Beg HN: Rethink your job posting strategy

@wedtm co-founder of streak.com here, we apologize that the job posting came off as offensive - as you said in your post it was totally unintentional.

We would love some constructive discussion on where we went wrong and how we can improve. Re-reading the job post again (deleted but we have a copy) using your comments as a lens, I can see how the title may come off as abrasive. However, in our actual post - we use competitors as a way to contrast and illustrate what our beliefs are - not to belittle them.

We actually disagree with posting requirements for our positions, mainly because there aren't any fast and easy rules that would make someone a good fit vs. not a good fit. That's mostly determined by meeting and talking - all we can really do is try to attract people who are interested in our space and beliefs.

Your other point on posting the actual salary we are offering is a tough one. Its not tough because we don't want to be transparent, rather, we're such a young company that we don't have a set role, skill set or persona we are hiring for. Compensation is LARGELY dependent on the applicants personal situation (young with high risk tolerance implies more equity, less compensation vs someone older with family and mortgage). We're totally transparent with all of our applicants once they've contacted us.

We are totally open to your help on figuring out a better way to do job postings given the above constraints. We've been a part of the HN community for a while and definitely don't want to offend others here.

[edit] Happy to chat over email too: aleem at streak

There have certainly been worse offenders in the annals of job posts on HN than Streak, but I see the point here (mostly).

However, job boards are classified ads, and oftentimes the controversial ones get the most eyeballs. Think about it from Streak's perspective: "okay, we're a young, relatively unknown company, and we're trying to hire the best engineers we can. Also, ideally, we want to screen for people who actually find our challenge interesting."

Through that lens it makes perfect sense that they call out an entrenched, better known enemy. It's controversial enough to be memorable--especially for people who aren't big fans of Salesforce (exactly the types they're looking for).

The problem is that those first few words is often all they have to get your attention. The forum's all wrong, and job posts in general are terrible places to tell people about your culture.

I'm just happy that folks have mostly weeded out the "rockstar" and "ninja" job posts. Those were god awful...

I think no matter what the job postings look like, someone is always going to be offended, because they're advertisements, and the readership has no control over them.

If you're offended by the job post, that's more of an indicator that you're not a good culture fit, rather than wrong. Sure, there are some things (like not listing requirements) which are generally considered a bad thing, but it's not a terrible shame to just ignore advertisements you don't like.

The premise of the job posting, "Salesforce is a hugely profitable company..." is also completely false.

Salesforce had negative earnings for fiscal year 2012, losing millions of dollars. The projections for 2013 call for much larger losses. It is unclear when, if ever, Salesforce will be profitable again. The company has recently been hiding their huge losses by trumpeting bogus financial numbers using non-standard (non-GAAP) accounting practices.

In many cases I'd agree. But this one has a little bit of historical context. This is how Salesforce marketed themselves. Benioff's book "Behind the cloud" talks about doing exactly this to disrupt the status quo.

>If your requirements are “The best hacker on the planet, must have at least 83 PhD’s from Harvard”, you’ve just alienated a majority of the workforce.

The above sentence appears twice.