Ask HN: What do you care about the most in a tech job post?
When I look at job posts, I really care about what technology is being used, what would my role be on the team and project, and more.
What things do you look for in a technical job post?
What things do you look for in a technical job post?
It's not, of course, the only thing I care about, but far too few postings offer this level of transparency. Love the other ideas of work week length and problem to be solved as well.
After suffering a cube farm for the last years I also like companies who have offices or are remote.
Decent vacation is also appreciated.
Or I'll ask former employees sourced from their Linkedin profiles. Fight information asymmetry whenever possible.
Sadly there is not much of an appetite for truth that affects any business exploits that rely on misinformation.
If you began informing Ethiopian coffee bean farmers of how much Starbucks charges for a cup of coffee for just a few cents worth of coffee beans...
They would find a way to raise their price ;)
Some firms won't list it also for legal concerns as well.
There are two types engagements recruiting firms have with companies:
1. contingency - You only make money when you place someone. This is what triggers the blasting of many resumes over to companies with little vetting. In short, it's a numbers game.
2. retained - This is when a firm pays the recruiter either all or partially upfront. The recruiter is then incentive to their very best to place the candidate.
When you really dig into the recruiting space, it's very interesting and you start to uncover things that create a bad experience for candidates, companies, and recruiters.
In my future postings, I will evaluate the market for the type of position I'm posting, decide on a pretty narrow range (even a specific number), and make it part of the posting and the job overall. It worked well for me and many others, and removes so many issues.
"California employers can no longer ask job applicants about their prior salary and — if applicants ask — must give them a pay range for the job they are seeking, under a new state law that takes effect Jan. 1."
http://www.calpeculiarities.com/2017/10/12/third-times-the-c...
Land on page for a job on an aggregator board. GeoIP detects if you're in California; asks you confirm if you're interested in the salary range of the job. You click "yes", it submits the request (which requires a response by law). Response is reported back to requestor when it arrives, aggregator board has salary on record.
Second part of the law is brilliant!
In the same time I talked to that company, I had had enough time to talk to 5 others and get 5 more offers that were all offering at least as much as I was making or significantly more.
Since I was really interested in company #1, I declined really good offers along the way, hoping I'd get an offer from that company.
You can imagine my elation and subsequent horrors when they told me that they had picked me for the job and showed me their salary ranges. I would never ever in my life want to go through such an experience again and I actively avoid companies that are hiding or avoiding that topic somewhat early in the process.
I don’t knew if this is some new tactic, but the whole think struck me as trying to leverage a sunk cost fallacy to underpay employees.
- This took place in Germany, where salaries don't vary to a very large extent. There are some outliers, but most people know they need to offer a certain amount of $$$ for talent.
- I did my research and assessed the current market. It was on par with my salary at that time.
- They made sure to communicate that there is no equity offered, which made me believe their salaries are adjusted accordingly.
- No, I didn't tell them I was turning down offers. But I did tell them that if they don't move faster, I'm going to accept another offer.
I usually walk away from anyone not announcing salary ranges, because they're also the most likely to negotiate hard.
It's a solid and necessary skill to be able to negotiate hard. But when taken to such extremes as to keep people oblivious about their salary until the end, it's a red flag from the get go.
Not everyone's philosophy is the same; there are missions that I might find detestable and you might not.
But for goodness sake, please don't make me go through the process of filling out a long form, writing a cover-letter, and jumping on a 60 minute phone call before you tell me that you're building something to help the government kill people. Like, seriously, put that right at the top and save everybody's time.
So your point is sound: it's up to each of us to decide how to participate and where to draw various lines.
Sometimes they very clearly don't ("70-hour weeks" in particularly awful case).
Other times they definitely do.
Most of the time it's very hard to tell, though, which is a shame. There are lots of other programmers who care about this besides me (my rant about 70-hour workweek got 120,000 page views - https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/18/when-startups-pay-le...).
If your company is hiring, provides a sane workweek, and you'd like some ideas on how to promote your hiring effots - ping me: itamar@codewithoutrules.com.
If it takes me more than 2 minutes to apply for your position, I’m going to skip the whole thing
If you make me retype everything that’s on my resume, I’m going to pass
My ideal application is attach resume, put basic info like Email and name if not automatically scraped and submit
This is such a pain, it’s 2017 and I have job sites who want a Word document resume, plain text resume, then in the middle of filling out a web form with my work history I just closed the browser window because I don’t think I really wanted to work at a place like that anyway.
Granted that was the end of my attempts to work there.
I know that applying to jobs is a pain in the ass, and that there are far too many bad actors on the hiring side (ie not giving a clear no and just ghosting applicants). But if you enter the application process making it clear you have done your research, you know what the company does, what the specific role is, and even better if you know something about the people on my side, who you want to work with and why, etc. then you are guaranteed an interview and you're starting a mile ahead of anyone just shotgunning in a resume. Yes, that takes a LOT longer than 2 minutes. But with that approach maybe you won't need to send in hundreds of applications.
If I'm right, you are trying to find people who have the rights skills and the ones who match the culture of the company, right ? Then not doing any research doesn't mean anything
I do the same, if the application process is longer than 2 minutes, I skip, if the cover letter is mandatory, I skip. But when I get an interview I prepare a lot.
So it's about showing that you can take the viewpoint of someone other than yourself (in this case the person doing the hiring) and figure out how to be effective. Refusing to even write a paragraph explaining why you're the right person for a particular job is simply not an effective way to try to get a job. It shows naivete and a lack of understanding of the system involved, which makes me assume that you'll approach similar non-technical roadblocks, of which there will be millions, in the same ineffective way.
Don't be surprised if the people you recruit lack the real skills needed by your company
It's not an ego-driven "only consider the candidates who put in effort specifically to satisfy me" thing. It's more "there's a 50% chance that this applicant who did zero research wouldn't actually be happy in this line of work, whereas any applicant who spends ten minutes of research and then still applies has already decided that this line of work is probably a good fit for them."
Does this justify it for you? Or do you still feel that asking candidates to know generally what your company makes beforehand is unreasonable?
I think "knowing what the company does in general" is reasonable. Anything beyond that is on the unjustifiable-impractical plain. First quarter.
I write unique cover letters for each with a copy and pasted section about my skill set
I don’t think a poorly made application process has a lot to do with doing research on a company
That is, my issue is with bad software not necessarily shotgunning resumes
Unlikely. There's a reason so many people take the shotgun approach. The response rate from cold online applications is very, very low. The 'hiring funnel' is also very discouraging. Every additional step in the hiring process is a step in which you may never hear from a single company again for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with you. Are you going to spend a lot of time up front to send an application into the void and never hear anything back again?
"Bad actors on the hiring side" include companies posting job openings they have no intention of filling. There's an information asymmetry here and spamming resumes and stock cover letters is how I resolve that. I know the company is serious about hiring somebody if I make it past the first HR/recruiter phone screen to talk to an actual engineer. Then I invest some time, do my research, contact some of the company's engineers through twitter and linkedin, etc. The company gets bonus points if first contact is made by the actual hiring manager or someone even higher up the food chain.
I wish I could tell right away who's serious about hiring somebody and who isn't. I haven't found a way to tell from the job ad alone.
And I skip when they ask for a cover letter (or send a blank pdf page)
Job hunting works both ways. If the company has put in the time to write up a decent enough job listing to make you interested, then you damn well do your side and don't waste their time (yes, this may be a shock to you, but sending a crappy email without a cover letter wastes someones elses time).
And yes if I don't spend 10 minutes writing a cover letter for your company I'm not able to do my job properly, you probably find the easiest way to find if someone is going to do his job properly. Well done !
Yes, it does indeed work both ways. Just because you don't understand this doesn't make you in any way correct.
I'm not really sure what your second paragraph means. Are you saying you job hunt while at work? That's not a professional thing to be doing. In any case, writing a cover letter is very easy, so being unable to do that probably means you need to work on your communication skills. Heck, with the amount of posts you've stuck onto HN today alone, you could have knocked up a short cover letter that would suit 90% of technical job applications, so this can't be a time problem for you.
After this, I usually try to find out as much as I can about the company. It helps a lot if the company has an engineering/team blog.
When I'm interested in a post, I'll look at the company website to get a feel for it. In the job posting they always describe how open and informal the culture is, how great the atmosphere is, etc. etc. The website often tells me what kind of company it really is. If that's alright I'll apply and expect further explanation about both the company and my position in interviews (since interviews are two-way), while I also fill them in on my qualifications.
Months? I don’t know anything about your situation, but how could you expect an employer to think that this is worth their resources?
I am also chronically ill. I had a job at a Fortune 500 company at one time. People there were aware I was desperately poor because I was walking to work and everyone was giving me rides. Some folks knew this was because of my medical condition. The company didn't do shit all for me (other than all the offers of rides).
Meanwhile, someone who made a lot more money than me had a death in the family and they did fundraisers so she could attend both the memorial service in one state and the actual funeral in another. They also routinely did fund raisers for people with a health crisis or a family member with a health crisis. I was there over five years. Nothing like that was ever done for me. It is part of why I left. ("Fuck you, too.")
Yes, I have special needs. No, my special needs are not greater than that of other employees who were getting the support I lacked.
I now do freelance work so I can work at my own pace. I have carefully arranged my life in that regard. But, really, I don't think I am more of a special snowflake than other people with jobs. But, for whatever reason, people think my needs are unreasonable, while they bend over backwards to take care of other people who, in some cases, have far less serious problems.
I get that a lot, in all kinds of ways. I don't really understand why. It is possible that prejudice is an element.
Flexible work and remote work is a potential boon for people with chronic health issues. There are a lot of people with such issues. As life expectancy increases and more people survive cancer, etc, we are going to see more people who can work, need to work and want to work, but they need to do it part time, flexibly and/or remotely.
Imagine a company holding fundraiser for Joe in accounting because he's poor.
That is simply not culturally acceptable, though it's likely the right thing to do.
I was homeless for ~5.7 years. During that time, my goal was consistently to learn to make money online to support myself.
People said shitty things to me like saying that I was "panhandling the internet." People pissed all over me, called me crazy, told me consistently to shut up about my problems, not because I was begging -- because I absolutely wasn't -- but because they had no plans to help me and it made them uncomfortable with the disconnect between what callous assholes they were and what nice people they imagined they were.
A lot of people online knew of my plight. Most of them either did nothing to help me or actively pissed all over me.
Meanwhile, I know of someone who joined Hacker News, networked, told everyone their sob story, got help pursuing their goals, was gifted money, etc. I never tried to use my sob story to manipulate people into giving me money. It works for some people. It isn't something I would ever do. I very much resent being accused of it.
One of the problems appears to be that I am a woman. The ways in which that is a problem are complicated.
But I am really tired of hearing all the excuses or explanations for why I need to understand why the entire world would like to tell me personally "Oh, fuck you. Feel free to die in the gutter. Also, stop making us aware of what assholes we are."
I am really in no mood to listen to this kind of tripe from anyone. Your account is two days old. If you aren't trying to defend the people at my former org, then, you know, just don't. Don't come here and try to explain to me why it is okay for the entire world to have such a monstrous fuck you attitude towards me such that there is just no path forward, not even if I am willing to crawl naked across broken glass to get there.
I spend a lot of time feeling suicidal over what I have learned about the monstrous heartlessness and callousness of the world in the last six years. I am not the type to go postal and go kill a bunch of people, but I certainly understand why that seems to be happening more and more here lately.
Long story short, I'm an anarchocommunist for a reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: I should add that this may be an unreasonable expectation but it's the expectation I need to have in order to be stably employed.
Done wasting my time on noise and distraction. "Interaction" is just fine with me, and I can even context-switch pretty rapidly. Unholy levels of stress and requirements to "tune out" a bunch of irrelevant and noisy stuff going on around me? Forgetaboutit.
I'm happier shuffling papers in a quiet, peaceful environment, than coding "the solution to the universe" in open space with "George who shouts everything across the aisles" and the very nice Melissa who nonetheless has multiple cube (really, "cubette") meetings everyday while Tayna pounds her (shared) desk constantly in emphasis while on sometimes hours long phone calls.
I think a lot of people can be happy doing more and a far wider range of things than they imagine, if the environment is simply right.
P.S. Which is by way of saying to employers, if you really want to hire that 10x/rockstar/gets-stuff-done/innovates person, hook them with an assurance they'll have an optimal working environment. And for many, that means a quiet physical environment. And if you're endlessly questioning just where the line is, and how little accommodation you can get away with? You've already lost that person -- sooner, even if they initially take the position.
- Remote / Location
- Flexible hours?
- Technology I will be using
- Ethics concerns? (Weapons, Spam, Porn, etc..)
- Team or solo (if team, can I meet them?)
- Architecture vs Coding (Do I have any say in projects?)
----
I am willing to negotiate tens of thousands of dollars for flexible hours and remote. Commute time and costs add up.
Many people define work/life balance as a 40-hour work work, but I would be willing to negotiate tens of thousands of dollars and more hours/week if I had the flexibility to work when and where I wanted to.
If you look at https://www.keyvalues.io, you'll see what dozens of engineers said they cared about most when evaluating a new job. I used their responses to create engineering team profiles that would directly address these things.
Not surprisingly, I see many of the same values described in the comments in this post: "Work/Life Balance," "High Quality Code Base," "Flexible Work Arrangements," "Safe Environment to Fail," "Committed to Personal Growth," "Team is Diverse," "Remote-OK," "Thoughtful Office Layout," and questions around how "Product-Driven" the team is.
Picture with my desk, chair and station.
Salary range.
All the rest.
This would save me so much time. I can't count the number of postings I've seen on "StackOverflow Careers" that brag about their Joel Test score (quiet working conditions, check!), but when I dig deeper I find a photo of a giant open floor plan.
I've even seen hiring videos where someone bragged about what a great place it was to get work done, and right behind the interviewee is a foosball/ping-pong table, and just on the other side you can see some poor programmer with headphones trying to block it all out.
The words "quiet working conditions" must mean something else to hiring teams these days, but no matter. Show a picture of my desk, and there's no ambiguity.
I spent a lot of time curating my resume, this includes formatting. Let me submit a pdf.
I would like to know the positions funding model upfront.
Its nice to know what tech is used, and weather the software stack is monolithic or diverse across the organization.
PTO is important, and should be clearly stated.
If the team has presented at a technology conference recently this is a huge plus.
salary range is helpful (no need to be super narrow).
What do i need to know? What am I expected to learn? What are nice things to know?
I would love for postings to include the company's expected response time! Also satisfactory "We may not respond if you aren't what we're looking for at this time."
Treat your audience like adults.
Don't use 'ninja' or 'rockstar' as a positive descriptor.
Don't use statements like "We at FreshSqeezed.io provide a service like Twitter but for Farmer's Markets!".
* Location; I love to cycle to work
* Pay rate; if it's too low, they're probably not looking for me, and if it's too high, same. Though I'm willing to take a pay cut when other aspects are good
* Technology; stuff that I know of course, but even more stuff that I want to learn
* Interesting problem space; will I just be moving data between DB and browser, or is there something more interesting about it?
I couldn't say which of these is more important; they all count. Money is nice of course, but I'm willing to work for a lower rate if it's close to home and I get to learn something I want to learn but don't know very well yet. The experience is valuable to me, and my lack of experience makes me less valuable to the client, so it makes sense for everybody. And no amount of money is going to make me stick with a job I absolutely hate. Well, maybe some amount of money, but few would pay that much.
- technology used
- ethics of the company (not making weapons, not spying etc.)
One that doesn't show up a huge amount at the moment, but which holds huge weight for me (potentially trumping salary) is autonomy: to what extent am I going to have leverage to build useful things as an individual rather than a mostly-fungible "team member".
I'm wondering whether some people have actually been a little scared off from advertising this because of the risk of being dinged for {bad,lack of} process.
Take this with a grain of salt, some people do actually like "fast paced" of course.
What are the key differentiators you’re looking for? If you had to explain your search to a recruiter... what would your elevator pitch version be? Just tell me that.
For one of my last jobs it would’ve been this for example:
“You need to be able to explain/guide our customers on how to build internet banking sites using our product and keep them happy in the process. Lots of traveling involved.”
2) Indications of thoughtfulness and solid engineering practices.
Positives: "testing" "mentorship" "Craftsmanship" "clear communication" "clear scoping" and indications thereof. Also, 'boringness' of mission--I want to work on plumbing.
Negatives: "rockstar" "hot".
3) Salary
4) Tech stack
5) Not having candy in easy reach
5. Support for physical wellness (whether in food or exercise) is also incredibly important to me.
I start by ignoring the first 50% of posts because they are contracting positions.
Then I look for the tech stack and product built, Since that filters 99% of the remaining ads (I don't like web tech for example) I rarely need to filter on more things.
Location and general technology field (frontend or full stack web tech, in my case). That's it. I don't consider anything else in a job post to be reliable.
Do I have any moral objections to the way they conduct business?
Will I be doing something that's interesting?
Would I want to tell others about what I do?
I have come to believe that, in poor quality companies, HR is peopled by gremlins. If the person writing the post gets something really technically bad, and doesn't know it, then I don't want to work there. It means that I am going to be interviewed (and selected) by trolls, instead of technical folks. It means that if I can tell a funny joke, or look cute, then that is going to overwhelm the weight of any technical ability they can discern. It means that half my coworkers are idiots, so when they figure out I can do what they talk about, I'm going to be gamed, pressured, blackmailed, and pushed to do half of everybody's work. If I wanted to do it ALL myself, and get none of the credit, rewards, remuneration, advancement, or job security, then I would start my own company.
I look for pointy-haired-boss jargon (think Dilbert). I hate those folks. They usually don't know anything but how to exploit others for their own professional gain.
It doesn't take much looking around to see how the company is doing. They like to hire newbies right before a layoff. I look at company performance, and if it looks like they are about to lay a ton of folks off, I don't want to play there. They are laying people off because of previous failures to hire the right people. If the folks getting the axe aren't including the upper levels of HR, then the source of failures to hire, manage, retain, and grow the right people hasn't been resolved.
It doesn't take much looking to see if they have spammed job boards. If there are going to be 100, or 1000 folks applying for the position, I don't want to deal with the crap. They don't know actual quality, so they more aggressively filter on keywords. If I don't have the right keyword I'm not on the menu? I don't need to work there. They like to pat their back, find someone decent who they can exploit by paying 1/3 of market rate. That game is built to take away my livelihood. I'd rather just work and do truly amazing things for their competitors, and let economics 101 and the market wash the dross from the market.
I look for folks who participated in the Techtopus(https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...) (massive screw over engineers company collusion) and if the company was on the list I boycott them. If they are going to try to suppress wages in the field for decades, I can suppress their revenue.
I look at company pictures, and pictures of employees on LinkedIN. If they don't have at least one person who is mostly like me, then statistically I can't succeed there. I go elsewhere.
I review glassdoor. If they have a track-record of treating folks badly, especially folks who have had my position, I go elsewhere.