Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing | Hacker News Reader

Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

120 pointslittlestitious106 comments

- Random words to make me feel special: 'guru', 'ninja', 'hacker', etc.

- Random words that adds nothing: 'professional', 'talented', 'passionate', 'awesome'. "hmm, maybe I'm not awesome enough for this position" - said nobody ever

- Describing your company like it just cured AIDS (if you company actually just cured AIDS, I will allow it). I only want to know what your company _actually_ does.

- Explicitly writing that the hired person will have to work a lot. "let's hire someone to do nothing most of the time" - said no company ever

What you should write and you are (probably) not writing:

- What are some real tasks / problems I might work with on a daily basis? I find it hard to be interested on positions that only mentions "you'll develop stuff". There's a lot of stuff out there, please be clear.

- In case of remote positions, is the employee supposed to live near the company or can she be on the other side of the planet?

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Postings that use phrases like "ninja", "rockstar", "crush code", etc, tell me something very, very important about the company.

Specifically, that I'd probably hate to work there.

We had a lot of fun with a recent hiring effort here. Our ad headline was "We do not want ninjas or rock stars, just good programmers." It seemed to resonate with our target audience more than a generic headline.

"ninja" and "rockstar" seem to have faded in popularity. Now one is expected to be "passionate".

I like to stay awake for days on end, writing. I mean like essays, articles and stories.

Sometimes I even write poetry!

http://blog.codejobs.io/post/95398815036/the-rise-of-the-roc...

"But we have bean bag chairs!"

I just looked at the Jobs page on the site of an actual employer - not a job board post - where they had photos of them all getting drunk.

I have had some experiences with alcoholics I do not wish to repeat.

A recent employer was a raging alcoholic, I mean to the point that there were hundreds of beer bottles in the recycling bin, one-liter bottles of expensive hard liquor presented on display in the break room. The only room in the whole office that wasn't totally trashed, held a pool table that no one ever actually used, that had several of the kinds of mirrors that liquor distributors give to bars.

I didn't clue in to this right away. However the guy bet the farm on a technology without looking into whether that technology actually worked. When I had not gotten it working after just two hours, he started raging at me about how it was all my fault that it didn't work. This for a technology I'd never heard of, and would not touch with a hot rock now that I have experience with it.

I finally packed up my stuff, broadcast a terse, angry letter of resignation to the entire company, to the effect that I don't work for alcoholics, then walked out with no advance notice at all.

> the guy bet the farm on a technology without looking into whether that technology actually worked.

> When I had not gotten it working after just two hours, he started raging at me about how it was all my fault that it didn't work.

This is how most mid-sized non-technology companies operate when it comes to making technical decisions. If you have a couple of months to spare (the guy is verbose), I recommend reading the Gervais Principle[0].

[0] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Best job description I ever wrote. This was while I was a Microsoft building a new team.

    Are you a lazy program manager who could care less 
    about PCs, devices, networking, and other technologies 
    in the home? Have you always dreaded working on a 
    product that you would LOVE to use? Do you yearn to 
    work in a huge, lumbering, group working on the same 
    old stuff forever? If so, have we got a job for you!

    We are looking for a newbie program manager to hinder 
    us in building the next version of Windows Home Server. 
    Our team is ginormous, moves excruciatingly slowly and 
    indecisively, and we are thoroughly hating life. And we 
    need more PMs to suffer along with us! Interested?

    You will be a non-player helping to design and build 
    the 42nd version of a product that has been around 
    since before you were born. We are still in startup 
    mode, and as part of a startup, you’ll have to do one 
    task repeatedly over and over. You need to be ready and 
    willing to do whatever I say when I say it even if it 
    makes no sense whether that means screwing up features, 
    angering partners, ignoring the community, creating 
    bugs, and maybe even stealing a little code and hacking 
    into a bank. We are in need of Program Managers with 
    weak design skills; goof-offs who can take ownership of 
    a user scenario area, ignore requirements, design a 
    useless technology for technologies sake (forgetting 
    about the user experience), and work with dev, test, 
    UA, usability, etc… to cause them all to quit. And then 
    do it again.

    Candidates should have poor consumer empathy, a deep 
    dislike of cutting edge technology in the home, and the 
    ability to cause political issues in small team where 
    everything is already figured out and there’s nothing 
    really left to do.

    Candidates must have less than 4 days experience as a 
    program manager working on shipping products. 
    Experience doing customer research and designing 
    consumer UIs will immediately disqualify you. The less 
    technical knowledge you have of networking, storage, 
    and Windows server technologies the better. Candidates 
    should have a B.A. in Basket Weaving or equivalent and 
    should have been fired from their previous two jobs.

I hadn't realized that Microsoft encouraged that degree of honesty or introspection.

Did you actually post that anywhere?

Yes, I posted this to several mailing lists that had thousands of people on them. I got about 500 responses. Most were of the "LOL" variety. One said "I found this to be in very poor taste."

I got 11 solid leads, and 2 of those turned into hires.

More here: http://ceklog.kindel.com/2011/10/27/my-best-hiring-stunt-to-...

Were they quality hires? And are you still hiring at amazon? ;)

Of course, and yes: http://www.amazon.jobs/results?searchStrings[]=alcc

Don't you mean to write "couldn't care less" in the first sentence.

"Could care less" is the sarcastic form of "couldn't care less." It works much better in speech than online (since the sarcastic tone on "could care less" does not travel over text).

Actually, in all honesty, when I wrote "could care less" I was more stoopid than I am now.

Not true, "could care less" is american english while "couldn't care less" is british english

They mean completely different things.

Not when used colloquially. It's called language, not logic.

Using "could" instead of "could not" does not make it "colloquial".

If it has a commonly understood colloquial meaning you could use colors, hand signals, flashing lights and a presentation of types of mollusks and it wouldn't matter at all. It's the phrase that has the meaning, not the words -- those are inconsequential.

This is why people who think it matters stay constantly confused at common turns of phrase and try to correct them, they've completely lost the forest for the trees.

This would actually explain my experience with Microsoft products! It's funny because it's true?

Did you get any qualified applicants?

This thread is about to get a lot more popular.

I just posted your job description to Craigslist.

I've been tracking[1] the use of "passionate" in whoishiring threads, really getting out of control. It's now become one of the 10 most frequent terms used in posts.

[1] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2014/...

I noticed by looking at the top 50 that there's also "passion" as a separate listing, and tracks almost perfectly [0].

[0] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2014/...

Good catch, I forgot I had them broken out, makes it even more common perhaps, but there could be overlap with posts using both terms.

Everything is on the rise that you're tracking. Which would make me believe there are just more job postings and for all I know the term passionate may actually be on a decline in how often it's use vs how many job listings are made.

You're right, the chart needs some work. The rankings table below show the relative rise better than the chart.

A pet hate of mine. Used by politicians, CEOs, recruiters. Good spot.

thanks for the link!

You're welcome.

>"hmm, maybe I'm not awesome enough for this position" - said nobody ever

I think you're underestimating the number of people who tell themselves things like that.

How about kitchen sink technology lists? These tell me two things about a potential employer. First, their HR department uses keyword matching to filter resumes. Second, the person writing the JD is inexperienced or has an extremely low hiring bar.

Low hiring bar? Kitchen sink "requirements" give me the impression that they are looking for a magical unicorn.

Have a look at the ads wanting several years of experience coding in Swift.

(Apple has only supported it for about three months now.)

When MS first shipped C++ for windows, quite commonly the recruiters wanted candidates with five years of windows C++ experience.

That sort of thing seems to happen when the folks writing the job posting attempt to take the actual requirements from the hiring manager and rewrite them to some standard format. A manager might want "someone who knows C++ for Windows" and "someone who is intermediate in experience". The HR person will look up "intermediate" and see "minimum 5 years" and then glue it onto the technology.

Has anyone ever had a favorable experience working with a hiring company or recruiter that is especially particular about how many years of experience a candidate has in some technology? Exactly how much a programmers knows isn't directly dependent on how long the programmer has been working with the tool. There is such a thing as "1 year of experience 5 times".

The impression that I get is that people with weak technical hiring skills use these lists as a proxy metric. It would be impossible to validate any claim that an applicant can demonstrate proficiency with all the skills in the list and equally unimportant. These people just want someone to walk up to them and lie. If they can't evaluate the quality of the people they hire, they've already hired shitty engineers and I don't want to work with them.

Interesting perspective I had not thought of before. It aligns with my one and only experience with a professional resume writer, who took my resume and fluffed it up with exaggerations and borderline lies.

My favorite (from a long time ago now): "Experienced in Lotus 1, 2, and 3."

In all honestly I don't think this is just jobs ads. Just look at this place (hacker news) for example, everybody is using the term "hacker" to designate anything.

Today putting lettuce and meat together to create a salad is hacking.

I agree that this is ridiculous though, also I currently work in a company that was hiring a "Jedi angularJS developer", I had 2 days experience with the framework when I signed (they knew, long story short they didn't want me, the recruiter pass me a test that was not for me and I did way better than the original guy).

Unless you written code for a rockstar, you are not a rockstar coder anyway. Why hire a Ninja, you won't see them come in to work or leave anyway.

A ninja could be potentially useful to deal with competitors.

Perhaps I should show up to interviews carrying my father's sword?

It's not sharp on the edge but it _is_ pointy.

"Your father's laptop. This is the weapon of a hacker. Not as clumsy or random as a tablet; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

An apparently genuine job ad that came to my attention today (i think it's currently sweeping Twitter), from Sportacam in Finland [1]:

    What we can offer:

    - Meeting and partying with international sports superstars
    - Drinking beer instead of Jolt-coke
    - Making it rain on them hoes
    - Salary and/or Equity

    Yes, this will all come true if you fit the criteria.

    We expect you to:

    - be totally gay for code
    - know how to build a robust back-end that can handle massive amounts of photos, videos and users
    - have at least 7-10 years experience in back-end development
    - be able to talk to other people

Well, at least the "be able to talk to other people" is good.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5YIQ01r...

Clearly they need somebody who is able to talk to other people.

Is there enough attention being paid to how the language used in job ads is, in the best case, subliminally advertising a company's culture of ageism?

I can hardly think of a better way to advertise that you only want young people to apply than to advertise for a guru rockstar gamechanging ninja who is awesome and wants a vague job description.

Joblint is now available as a service!

http://joblint.org/ - Test tech job specs for issues with sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails.

Library source: https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint

Nice project :) (I just lint job spec and the analysis seems right)

I recently by mistake expressed interest in a startup on Angel.co found out later tha its one of these fake social startups building a mobile app on top of facebook and the founder is screaming about passion after 2 years going with no funding showing..yeah right..way to kill any interest whatsoever.

In my experience, "passion" is (for some people) synonymous with "working a ton of unpaid overtime."

My favorite job advert was one for a large-ish company (200 people) that invited you to criticise their public-facing web application. The implication was that not following the instructions on the advert to a T would result in your application being ignored.

Clearly this was a lose-lose proposition.

Hilariously, I naively took them at their word and described amongst other observations how their application used far too many HTTP requests (i.e. they weren't using concatenation) and that the page size was phenomenally large.

Needless to say I got no response.

Another time an in-house recruiter for a company that creates a light-blue VOIP client that everyone uses, mentioned that there were free soft drinks and that the executive management were really down to earth. At which point I moved the phone away from my mouth, took a breath and regained my composure.

I would like for them to hire a professional writer. It seems more common to cut and past.

> cut and past.

I cannot tell if that's a pun or typo..

Well, at least it was seemingly written specifically for this occasion.

What I learned earlier this year on HN in another thread is that saying "ninja", etc, paints the picture of the company's culture. Keeping stick-in-the-mud guys like me away :) It just saves everyone some time.

Can you give an example of a good job posting? I try to make our postings as real as possible[1], and would love feedback.

The level of detail goes both ways, though. The vast majority of people who apply don't even submit a pgp resume, which gives the impression that they didnt read the job description.

[1]: http://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=66c8368e9c756e78

I liked the job posting but thought the list of requirements is very specific. JavaScript, Python, and Linux are the only things on that list that look like they should be a deal breaker for you. Everything else can be covered in a soft requirements list such as "have experience with web development (client and server side), relational databases, and queueing/caching". This gives people who have experience with the core of your stack an indication that they fit your main requirements. Of course you might only want people who fit your requirements 100% but I think you're getting into Unicorn territory at that point.

Your posting is much better than average, as you potential recruit can easily picture what they'll be doing and with whom. However you're still erring on the side of evaluating people on their buzzwords.

I think the reason why it sucks is because engineers don't write job specs -- recruiters do. And a lot of recruiters don't take the time to really learn about how and why engineers move from company to company. Often they don't attract the highest quality talent because they attract talent that is "just right" and they don't try harder to make their recruiting better.

Agreed. On the other hand, my favorite line to read is

- 'Interested? Email me at ted@coolstartup.com, include hackernews in subject line'

Hey, one just popped up: http://www.jobscore.com/jobs2/simplyinsured/software-develop...

You are going to hate everything about this requirement page then: https://www.bunq.com/nl/en/job/

Actually it improved a little bit. Until a few weeks ago you had to sign an NDA to learn what the company actually does.

I totally agree. Ironically I think current economical situation flips the coin. Companies are fighting for developers rather than employees applying for jobs. In rare cases ( google, facebook, twitter, etc. ) these writing actually doesn't exist.

No arguments from me regarding the first set of words, but the second set? Those do hold benefit when used properly to communicate context, especially with differentiating between a presumed core skill requirement and supplemental nice-to-have.

Really?

"Professional" strikes me as an overall requirement. I can't imagine companies are looking for unprofessional employees.

"Talented" is rather vague, and isn't the presumption that the candidate is talented anyway?

"Passionate" could be applied to a specific thing (e.g., technology, like "passionate about SPAs"), so that one makes sense.

"Awesome" is in the same category as the first group, I think.

Do you have any examples of how "professional", "talented", and "awesome" can be genuinely useful?

sure, you can use it properly, but what I see most of the time is a generic "[passionate/awesome/etc.] developer"

Ads that use language like that often go on to say suspicious things like "build great exposure for your work" and then finally come right out and say "unpaid role".

Ninja was cool the first time it was used, not it's a stupid word telling : "you won't get paid much but you'll work on a mac book pro"

"Gamechanger" is the new "rockstar"

Mazda revealed the new 3 as a #GAMECHANGER [sic]. Now that I have one, does that mean my car is a better prospective employee than me, since I'm merely a programmer/coder/developer/engineer?

The recruiting email I got noted that from my resume, she could tell I was clearly a gamechanger, but challenged me to question whether I was surrounded by other gamechangers. Because, you know, it's lonely being the only gamechanger at a company replete with non-gamechangers.

"Gamechanger"=same shit, new wrapping

"rockstar" or "ninja"=naive or gullible

"hybrid"=1 to do work of previous >1

These are the people I would not work for even if they paid me <i>enough</i>; considering they're using silly buzzwords to attract warm bodies(not = talent) assures me their "competitive wage" puts the starting salary right on par with 'fry cook'.

Actually a lot of people _can_ feel like they are not awesome enough.

"rockstar"

write some code, destroy the office, drink some coffee, do a little debugging, bite a pigeons head off, deploy

"Crazy Train" actually predicted the rise of ruby on rails

ozzy osbourne basically was holding out for rails 3

sign me up!

those are key words for young coders, nothing more

What I'd really like to see, is a recruiter who actually looked at my resume from beginning to end before contacting me.

Finally, just a few minutes ago, I put a vacation response in my gmail account:

   Dear Friend,

   Thank you for writing, I'll get back to you soon.

   If you are an agency recruiter seeking to place me in a
   job or contract position, please be advised that I find
   my own work.  Please take me off your mailing list.
   Please delete my resume from your records as well.

   If you'd like to know why, please read this:

      Market Yourself: Tips for High-Tech Consultants
      http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/market-yourself.html

   Regards,

   Michael David Crawford, Consulting Software Engineer
   Solving the Software Problem
   mdcrawford@gmail.com

      Local Jobs, Local Candidates
      The Global Computer Employer Index
      http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/

Did it have any effect whatsoever on the flow of spam?

(I was nominally responsible for a Clearcase installation for six months in 2001. I mentioned it on my CV in 2002. I still get the occasional ping from those last, last few Clearcase shops, desperate for someone who will admit to ever having touched it.)

I learned this the hard way as well.

If you've worked with some technology or product, but don't ever want to work with it again, don't mention it in your resume.

I mentioned doing some ColdFusion work because, well, that's what I did as part of a previous job, but when I started looking for a new job, I quickly found I wanted to take that out.

Of course, if word gets out you're a software developer looking for work, there are a whole slew of recruiters that will spam you for anything that even remotely involves computers. It's been 2-1/2 years since I was looking for work and I still get a couple e-mails a week spamming for jobs like a Linux Admin in Detroit or a Data Analyst in St. Louis (I live in Virginia and never had any intention of moving).

I'm looking for work in Portland, Oregon.

The recruiters seem to be catching my drift in a rather oblique way, in that just since yesterday, they've been sending me inquiries about jobs in Portland, Maine.

You match 50% of the requirements, that's better than the usual recruiter spam.

I'm a week into a ColdFusion job (also in VA) and this is a little unsettling -- pretty sure I'll want to leave this stuff behind me when I move on.

I mostly find it hilarious. Of course, the flow of recruiter spam started as soon as I hit a magic 5 years' Unix experience and hasn't stopped.

Well that's going to be annoying for anyone e-mailing you that isn't a recruiter.

I have a private email addy for just friends, family and established clients.

Among my pet peeves is that when I search for telecommute jobs at Craigslist - which is often the case, as I am a consultant - it gets me posts that say "no telecommuting".

It is quite cruel that the name of the employer is usually not provided: "We are a hot startup in the cloudspace" rather than "Example.com is a hot startup in the cloudspace". This has the result that I apply to a lot more companies than I otherwise would, because there is no way I can learn more about the company _before_ apply.

See if you can find a recording of the original Apple Computer radio ad. It was on their very first developer CD - "You can change the world!"

Well I expect Apple did, but now everyone says they're going to.

I've gotten to the point that when I see an ad seeking a "rockstar coder" I just don't apply.

How about a job posting that's looking for someone with more than ten years experience?

Someone whose products got reviews in the trade press, or sold well?

> It is quite cruel that the name of the employer is usually not provided: "We are a hot startup in the cloudspace" rather than "Example.com is a hot startup in the cloudspace". This has the result that I apply to a lot more companies than I otherwise would, because there is no way I can learn more about the company _before_ apply.

There's a workaround for this. Take a few sentences from the job description - some of the non-standard ones - and google for them. Frequently, you'll see the company's job page in the results as the first hit. From there, you can usually even contact them directly, and skip the recruiter middleman.

In my (a few years out of date) experience, it got me hits about 50% of the time.

One additional bit of search foo to add to this if "non-standard" doesn't work well is the last and first few words of abutting sentences, like "a workaround for this. Take a few sentences from the job description" (with the quotes) from the message I'm replying to; right now that gets no hits from Google, and I just got exactly one hit from "provide strong isolation? Partly because it is hard and partly" from 5 hour hold comment in another discussion.

One recruitment consultant contacted me about a job. Told me blah blah blah, how such and such a company were hiring loads of people etc. I told him I was interested and he didn't get back to me. So I posted my own application to the same company, and got hired a month later.

I wonder how effective that is vs going through the middleman. I'd guess if the "end company" is small enough without the bloated HR structure, it's more effective to get in the door by contacting them directly. On the other hand, if it's a behemoth like GE or similar, it might be more effective to go through a middleman to get past clueless HR.

I'm struggling with these decisions currently, as I see the same position posted by multiple middle men, as well as the "final client" directly, and sometimes it's difficult to figure out the best way to handle it.

Does going through a recruiter typically mean that you bypass HR? I always assumed that HR would be involved regardless.

I've only worked for one company large enough to have a dedicated HR team, and they don't seem clueless to me so far.

My understanding is that some (most?) recruiters work directly with hiring managers.

Awesome! Thank You!

Actually I used to do that for my own web pages, to find scraper sites. Funny it didn't occur to me.

yes! I just did this today and it works very well

haha I forgot about the 'rockstar', which makes even less sense than the others

I'm looking for the kind of job where I can stare out the window all day long, but then write one single subroutine that just works the very first time, and that not only is compliant to spec, but exceeds expectation.

Rock stars blow their royalties and ticket sales up their noses, sleep with groupies, trash hotel rooms and die young.

Rock stars are statistically more likely to end up dead in a hotel bathtub.

Ninjas spend 99% of their time practicing, but when they do work, you never see them. And you know them by their trail of bodies.

Neither of these sound like successful software developer case studies.

back in the day, some clueless manager posted to usenet that he was looking for a coder who could - I swear I'm not making this up! - "write 1000 lines of code per day".

I'm sure you can visualize all the responses that were posted.

Clearly they were looking for this guy: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Got_Time_0x3f_

Now, if they could average minus 1000 lines per day ...

Yes, for almost every existing project I've ever worked on, I had a net negative line of code count per day, and boy did that feel good.

There are some days (like today) where this is the norm at my company...

I started on my current project 10 months ago, and using gitinspector [1], I can see I've averaged 10k lines a month, but after deletions and refactors, about 40% of that remains. This is working on a green field project and never exceeding 40 hours a week. It's also 'losing' coding time to research (I'm a junior dev) and managing / training other team members. So I could see a much higher number of lines than this being feasible.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/gitinspector/

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