When Bullet Points Go Terribly Wrong: How Not to Write a Tech Job Listing | Hacker News Reader

When Bullet Points Go Terribly Wrong: How Not to Write a Tech Job Listing

chicago.craigslist.org

14 pointsbrm17 comments

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About 7/8 of the way down: *Must have perseverance to read and understand complex product requirement lists.

Too bad when they hired the author of the posting the didn't include:

* Ability to summarize

I would have totally applied, but then I saw bullet point no. 114 : Must have pet chicken.

Dammit.

Go to a petting zoo and get it over with, or if it could be a male chicken...

Am I the only one who saw this, and immediately thought "please don't be my CL job post, please don't be my CL job post"?

So... what you're saying is you need someone to code AND design AND market your product and we need to have an advanced degree in either Business Adminstration OR Computer Science to prove that we can do it. I hope you're at least bringing cash

AND administer all of the systems.

I noticed that, too -- it really looks like they want a single individual who can both make high-level technical decisions and implement + support a bunch of infrastructure at the same time.

I would call that person a co-founder, not a CIO, and a particularly over-burdened one, at that.

Mistake number one: looking for a vice president on craigslist.

Looks to me like the biggest problem here is a lack of white space -- if there were blank lines before "Implementation & Development", "Management", "Position Requirements", "Knowledge & Expertise", and "Personal Attributes", this would be far more readable.

"As a member of the senior management team, participate in the selection and registration of the company’s web site domain names, including any related-but-unused domains that could compromise the integrity of the business (through competition, typosquatting, etc.)."

This makes it sound like they could be having board meetings concerning whether to a register a domain to protect against typo squatting. Also they are asking for someone with exposure with business theory and governance processes. Since they haven't even registered a domain, I'm guessing it's just one or two mba's looking for someone to develop their product.

A really good case for basic inline formatting.

Any website that takes text blurbs that could be more than a paragraph should support some formatting.

At least: bold, italics, blank lines, and bullet/number lists.

And please, put a bullet-list of how to format the text to the right of the text box. It's not hard.

So you're saying this is a bad job posting because Craigslist must die?

Nah, that they (and other text-submit-heavy sites) should put in a little formatting support.

Probably a copy+paste issue where some of the formatting was stripped. Meh.

That must be why they need a VP with HTML skills.

Beyond the obvious overwhelming qualifications, I have to ask: they expect to interview lots of people with five years of startup experience in downtown Chicago? Really?

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