thirdbIT

Oh, come on now, people:

You are a creative thinker that communicates effectively and possesses the individual leadership and accountability to “step up” and deliver high quality results in a fast paced environment while maintaining focus and a sense of humor.

I also saw a job posting with the headline “Web Designer/Developer – Full-time Non-Benefited Position”. Isn’t that called a ‘contractor’? Though I suppose that a lot of contractor work is really just being a full-time employee without benefits or unemployment insurance, you’d think that the company that’s searching for such would make it sound slightly more attractive. Especially since there is theoretically supposed to be a distinct difference between 1099 consulting work and employee work, tax-wise.

In other stupid job postings news, here’s a good discussion on what makes a _decent_ job posting, from a Thoughtworks guy in India, Sidu Ponnappa. In particular, he notes the difference between a job asking for people who are passionate about Ruby, for example, and one looking for people who are passionate in general. (I still think passion is overrated, though. Except where cheese is concerned. I am passionate about cheese. For example, this Vermont Brie is really fantastic. If only someone would make a truly artisan domestic parm…! But I digress…) Anyway, he suggests that one rank postings by the number of requirements in them that were clearly written by an HR person or someone else with no idea of what the job actually entails.The more HR speak, the lower the job posting ranking. I think someone needs to write a flog for job postings.

The other day I responded to an ad looking for Rails Ninjas. A very nice guy called me up to talk about his startup. He asked me to talk about our rails skills. Would I describe myself or Max as a rails superstar? I said “look, we’ve been using rails since March. We are not rails superstars.”

Why did I respond to an ad asking for Rails superstars when I make no claims to be one? Because there are many ads looking for Rails superstars and there are not enough to go around. There certainly aren’t undiscovered rails superstars around. We’re not talking supermodels here. You don’t take an ordinary Romanian peasant and turn her into a rails superstar overnight with a nice haircut and a manicure . Rails superstars have blogs and open source projects and debates about the importance of symbols on the rails-core mailing list. They have histories.

Me and Max, we don’t yet have a history with Rails. We are not superstars.

And yet, we are not script kiddies. Rails is full of amazing magic. How do instance variables set in the controller end up as instance variables in the view? Who knows? And who cares? Script kiddies don’t care. It’s automagically terrific, and that’s all they need to know.

If you look at the source code, though, you fall down a rabbit hole. You discover that Ruby itself has a method called instance_variable_set (be sure to check out the documentation on that!), that you can call on _any_ ruby class. How utterly transgressive! You can just shove whatever you feel like in anyone’s class at any damn time you please. You can make brand-new methods on the fly, when you need them, by using method_missing to make a new method whenever you call one that doesn’t yet exist. Amazing feats! And not implemented in secret or in C or something that isn’t any fun to look at and that there’s little hope of your ever being able (or particularly wanting) to do similar things yourself. All the magic is just hanging right out there for everyone to see. And it’s all just part of Ruby, a cute little language that’s fun to code.

And you think, yes, I can do this! Someday I too may tackle the continuation koans.

But not just yet.

Recently I saw a job posting that had a list of perks including “free Starbucks coffee, bennies.” Wow, I thought, do they really want to advertise that their developers need tranquilizers (possibly from all the free coffee)? Then I realized that “bennies” meant benefits, as in health, leave, insurance, retirement. Note to recruiters: benefits are important enough to be listed before free Starbucks coffee and should not be referred to with a diminutive.

Also, anyone who writes “All applicants must have the ability and desire to thrive in a fast moving team environment.” deserves whoever they end up hiring.

I’m not linking to the offenders. What if I want to work for them someday? Then I’d be embarrassed and the New York Times would use me as an example of the perils of online work life in the days of blogging.

I look at a lot of job descriptions. If the perfect employee jobs came up, Max and/or I would take them. We are also always on the lookout for interesting contracts, cool companies, and weird projects. For clients who want the work done, and don’t care if I bring a nursing infant to a meeting…For work opportunities with the potential for exponential and renumerative growth. For a fast-paced, take-no-prisoners, work hard-play hard up-and-coming, learning organization. Wait, no, scratch those last two sentences.

__What we’re looking for is job descriptions that are not full of crap.__

Most job descriptions are as tedious to read as most resumes. Do they say *anything*? Can even the people who write them stand to read them? I’ll be honest - I cannot bear to read my own resume, or Max’s. Or anyone else’s really. Even the best-written resumes I’ve seen are so bland my four-year-old would eat them without complaint. That’s *bland*, baby. Same for job descriptions. Occasionally I send my resume to a company because they had a puzzle in their job description — Athena Health had a fun one) or because they have an opening for “General Rock Star” (ZoomInfo’s clever recruiter Martin Burns attracted me with that one). The rest of the time I think, “eh, I’d rather be wiping up baby poop.”

I would like a world in which no one was counseled to pepper their resume with impactful verbs, and companies did not seek “ideal candidates” who “posess excellent communication skills” and are “self-motivated.” Resumes and job descriptions would be formatted in a kind of work-yaml:

job-title: senior software developer
    skills: RoR, mod_perl, MySQL
    experience: 4-6 years
    hours:  40 hours for salary negotiations, 55 if you ever want a raise or bonus
    location: Burlington, in a hideous office complex where the only food is a Panera
    commute: 30 minutes, door to door (i.e., at least an hour each way)
    boss: hates confrontation, won’t tell you if you’re screwing up. Otherwise nice.
    benefits: good for now, but next year we’ll cut out prescription drug coverage
    coworkers: pretty smart, will expect you to know how the Sox are doing this year.

resume: Amy Newell
    keywords: Java, Oracle, RoR, JSP, HTML, workflow, FDA compliance, project management
    previous_employers: Newell Household,
                        Millennium Pharmaceuticals,
                        Abuzz Technologies,
                        Harvard Extension School,
                        Harvard Medical School
    education:  humanities degree, summa, Harvard College.
                Software classes at Harvard Extension,
                vague thought of getting Masters there till life got in the way.
                O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online.
    good_at:    talking, writing, coding, training, requirements
    experience: mom brought home apple 2+ when I was 7.
                Husband brought home heapsort 7 years ago, been software developer ever since.
    quirks: nursing infant, hate crowds, startle easily, don’t like gadgets
    projects: Teaching Fellow for Data Structures class.
              Experiment Management Software for Molecular Pathology Department.
              Clinical Exam for Fourth Year Medical Students.

That’s it. I couldn’t resist putting in some jokey parts, but if you take those out I think we’ve really got a solution to the heartbreak of job and contract-hunting. Let’s stop bombarding one another with “Implemented Tracking System that increased revenue by 17% in 6 months” and “Must be a team player.” Let’s quit with “Detail-oriented”, “compensation package”, “in search of talented individuals” and “demonstrates expertise”. Please, no more “performs a variety of tasks” or “helped to grow the business”. Let’s ban “methodologies”, “proactive”, “interpersonal skills”, and “highly motivated”. I’ve been reading Jakob Nielsen’s website, and he has a nice quote from Winston Churchill: “Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all.”

The thing about resumes and job descriptions is that there’s really no hope that most of what we say in them is going to be particularly useful in matching people to work. All the interesting, useful things to know about jobs, and about people doing jobs, come out later, after everyone’s already committed. So can’t we all just cut the crap?

Max received one of those automated ‘hey, saw your resume on monster’ emails this morning. Someone in Boston is looking for a Senior Ruby on Rails developer. The person should have 3+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails. Salary range is 45-80K.

As far as I know, there’s one person who has even *almost* 3 years of Ruby on Rails experience, and I’m pretty sure he’s not doing any work for anything in that salary range.

*Job listings are so often ridiculous I think I’ll make this a weekly feature.