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Now this is a job posting

airbnb.com

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: Now this is a job posting

#21
post #10
post #8

I'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.

I don't think he was asking about the smart part, but the engineer part.

Re: Now this is a job posting

#22
My job posting would be similar but would add "Bonus points if you are musician who takes jam breaks in between coding." Which I do myself often.

Instead of just having Rock Band the game I'd have full on band equipment.

Working towards this type of environment!

Re: Now this is a job posting

#23
I don't get why this is seen as a good job posting. There's very little info about the job, the compensation and only minimal info about the skills needed.

When I was, say, 20, the blank slate might have been appealing. Now I'm actually good at stuff. I have deep specific skills and sorts of problems I like working on. Working in a job where I'm not using a significant subset of those skills is a poor use of my abilities. (Though, notably, doing the founder thing that happens anyway. ;-) )

To me this post basically reads as looking for, "young, excited and inexperienced", which may be their goal, but would be disastrous if used as a general template.

Re: Now this is a job posting

#26
This is just another confusing, poorly written job posting.

The first section is titled "Position" which would make you think that it would be a description of the position being advertised. It's not. It reads like a list of requirements: "You have... You are... You are..." The second section actually makes sense, which is rare for a posting such as this. The third section is titled "Bonus Skills." I see a framework, an RDBMS, two languages, a technology, a skill, a service, another skill, specific knowledge, and a requirement. Nine bullet points: two actual skills.

Having experience with a language or a framework is not a skill, it is experience. Having knowledge of a language or framework is also not a skill. All the time companies take five minutes to write a job posting like this while perspective developers waste hours on resumes and cover letters. Most of the applications are thrown out because the company couldn't take a little bit longer to write a clearer job posting.

Re: Now this is a job posting

#27
post #23

I don't get why this is seen as a good job posting. There's very little info about the job, the compensation and only minimal info about the skills needed. When I was, say, 20, the blank slate might have been appealing. Now I'm actually good at stuff. I have deep specific skills and sorts of problems I like working on. Working in a job where I'm not using a significant subset of those skills is a poor use of my abili…

Agreed. Clearly jobs which list a million required "skills" are useless. But ones that list no problems to fix are also bad IMO (this one lists "you are..." instead - which is worse).

At least give an idea of the problem domain being faced (scaling, for example)

All that will happen is you will get a load of people apply who aren't really suitable for what they had in mind...

Re: Now this is a job posting

#28
post #21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think he was asking about the smart part, but the engineer part.

Canada makes that easy. Here you can only call yourself an engineer if you're actually an engineer because it's a protected term. (Like doctor.)

We don't have the ridiculousness of sanitation engineer and the like so if the job posting includes engineer in the title you can easily assume they expect a degree and a licence with a proper Canadian accreditation board.

And in case you were wondering, software engineering is only slightly different in that the majority of software engineers don't keep up their accreditation licence so usually when you see a Canadian software engineering posting they're looking for the degree but not necessarily the licence and will often accept non-engineers with a comp sci degree. It's rare that if the posting asks for software engineer that they'll accept someone without a degree. (Those positions are usually titled programmer, developer or programmer/analyst (which is the title you typically get from a CEGEP (kind of like community college in the US) degree.))

Re: Now this is a job posting

#29
post #5

Funny 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…

You're concentrating on what you want, but how about what I want? I think job ads should be a bit (a lot?) more descriptive about what the technologies used are and what the employee will be working on. I've always liked job postings which instead of listing requirements list things you'll learn, though I mostly see these kinds of things advertised for free software communities rather than companies.

Re: Now this is a job posting

#30
post #23

I don't get why this is seen as a good job posting. There's very little info about the job, the compensation and only minimal info about the skills needed. When I was, say, 20, the blank slate might have been appealing. Now I'm actually good at stuff. I have deep specific skills and sorts of problems I like working on. Working in a job where I'm not using a significant subset of those skills is a poor use of my abili…

They also say they're interested in a "generalist", but then the list of skills makes it pretty clear they're interested in someone mainly skilled in web-related stuff (backend, frontend, design). There's nothing wrong with that, but it's pretty clearly a kind of specialty, and would be an inappropriate job for a candidate whose strengths weren't web-related, no matter how many other skills they had.
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