This may be the most bonkers tech job listing I've ever seen | Hacker News Reader

This may be the most bonkers tech job listing I've ever seen

arstechnica.com

34 pointsjnord15 comments

This job is in NYC. Isn't it required to post a salary range?

https://www.nyc.gov/site/cchr/media/pay-transparency.page

(I assume most of it will be worthless stock anyway)

No salary range listed (surprise surprise) but I would expect if they wanted you to work virtually all the time except potentially when you passed out due to lack of sleep then it would start at 1.2 million a year. Since one would reasonably factor in overtime and health ramifications, more like starting at 3 million a year. But, hey don't overlook the $1500 bonus if you live within a 15 min walk of the office!

The company's main site is truly bonkers. 27 repetitions of the term "Tier 1," half of them applied to nonsensical things. The CEOs bio lists his League of Legends ranking, twice. 14 available products listed for a supposedly 4 month old company. 24-point feature comparison against ChatGPT, almost none of them even remotely related to anything ChatGPT is even targeting.

Honestly this seems like the product of a guy on a fast track to a major nervous breakdown.

Just quoted fragments from https://icon.com/careers, not a complete reproduced listing. Odd that you can apply to be a "founding" engineer, "founding" creative, etc.

Th CEO is an attention seeking moron who used to spam HackerNews with job posts for his previous company (Skio) which got preferential treatment as a YC company. I wouldn’t pay any attention to this company.

Their original schtick was charging $10k to get on their waitlist, which clearly failed as now you can “get started for $0” per their website.

Grifter gonna keep grifting

I am unable to comprehend the state of mind that would lead a person to publish an ad like this. Like, you can't make a job a part of your core identity. Everyone there is going to forget you 10 seconds after you quit. Which, you can know with certainty is something that will happen sooner or later. So then what happens to your core identity? Do you just become an empty shell, waiting on the sidewalk for someone new to tell you what to do?

But yeah the attitude on display here is terrifying to be honest. Honestly this guy needs medication and therapy. There are some deep seated issues here.

Key point: if a company is backed by VC's, employees almost never will get generational wealth due to how the stock options are structured.

If you want generational wealth, build your own business without investors.

An advertising firm posting content that's gone viral - that seems like a win for them

Only if you get conversions, and this case it's worse because you wanted valuable conversions. Being swamped with morons that want to ride a 300k salary for a month or two before they get the boot is not the kind of applicant you want to attract

Isn't the job post a joke? The idea was to communicate - to companies looking for an advertising/PR firm - that the owner and existing employees work super-hard and don't take weekends off. Clearly they are exaggerating but a) they did get a lot of attention, b) seem to have a sense of humor and c) let you know they will return your call/email quickly.

Plus maybe the job post will attract one or two lunatics who are passionate and very hard-working.

What is your evidence that it is a joke?

Because it is mostly ridiculous? Will they require you to demonstrate "running through walls"? Show evidence on your phone of when you quadruple-texted someone?

They declare their mission: "Make viral content" - and they did.

Maybe just a colorful way to get attention.

But taking it at face value, the real downside of such working conditions for some people wouldn't be the long hours and such, but stress coming exactly from what the conditions do to other people:

* The job description mostly attracts inexperienced bros who don't know how to work smart or well, will perform even worse work with fatigue from the hours, and will soon be enthusiastically hitting 'performance enhancement' drugs, making them even more counterproductive. Also, besides this hurting performance, the drugs will cause personality disorders to emerge, resulting in worse decisions and general unpleasantness, all increasing your stress.

* Any sane colleague who joined (by accident, or desperation) will also be feeling the fatigue and stress, and, no matter how comforting it will be to find a fellow sane person amidst the chaos, they will be getting less sane from the stress, and that will also be adding to your own stress. And whichever of you escapes the company first will be removing the moral support, abandoning the other to the company of increasingly insane fudge-ups.

* Leadership may already be coked up, and it will only get crazier from here. This will increase workplace environment stress, and also likely lead to business crises, for more stress.

* If you decide to overcome the stress by heroically solving some key problem, to get the company on a sane path, the crazy druggie bro fudge-ups will inadvertently sabotage all that effort. More stress.

* Eventually, the stress starts causing physical health problems that are their own sources of stress, but even this is indirectly due to problems created by your incredibly dysfunctional workplace.

Sure, stress can also come from things like legitimate business challenges, but you can rise to those, and fight. What you can't fight is being trapped in an insane asylum. Learn to recognize such places, try not to enter, and run away.

Sounds like a job to die for ... literally. There is no life-work balance when you are 6ft under pushing up daisies. But some grifters get rich on the efforts of others. i.e. business as usual.

this is a symptom of labour oversupply

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