, but nobody's looking for "Finders". Finding the right problem to solve is often the domain of the founders and execs because of course, they are oh-so-smart and always just innately know what the company should be working on!

I consider myself a decent programmer, and I love doing it. I used to program professionally, and still do so at home all the time as a hobby. But I have a hard time imagining myself coming into work and doing it for a living anymore. I got sick of implementing someone else's half-baked ideas and not having even a tiny say about what we're building, who it's for, what the most important features are, where we should spend our time, etc. It was all: Close this ticket. Fix this bug. Implement this feature using this binary tree here and that data structure there with these fields. JUST TYPE IT IN and don't worry if the product will be successful. Most places treat software engineering as data entry. The glorious Product Managers got to do the creative work!

So I moved over to the product management side to get those things and that's great. But it's still not a "Finder" role. You don't have enough time to both find and solve the problem, and you don't have the autonomy to do it right. You're too busy running around talking to 'stakeholders', smoothing over things with marketing, reviewing ad copy, sitting in strategic synergy meetings, battling with the UI designers, and trying to keep sales from selling something you don't have. And, at the end of the day, you still don't have that autonomy or creative control, since there's always someone higher up the food chain who just wants you to do it their way and write them a report about it.

It seems in tech your choice is between being an implementer-monkey and being a sock-puppet.

Isn't "Problem Finder" just a synonym for QA?

> We practice HN-driven-development

Brilliant.

What is HN-driven-development?

I'm guessing writing with whatever is most exciting eg Rust, Go, Phoenix, ml, etc.

http://devdriven.by/hn/

.... who's single, willling to be paid in options rather than a market-rate salary, and will work long hours because they truly believe in our mission of $RANDOM_BS_NARRATIVE

I'm almost afraid to ask which two sentences came from real job descriptions..

I'm guessing this is one of them:

> Yes you’ll get all the usual benefits, but if you’re really going for perks, Google is your best bet! If you want to make an impact, then please apply.

Yep.

Here: https://www.codeeval.com/company/EmailCherry/

My guesses (two sentence _pairs_):

> Plan on working ~100+ hours a week during sprints. If that scares you, don’t apply.

> Yes you’ll get all the usual benefits, but if you’re really going for perks, Google is your best bet! If you want to make an impact, then please apply.

My guess:

> "Equity: 0.1% - 2% for the ‘right person’."

I'm betting on:

> We’ll have a large variety of alcohol in the office as well as an assortment of video games for the perfect frat environment

I recall a (short-lived?) trend a year or two ago of startups offering free beer as a perk, and generally trying to describe themselves like a frathouse.

Having beer, fine. Describing yourself as a frat house seems both a bit sexist and immature. I believe you but it's a bit appalling. But I supposed it's a good signal for people looking to apply.

"We’ll offer the low end of the range, citing lack of experience with some framework that hasn’t left beta." and because, ah, you're self taught.

> Unshakable confidence due to the Dunning-Kruger effect

This is my favorite line.

This made me smile, and then I felt bad because it's true.

That scarily describes a startup I am involved with.

Must haves:

White Male

Haha! I see a law suit on its way! :)

Forgot around 30s :D

No, early Twenties with 15 Years of experience in the 'field'

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