Job Descriptions Should Be Better

The main thing I want from job descriptions is a salary range. The fact that companies don't post salaries is a strong counter-point to how companies complain about how hard it is to hire software engineers.

With a lot of hiring processes I get the impression of filters tuned to the exact match of skill and experience requirements, plus some padding. This is systemically bound to fail because the candidate pool for any one cross section of a growing area is going to be small enough to put you in competition over the qualified candidates. As well, it tunes for a stodgy "best practices" mindset, with no chance of spreading skills diversity through your team.

For a field requiring some creativity as well as learned knowledge, enthusiasm and willingness to learn really matters, and the easiest way to induce enthusiasm is actually to go a little off of the mark and present candidates with an opportunity to learn the role based on their existing strengths. That presents some risk, and it's much harder to make it work as you go for "senior" candidates. But case-by-case, there are always ways to offset that risk if you are creative enough - better ways than putting folks who claim to know everything under the microscope in order to fail them as fast as possible, a process which builds a high level of mistrust.

Your statement is very fair. However, even though there are definitely companies that don't value their programmers, I would be surprised if any of them actually said that in a job description.

How do you tell the difference between a company that does value their engineers from one that doesn't if both companies say the same thing? It is not an easy thing to do for sure, but generic uplifting statements don't solve that problem and don't add to job descriptions.

> How do you tell the difference between a company that does value their engineers from one that doesn't if both companies say the same thing?

You check if they put their money where their mouth is. Generally, a (well-funded) company that pays its (senior) engineers the same as or more than its executives values engineering. To name two, I've noticed both Google and IBM immediately matching friends' competing offers no questions asked. I know two other engineers whose base, cash salary was over USD 400,000 / year. Cash is very expensive to managers, and enormously expensive to startups (equity less so, but still quite a bit) so it is a reliable signal.

A subtler way might be to check the flavour of engineering projects, and particularly their time horizon. Bringing up Google again, one SDE mentioned using machine learning to automate managing their infrastructure. That's the kind of risky, ambitious, long term project you want to look for.

I personally take mentions of intangible things as negative signals from experience. Something along the lines of if someone is trying to reassure you about something, it means they think it's an issue.

That does seem to be a very critical piece that is missing. Not that engineers say what they are selling themselves for in their applications either...