Ask HN: Does this company have unrealistic hiring expectations? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does this company have unrealistic hiring expectations?

4 points31reasons9 comments

I recently saw this Ad for iOS developer on Stack Overflow.

Here is what they are looking for in the skills:

Skills & Requirements

NETWORKING: Strong understanding of mobile networking best practices: request limiting, request caching, batching, content aggregation, minification, integrating with rest and tcp/udp services, etc.

PERFORMANCE: Expert performance profiler: understands the importance of optimizing for speed, memory usage and end-user responsiveness.

CONCURRENCY: Comfortable using asynchronous, multi-threaded, parallel programming paradigms and other techniques to maximize UI responsiveness.

USERINTERFACE: You know how to make the unthinkable happen: long data lists, and thousands of images don’t scare you. Animations are cake.

APIs: You know all the APIs inside and out. Your knowledge of obscure parameters scares authors of technical books.

I was fine till the User Interface related requirements. But they lost me and kind of scared me by their last requirement about heroic API knowledge!

What do you think ?

What do I think? I think they have the right to ask for anything they want. And applicants have the right to ignore them, if that's what they want. It's not as though there's a rule that job descriptions have to be reasonable.

There's an old joke about parenting -- "I used to have six rules and no children, now I have six children and no rules." Maybe this company has hired too many children.

Well the reason I asked in the first place is to decide weather i should apply to this company or not. I am a good developer but if they have unrealistic expectations I might waste my time with the interview.

Yes. Unfortunately that's a question no one can answer but you. I think even the company posting the advertisement won't know whether you're suitable until they meet you.

If you think a bit more deeply about this, you may realize a company may have any number of reasons for overstating the requirements for a position. They may want to be able to reject anyone, however well-suited, based on real criteria they're unwilling to reveal, like gender, race or ethnicity. An obvious way to recruit based on secret criteria is to greatly overstate the requirements, then accept someone who doesn't meet them on the ground that they meet the secret requirements.

I'll bet you didn't think of that angle. :)

Your explanation is very creative indeed. As you said earlier they can do whatever they want. May be they want someone over-confident who can bend some truth.

Another angle is that HR requires that a public posting be created for N weeks for all new positions, but there's someone they really want to hire internally. So the post is crafted such that only the internal hire meets all of the requirements, and they can just reject everyone else.

I've seen it done. A friend of mine was one such internal transfer, and before that, he helped write the hiring post for converting a contractor to full time.

I seem to remember some post on HN about how 90% of interview candidates can't write FizzBuzz?

I treat laundry lists of "requirements" like these as "nice to haves" unless they are accompanied by some indication that they are putting their money where thier mouth is. For example, if the ad is accompanied by a salary range 50% more than "normal" then it shows that they are serious about finding "unicorns".

I think that the use of fuzzy, non-objective criteria means almost anybody can meet the job description. "Comfortable"? "know how to make the unthinkable happen"? Meaningless unless these are tech job ad code words that I am unfamiliar with.

APIs are the easiest thing to learn (and to forget). They basically mean that you have recent direct experience with whatever platform these APIs are on. I wouldn't stress to much about it.

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