Joblint – Test tech job posts for issues | Hacker News Reader

Joblint – Test tech job posts for issues

joblint.org

58 pointspabs349 comments

I've built one of these before and the devil is so very much in the details, but really even more in the context.

There's the easy stuff: "ninja" for example. Nobody, in the year 2023, should be using that word in a job post.

But then there's the hard stuff that really matters. If you want someone who has experience being a "white hat" hacker, that's perfectly alright, but if you want "white people only" well that's obviously bad. If you don't flag the latter you look like a joke, but if you flag every instance of the word "white" then it feels overbearing and like the tool isn't very smart.

I'm pretty sure these will never actually be useful on a superficial word-matching basis. They need to look at broader phrases and context.

And then there's the real problem that even if the tool helps the hiring manager / recruiter sweep their inbuilt biases under the rug to get better applicants, they're still the ones making the hiring decisions.

I wouldn’t consider anything easy tbh, ninja is the name of quite a few libraries that are common enough for experience to be requested

Have you ever seen a job posting asking for white people only? At least in America that sounds highly unlikely.

I can already see the tweets of people making up ridiculous job ads which are perfectly "linted" while contain some wildly racist text. That'd be highly damaging for the tool, which is what OP is saying.

This happens far more often than you may want to believe. Either it's explicitly requested or it's somewhere in the recruiter notes.

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/zkh9pf/anyo...

No ninjas? WTF?! Am I supposed to only hire pirates now? :-O

At least according to this tool, "rock stars" are still fair game. EDIT: never mind, I got it wrong. No rock stars either.

I have often wondered though how many coders worldwide are really comparable to a rock star, I guess in terms of standing out as a super creative outlier. So many rockstar wannabes out there in the wild world..

Linus is the only one I can think of given his level of job security. Maybe Woz, but I don't think he doesn't seem to be a professional coder today. Perhaps Stephen Wolfram. Everyone else seems much more disposable than even B-tier rock/pop stars, relatively speaking. Bill doesn't count given he likely hasn't touched any code himself since the 1980s.

I've heard of multiple language and framework designers who failed to score a job when it really should have been a slam dunk. There might be rockstars among the foot soldiers of tech, but virtually none outside of that.

The number may as well be zero. It's pure marketing crap.

Relatedly, no US Marines have ever defeated a lava monster with a magic sword.

Our David Lee Roth React/Redux guru recent left and we are looking for a Sammy Hagar to fill his shoes!

FELLOW HUMAN WHY ARE YOU YELLING?

NO PIRATES, ONLY ROBOTS, WHO ARE CLEARLY NOT HUMAN AS WE ARE.

One might reasonably be sharing a ninja-based build system in their tech stack?

> If you want someone who has experience being a "white hat" hacker, that's perfectly alright

Why is "white hat" hacker inherently used to mean "ethical" or "good"? Most normal people wear black hats.

In Old Western films the hero would often wear a white cowboy hat, the villain a black one.

You should not need to know about Old Westerns to participate in security. This sounds like great terminology to replace with explicit terms.

Good news: you don't need to know about Old Westerns. You just need to know that white hat is good and black hat is bad.

Oh. What's red hat then?

Seriously though, if learning the meaning of two (three if you throw in grey hat) terms is too difficult, never mind the rest of the requisite knowledge to meaningfully participate, you may want to consider an alternate area of study.

> You just need to know that white hat is good and black hat is bad.

Yeah, anything that boils down to "you don't need to know about X, you just need to know that white X is good and black X is bad" is not a great look for technical terminology in the current context.

It's like saying you should not need to know about ancient Greece history to participate in marathon running. And the truth is, you don't. You can easily learn the present meaning of a word without fully understanding its etymology.

There are countless words and idioms that will make no sense when you're not familiar with them. You could consider these annoying, or you could consider these the interesting parts of a language.

I for one very much like words with interesting history.

Or you need to know the greek alphabet to deploy on AWS lambda. Or the history of lambda calculus.

Fair, but marathon doesn't have the additional association of "white = good, black = bad" which is, to say the least, somewhat insensitive given current events.

I'm aware that I'm moving the goalposts a little bit, or at least making them more explicit. Sorry? Just trying to voice explicitly why my (admittedly subjective) stylistic sense is going "Eh, this one is better off replaced by explicit terms".

I mean,one of the core competencies in (certain types of) security is bringing yourself up to speed on obscure technical systems you never heard of before. Familiarizing yourself with unfamiliar terminology is step 1.

If you can't figure out how to google white hat, how are you going to figure out what the FHBTYU (made up acronym) is in your tech stack?

Personally i find the explicit terms really cringy and seem to have been co-opted a bit by marketers. "Ethical hacker" has very different canotations than white-hat, to me.

"We are looking for childless workers who will join our weekly event of snorting coke off of each other's necks until we pass out. We expect a minimum of 200 hours per week in the office, though we do not allow sleeping on the job.

Perl nerds only!"

Zero issues reported.

“white childless workers” also doesn’t get flagged.

I think this is the main ruleset: https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint/blob/master/lib/rule...

There's such a striking lack of racist/homophobic rules that I'm almost willing to believe it's a satire project.

Edit: this got me -2: "We provide seeds to local farming communities to ensure they always have the green fields they need to supply their local markets."

It hasn't been updated in 7 years. I'm willing to believe it's an abandoned project that didn't see the desired traction to justify gold plating it.

Oh it totally is. But with the number of people in this thread (and past threads) talking about how nice this is, "all it needs is.." and such, it's not unwarranted to call out the system's obvious absurdity.

Missing the part about how it's built in Rust

lol it's nice to see Hacker News is still a bastion of reasoned communication and friendly discourse between tech people. I should really log in more.

I built Joblint literally 10 years ago as a fun side project. I was fed up with a spate of really terrible job ads and decided to write something to help me as an engineer vet whether I wanted to work at a company.

It's not a solid tool, it doesn't represent the way I'd build things now, and it codifies my fairly limited view of what made a bad job when I was a bright-eyed 20-something. I should probably add a note to the repo and site to express this but I'm always surprised when it gets dug up tbh.

If I were building it again then yeah it'd spot a lot more issues, it wouldn't be built using a massive RegExp , and it'd probably go harder on trying to spot red flags around homophobia and racism. I'm sure some of the foaming gammons here on HN would be overjoyed.

Anyway, see you all in another 10 years. Lots of love

> lol it's nice to see Hacker News is still a bastion of reasoned communication and friendly discourse between tech people. I should really log in more

> ...

> I'm sure some of the foaming gammons here on HN would be overjoyed.

The comments here don't feel that out of line that you need to be this defensive / thin skinned. It's an interesting idea, and worth expanding on, even if it's been languishing.

> The comments here don't feel that out of line that you need to be this defensive / thin skinned.

It's not the first time that this tool is discussed and, unfortunately, looking at the comments made in the past, I would definitely consider them out of line.

So I'm not surprised that the parent poster feels like that about this place.

Over half of the comments in this thread are exceedingly negative and some are claiming it's racist satire. It's fairly out-of-line, and as is often the case the HN mob is in the wrong.

But Rowan why didn't joblint prevent the outbreak of war in Ukraine? I see this as a major failing, and really speaks to the nature of your character.

I was hoping/expecting it would flag descriptions that don't mention a salary range, location or worthless perks. Maybe I'm jaded.

I’ve been helping college students navigate their job searches through a local program. I’ve noticed a continuous dilution of the criteria for what people consider to be “red flags” in their job searches.

When I started doing this, we had to teach people to watch for red flags like unpaid internships, companies with extreme turnover, or jobs trying to demand full-time employment but paying people as contractors without benefits.

In recent years, I feel like I spend more time talking people out of simple things they’ve determined are “red flags”, such as job postings that don’t use exactly the right words or interviews that don’t proceed exactly like the student imagines they should. In the past year, I’ve had students tell me that their “red flags” include things like any interview process that takes more than 1 hour total (this is for college grads) or any job that doesn’t pay FAANG level compensation, or any job that requires them to do any on-call for their own work. We spend a lot of time resetting expectations to get students aligned with healthy jobs that won’t take advantage of them, but nevertheless can’t match their unrealistically perfect ideals.

This tool has good intentions, but I’m afraid it might contribute to some of these unrealistic expectations about job searching. I often have to remind people that the job posting is never perfect and might be written by someone who doesn’t know how to write well. It might be written by an HR person who was copying things from some bad boilerplate text. You should always be wary of issues in job listings, but if you’re interested in the job it’s worth spending 20-60 minutes communicating with the company to learn more details first.

I’ve also noticed a secondary trend wherein some of the most toxic local companies have become very good at signaling: They know how to say all the right things in job listings, sponsor all the right events, and present themselves as exactly the “right” company to work for, but everyone who goes their ends up burned out and depressed by the toxic environment. Ironically, they’ve become experts at recruiting because they’re constantly recruiting to backfill their high turnover rates.

What I’m trying to say is: Be on the lookout for issues in your job search, but try to get the full picture before you rule companies out or select an employer.

I entered this job posting:

> I need someone to inculcate my employees with rote

> identity politics without doing anything genuinely

> useful. Bonus points if they can also serve as a token

> minority hire.

and it passed with flying colors.

(pun intended?)

I built a similar one to test job descriptions for non-inclusive language[0]. These tools are helpful , particularly for people who are not native English speakers. I use open source tools like retext-equality[1] and retext-profanities[2] to help catch non-inclusive language. Inevitable there will be strings that are mislabeled or just plain wrong as many of these tools aren't capable of understanding context ("communicate clearly" is often flagged as "clearly" can be superfluous or patronising in certain contexts).

Also - kudos for open sourcing it. I look forward to contributing and using the library.

0: https://devscreen.io/inclusive-language-check 1: https://github.com/retextjs/retext-equality/blob/main/rules.... 2: https://github.com/retextjs/retext-profanities/blob/main/rul...

Edit: I have just noticed that this hasn't had any commits in 3 years, and no releases for much longer than that. OP: are you the author of the library? It would be good to hear what the plans are for it.

looks like a dead project last content change seems from 2016 https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint/commits/master

IMHO this is missing one key check: salary range.

I think it's stupid for candidates to get through the interview process just to discover after many wasted hours that the salary range of the position is incompatible with their expectations

Issues according to self proclaimed standards? Not very useful.

Is it me or your website is showing tally 0 for any input I put in? I dont see any submit button nor is enter working

The UI isn't great. It should flag text as you type. Try "bro". You'll need to enable javascript

Sooo I just put one of the most vulgar, sexist, racist, homophobic text I could think of, also said extra points for knowledge of NodeJS and I got score 0. No problems found.

Kind of funny how using the term sluts is considered only twice as bad as using the word "she"

I get a warning for "fuck" but an error for "guys".

I wish problems in business life were always such naive things.

if anything, I'd run jobs thru this, and if it came back with "issues", I'd be interested in applying

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