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Job Descriptions Should Be Better

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Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#31

Post by movingtooz »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #23

It's far worse here in Australia. Almost every job ad is written by a slimey salesman in a recruitment company, so: a) The ads are deliberately vague so you can't go direct to the client b) A single job / employer will be listed in several vaguely-worded ads from competing rent-seeking-middlemen c) For the invaluable work of obfuscating the description and wasting everybody's time, these people will take 10-20% of yo…

Any advice for finding dev jobs in Australia? Moving to Melbourne from London in a few months and I've only been told to look on seek.com.au. Is this where you're having issues with recruiters?

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#32

Post by systemtest »

I want to know more about what I am going to do on a day-to-day basis. The last job I quit was because I spent about three days a months writing uptime reports and incident descriptions in Microsoft Excel and Word. And about five days per month on manual testing (clicking through the web-interface to see if everything was still in place). I'm a specialized back-end developer, hire a (way cheaper) document writer and tester for that.

Had they told me what I was going to do beforehand I would've declined the job and that would have spared them a lot of money on onboarding and orientation.

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#34

Post by cs02rm0 »

systemtest wrote: post #32

I want to know more about what I am going to do on a day-to-day basis. The last job I quit was because I spent about three days a months writing uptime reports and incident descriptions in Microsoft Excel and Word. And about five days per month on manual testing (clicking through the web-interface to see if everything was still in place). I'm a specialized back-end developer, hire a (way cheaper) document writer and…

> I'm a specialized back-end developer, hire a (way cheaper) document writer and tester for that.

I'd suggest, even if you think a document writer and tester is way cheaper, you're probably not charging enough for your time. I've always found an inflated rate a very effective way of avoiding tedious work.

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#35

Post by zanchey »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #23

It's far worse here in Australia. Almost every job ad is written by a slimey salesman in a recruitment company, so: a) The ads are deliberately vague so you can't go direct to the client b) A single job / employer will be listed in several vaguely-worded ads from competing rent-seeking-middlemen c) For the invaluable work of obfuscating the description and wasting everybody's time, these people will take 10-20% of yo…

Somewhat tangentially, do you remember how you described your job in the Australian census? I always really struggle with distilling my job into half a dozen words (but more than a simple job title).

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#36

Post by collyw »

Dayshine wrote: post #29
collyw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This tends to put me off a bit. Just like "full-stack developer". I agree everyone should be able to do beginning to end when needed, but I much prefer to be able to specialize. And I really don't want to be involved with "product conceptualizations". Depends where you work. Our company has two experienced developers and we can both do pretty much the full stack - and we need to. We specialize a bit, I am better at…

Ok, that's half the stack... Who specialises in the lower parts?

Rackspace. Though we are setting up our own dev server locally.

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#37

Post by Shanea93 »

I've been thinking about this a lot recently as we come to hire our third software engineer, in a company which historically hasn't valued their engineers - but with our help has changed a lot in the last year. With myself being the technical team lead going forward, it's important for me that my engineers understand what they will be doing and what value they provide to us, so I've been leaning towards the following:

We're looking for a senior software engineer with PHP experience who is interested in learning Golang in the near future. You don't have to enjoy working in Magento, as we're stripping out as much as possible, but a knowledge of Zend Framework 1 or 2 would be a significant benefit.

We've worked on some cool problems recently, like converting our monolithic architecture to auto-scaling EC2 instance groups, moving our local development from using a "dev.domain.com" domain to Vagrant (and soon, Docker across the stack) and writing custom security monitoring tools for our various bespoke applications.

Outside of the every day work of managing our E-commerce websites, you have fairly unlimited scope for the projects you work on, as long as the team sees value in the idea. You get one day per week to work on whatever you want and to experiment with new languages.

We don't currently allow remote working, but we're in talks with the MD to allow us to work from home one day per week, with a view to increase this going forward.

Your hours are fixed, you're expected to leave at 5.30, though very occasionally you will get a call out of hours if you're on call (which is a voluntary, paid schedule.)

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#38

Post by 20andup »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #23

It's far worse here in Australia. Almost every job ad is written by a slimey salesman in a recruitment company, so: a) The ads are deliberately vague so you can't go direct to the client b) A single job / employer will be listed in several vaguely-worded ads from competing rent-seeking-middlemen c) For the invaluable work of obfuscating the description and wasting everybody's time, these people will take 10-20% of yo…

I would like to add that some recruitment companies place ads when there are no jobs as well to increase their candidate pool. It happens a lot when there is a lot of competition to get the best candidate at a moments notice.

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#39

Post by quantumhobbit »

Dayshine wrote: post #29
collyw wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This tends to put me off a bit. Just like "full-stack developer". I agree everyone should be able to do beginning to end when needed, but I much prefer to be able to specialize. And I really don't want to be involved with "product conceptualizations". Depends where you work. Our company has two experienced developers and we can both do pretty much the full stack - and we need to. We specialize a bit, I am better at…

Ok, that's half the stack... Who specialises in the lower parts?

You aren't full-stack unless you are writing the Verilog for the chips that run your other code.

Seriously though the term full-stack is pointless as everyone has a different definition of what that means but still wants to say "I am full-stack"

Re: Job Descriptions Should Be Better

#40

Post by wastedhours »

wodenokoto wrote: post #22

In my very limited experience companies often don't know what they are in need of, and therefore end up writing all sorts of things.

Very true - I actually helped rewrite the JD for my own job after I'd handed in my notice. They were going to repost the one that I went for, but the nature of the role had changed so much it was almost unrecognisable (that being said, £25k for someone to do everything from sysadmin to social media, i.e. about as much full stack as you can do without writing an operating system was utter BS...).

If I wasn't still there to tell them, it'd have been total nonsense.

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