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Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

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Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#61

Post by duderific »

nkantar wrote: post #23
duderific wrote: post #17

"Gamechanger" is the new "rockstar"

Mazda revealed the new 3 as a #GAMECHANGER [sic]. Now that I have one, does that mean my car is a better prospective employee than me, since I'm merely a programmer/coder/developer/engineer?

The recruiting email I got noted that from my resume, she could tell I was clearly a gamechanger, but challenged me to question whether I was surrounded by other gamechangers. Because, you know, it's lonely being the only gamechanger at a company replete with non-gamechangers.

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#62

Post by EpicEng »

fredgrott wrote: post #47

I recently by mistake expressed interest in a startup on Angel.co found out later tha its one of these fake social startups building a mobile app on top of facebook and the founder is screaming about passion after 2 years going with no funding showing..yeah right..way to kill any interest whatsoever.

In my experience, "passion" is (for some people) synonymous with "working a ton of unpaid overtime."

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#63

Post by collyw »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #3
MichaelCrawford wrote: post #2

Among 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 recruitment consultant contacted me about a job. Told me blah blah blah, how such and such a company were hiring loads of people etc. I told him I was interested and he didn't get back to me. So I posted my own application to the same company, and got hired a month later.

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#64

Post by vonmoltke »

zerotolerance wrote: post #37
vonmoltke wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting perspective I had not thought of before. It aligns with my one and only experience with a professional resume writer, who took my resume and fluffed it up with exaggerations and borderline lies.

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#65

Post by makeset »

cek wrote: post #41

Best job description I ever wrote. This was while I was a Microsoft building a new team. Are you a lazy program manager who could care less about PCs, devices, networking, and other technologies in the home? Have you always dreaded working on a product that you would LOVE to use? Do you yearn to work in a huge, lumbering, group working on the same old stuff forever? If so, have we got a job for you! We are looking fo…

This would actually explain my experience with Microsoft products! It's funny because it's true?

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#66

Post by jdmichal »

mountaineer wrote: post #4

I've been tracking[1] the use of "passionate" in whoishiring threads, really getting out of control. It's now become one of the 10 most frequent terms used in posts. [1] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2014/...

I noticed by looking at the top 50 that there's also "passion" as a separate listing, and tracks almost perfectly [0].

[0] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2014/...

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#67

Post by redmattred »

IvyMike wrote: post #12

Postings 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.

http://blog.codejobs.io/post/95398815036/the-rise-of-the-roc...

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#69

Post by francesca »

I think the reason why it sucks is because engineers don't write job specs -- recruiters do. And a lot of recruiters don't take the time to really learn about how and why engineers move from company to company. Often they don't attract the highest quality talent because they attract talent that is "just right" and they don't try harder to make their recruiting better.

Re: Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

#70

Post by twic »

An apparently genuine job ad that came to my attention today (i think it's currently sweeping Twitter), from Sportacam in Finland [1]:

    What we can offer:

    - Meeting and partying with international sports superstars
    - Drinking beer instead of Jolt-coke
    - Making it rain on them hoes
    - Salary and/or Equity

    Yes, this will all come true if you fit the criteria.

    We expect you to:

    - be totally gay for code
    - know how to build a robust back-end that can handle massive amounts of photos, videos and users
    - have at least 7-10 years experience in back-end development
    - be able to talk to other people
Well, at least the "be able to talk to other people" is good.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5YIQ01r...

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