Now this is a job posting
airbnb.com
Now this is a job posting
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Now this is a job posting
#2As a basic "get everything right and nothing wrong", yep, it's a very good job posting.
Presumably interested applicants will be able to e.g. look at their site and figure out whether they want to work for the company (i.e. it doesn't sell the company, although it does sell the quality of engineering hiring, which is even more rare than quality engineering management!).
It's also good in that it has one firm and semi-measurable requirement (specifically one or more sites the applicant has done his stuff on; "semi-" qualification for their ability to know how much an applicant was really responsible for that).
Re: Now this is a job posting
#3Notice there are only three requirements, none of them language-specific. Even these can be thought of as only two different demands, since learning languages quickly and being a really smart engineer are nearly the same thing. This means that, probabilistically, there's a reasonable chance they'll get a lot of applicants that actually meet all the requirements and from there they can hire someone they like based on the bonus points section, people skills, etc.
In contrast, the average job listing makes it very unlikely that anybody can comply with all the requirements, so the hiring manager ends up hiring someone who does not meet requirements. This is the honest approach to the problem of hiring good hackers.
Re: Now this is a job posting
#4As a basic "get everything right and nothing wrong", yep, it's a very good job posting. Presumably interested applicants will be able to e.g. look at their site and figure out whether they want to work for the company (i.e. it doesn't sell the company, although it does sell the quality of engineering hiring, which is even more rare than quality engineering management!). It's also good in that it has one firm and semi…
I don't understand why this comment was downmodded. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable. I'd be genuinely interested in someone explaining what's wrong with it.
Re: Now this is a job posting
#5Funny timing. This Friday I talked to the HR person at work and told her I want to hire an IT person - someone to help me manage all the servers, users etc. Based on what I said, she did some research and made a draft job posting. It was a smörgåsbord of every technology I'd heard of in the past 10 years. I edited out a bunch of it but frankly, all I wanted it to say was "1. Must be able to learn anything when needed. 2. Must love technology and helping others." Frankly, the rest is just fluff.
Re: Now this is a job posting
#6As a basic "get everything right and nothing wrong", yep, it's a very good job posting. Presumably interested applicants will be able to e.g. look at their site and figure out whether they want to work for the company (i.e. it doesn't sell the company, although it does sell the quality of engineering hiring, which is even more rare than quality engineering management!). It's also good in that it has one firm and semi…
I don't understand why this comment was downmodded. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable. I'd be genuinely interested in someone explaining what's wrong with it.
17 minutes after your comment it's now a +2, but I too am curious.
ADDED: my only complaint is that it doesn't explicitly sell the company or the job; the former is something you have to do in an classified advertisement ("We are the leading...." is an example of the usual BS sort of copy that does that). For an ad on a web site, that's OK, although adding a bit of explicit selling of the job and maybe the company would make it better.
To make it perfectly clear, the emphasized "everything right and nothing wrong" is my acknowledgment that implicitly it does a hell of a job of selling the job (since that's so very rare and says so much).
Re: Now this is a job posting
#7Funny timing. This Friday I talked to the HR person at work and told her I want to hire an IT person - someone to help me manage all the servers, users etc. Based on what I said, she did some research and made a draft job posting. It was a smörgåsbord of every technology I'd heard of in the past 10 years. I edited out a bunch of it but frankly, all I wanted it to say was "1. Must be able to learn anything when needed…
IT is particularly like that, since there are so many different ways to do things. Is your storage iSCSI or FC? Are your server Windows or UNIX? Is your hardware Dell or Sun? The fact is that 80% of the technology is the same between them, and what matters is being able to learn new ones and adapt. People are still writing C99, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone still using Compaq hardware.
Re: Now this is a job posting
#8I've wondered about this from other job postings I've read:
Does "Really smart engineer" mean someone, specifically, with an "engineering" degree?
Re: Now this is a job posting
#9This is a great job posting, but its completely focused on the benefits to the company, not the job seeker. In the context of the site it's fine because their main jobs page is awesome http://www.airbnb.com/jobs but if this was posted on a job board, it would need a lot of work to lure someone who didn't know about airbnb in advance.
Re: Now this is a job posting
#10I've wondered about this from other job postings I've read: Does "Really smart engineer" mean someone, specifically, with an "engineering" degree?
Degree != smart
That said, it is a heuristic for determining who's smart. You just have to realize that it's a very imperfect tool.