Now this is a job posting
airbnb.com
airbnb.com
When I was, say, 20, the blank slate might have been appealing. Now I'm actually good at stuff. I have deep specific skills and sorts of problems I like working on. Working in a job where I'm not using a significant subset of those skills is a poor use of my abilities. (Though, notably, doing the founder thing that happens anyway. ;-) )
To me this post basically reads as looking for, "young, excited and inexperienced", which may be their goal, but would be disastrous if used as a general template.
At least give an idea of the problem domain being faced (scaling, for example)
All that will happen is you will get a load of people apply who aren't really suitable for what they had in mind...
This posting definitely leans more toward the perceiving end of the spectrum. That isn't necessarily bad or good, but it definitely makes this posting different.
The first section is titled "Position" which would make you think that it would be a description of the position being advertised. It's not. It reads like a list of requirements: "You have... You are... You are..." The second section actually makes sense, which is rare for a posting such as this. The third section is titled "Bonus Skills." I see a framework, an RDBMS, two languages, a technology, a skill, a service, another skill, specific knowledge, and a requirement. Nine bullet points: two actual skills.
Having experience with a language or a framework is not a skill, it is experience. Having knowledge of a language or framework is also not a skill. All the time companies take five minutes to write a job posting like this while perspective developers waste hours on resumes and cover letters. Most of the applications are thrown out because the company couldn't take a little bit longer to write a clearer job posting.
A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS products. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. The impression I got was that they wanted to focus on the product and not spend time fixing ActiveRecord bugs, etc.
Are there really no good MS hackers out there? Is it a cultural thing?
First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN.
They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack.
Did they then administer it?
Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment.
There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.
In contrast, the average job listing makes it very unlikely that anybody can comply with all the requirements, so the hiring manager ends up hiring someone who does not meet requirements. This is the honest approach to the problem of hiring good hackers.
Only if we're thinking of formally specified computing languages. Since it's a world travel business that demands just a few lines later that you travel around the world as part of your job responsibilities, I read the requirement as refering* to natural languages.
I think an ad like this could work for a small, high profile startup like this but it should really take a line to say, "we mostly write all this in [RoR|Arc|Django|Objective-C] and need to keep [Oracle|Psotgres|MySQL] back ends tuned." That way we'd have some clue what to expect.
* Look, I'm qualified to write web standards.
Presumably interested applicants will be able to e.g. look at their site and figure out whether they want to work for the company (i.e. it doesn't sell the company, although it does sell the quality of engineering hiring, which is even more rare than quality engineering management!).
It's also good in that it has one firm and semi-measurable requirement (specifically one or more sites the applicant has done his stuff on; "semi-" qualification for their ability to know how much an applicant was really responsible for that).
ADDED: my only complaint is that it doesn't explicitly sell the company or the job; the former is something you have to do in an classified advertisement ("We are the leading...." is an example of the usual BS sort of copy that does that). For an ad on a web site, that's OK, although adding a bit of explicit selling of the job and maybe the company would make it better.
To make it perfectly clear, the emphasized "everything right and nothing wrong" is my acknowledgment that implicitly it does a hell of a job of selling the job (since that's so very rare and says so much).
Does "Really smart engineer" mean someone, specifically, with an "engineering" degree?
That said, it is a heuristic for determining who's smart. You just have to realize that it's a very imperfect tool.
We don't have the ridiculousness of sanitation engineer and the like so if the job posting includes engineer in the title you can easily assume they expect a degree and a licence with a proper Canadian accreditation board.
And in case you were wondering, software engineering is only slightly different in that the majority of software engineers don't keep up their accreditation licence so usually when you see a Canadian software engineering posting they're looking for the degree but not necessarily the licence and will often accept non-engineers with a comp sci degree. It's rare that if the posting asks for software engineer that they'll accept someone without a degree. (Those positions are usually titled programmer, developer or programmer/analyst (which is the title you typically get from a CEGEP (kind of like community college in the US) degree.))
What about those of us who have a mustache every day?
This should be a requirement rather than a bonus. I can't tell you just how helpful it is to hire people who are customers/users of your service. They obviously believe in what you are doing because they use the service and have given the ultimate vote - opening their wallet.
Here's an old blog post where I talked about that with our company http://www.cattlemanagement.com/customer-service-hiring-phil...
That said, there is no way I'd hire a customer service person who wasn't a customer first. (but then, I sell a product that is of interest to technical people, and I target the low end, so really, #prgmr on irc.freenode.net is probably a fairly decent place to pick up cheap SysAdmins.) If I sold to, say, real-estate agents, I might feel differently. Also, if I was looking for an MBA, my customer pool would probably not be a very useful place to fish.
Really, people I know, and people who know people I know have been a more useful resource than anything else. (I don't mean people on my "social network" in the sense of facebook, but, for example, I met the co-author of my book because he was the roommate of one of my employees.)
Instead of just having Rock Band the game I'd have full on band equipment.
Working towards this type of environment!
Are you in SF?
I mean, I think hiring people without experience is great; how else are they going to get experience? but if you are looking to pay $25/hr, don't waste the time of people who expect $200/hr. (and visa-versa.)