I would like for them to hire a professional writer. It seems more common to cut and past.
Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#32No 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?
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#33No 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.
sure, you can use it properly, but what I see most of the time is a generic "[passionate/awesome/etc.] developer"
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#34My favorite (from a long time ago now): "Experienced in Lotus 1, 2, and 3."
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#35What 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.
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#36Among 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 otherwi…
> 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…
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.
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#37How 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.
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.
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#38Postings 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.
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."