HN Explorer

Ask HN: What info do you wish every job posting included?

41 points by cmorgan8506 ↗ HN
There seems to be a broad range of different approaches to job postings. Some have salary info, some don't. Some describe their interview process, some don't.

If you had it your way, what info would every job posting include?

84 comments

[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread
Raed667
Interview process, team size, salary (or reasonable range), desired starting date and latest starting date.
byoung2
Salary range, remote work possibility, tech stack, job responsibilities
pleasecalllater
Remote possibility, salary range, the future manager/team_leader name (or better: a link to online identity), recruiter contact information, responsibilities, expected work time per week.
lejeanvaljean
1) Photos of the office, I mean the actual office, not the cafeteria or the hall at the entrance :)

We have something like that in France, that's called "Welcome to the jungle" (Guns N' Roses reference maybe), but again, you mainly see photos of the coffee machine.

2) a commentary on the position by someone at the same or equivalent role at the company

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codesternews
How much my colleagues are getting salary on same post?
sampl
Link to bio of hiring manager, example project brief
oldsklgdfth
What the team dynamic is like and how they collaborate. Not the tools they use, but how they communicate with each other.

I can work with terrible people if they can communicate. And I can learn to hate the softest soul if we can't get on the same page.

olavgg
Interview process, organization / team structure, salary range, technology stack, benefits / vacation / freedom and a good description of the business domain.
bigtimber
Actual work location, if not 100% remote.
megaman22
Salary. It's almost never there.
SteveNuts
Whether or not the office is an open floorplan.
plessthanpt05
Yea, would love to know if they have an open office floor plan before going through the whole interview process and without having to ask.
sanderjd
Honest question: do you ever come across companies that aren't open floor plans? I don't, so it isn't a very useful question.
blacksmythe
Worth looking at: Adobe, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco, Esri, Fog Creek, Garmin, HP, Mathworks, Microsoft Research, Panel, SAS, Stack Overflow, VMWare, XTime
V-2
There are separate rooms (usually hosting about 3 to 10 devs) at the place where I'm at right now.

The previous company where I worked eventually ended up with open floors - once they grew and moved to a new building - but also provided closed rooms in the location before that.

I also happened to worked at our client's office, a large IT company based in Berlin, they had rooms again.

YMMV - depending on your location perhaps - but based on my experience it's not extraordinary at all.

amyjess
My employer has a cube farm.

Even though it may be technically accurate, I don't really see that as an "open floor plan". To me, "open floor plan" means a bunch of desks strewn all over with no dividers.

I love cube farms (and I generally prefer conservative, enterprisey companies), and I refuse to work at a company that uses open offices like I described above, so it matters to me.

ken
Software development positions, no -- but I'm not limiting myself to that. People (on both sides of the table) are way too locked into the mindset that people can only do what they've done in the past. I'm good at lots of kinds of jobs.

If someone wants to hire me but their software development position happens to be in an environment that we know I'll do poorly in, then let's talk about what else is available.

Learning new technologies quickly, being able to pick up details from context, dealing with imprecise or conflicting requests, working backwards from a problem to find the root cause, designing future-proof systems, working in a fast-paced environment? I can segue these skills into almost anything.

I don't want to be shoehorned into "$(lang) developer", or even "developer", especially if it means I have to work in an open floor plan. Nobody should want to hire me for that, either, because it's the worst environment for me to do that work.

mindcrime
Salary range, description of office environment (and/or actual pictures), remote work policy, expected hours, dress code, tech stack details, some details on what the project actually is, and a quick "Joel test" like summary of the current development practices.

Also, a note indicating whether or not managers refer to people as "resources". Also, the name of the actual development methodology (if any) that is in use (eg, don't just say "Agile" - tell me if you're doing Scrum, SAFE, XP, Crystal, UP, or your own made-up thing, etc).

cmorgan8506
> Also, a note indicating whether or not managers refer to people as "resources"

This made me chuckle. It's a pretty accurate measure of a companies culture though.

pleasecalllater
I'm sure they are, so asking this question is useless... I won't believe the answer.
strictnein
There's one level worse: Human Capital, as in Human Capital Management (HCM).
mindcrime
It's a pet issue of mine. I feel very strongly that a "resource" is something like a backhoe, a stack of lumber, a pallet of widgets, a computer, a building, etc. A person is... well... a person, damnit.

Calling people "resources" and treating them as fungible, disposable, commodities is extremely dehumanizing and is emblematic of the typical corporate newspeak bullshit that some people use as a dodge to avoid facing the fact that their actions affect actual people.

calciphus
At my last job we had a rule: if someone (usually a new manager) called people "resources", we called them "overhead".

Ex. "I could get more people on my team if we had less overhead".

It helped that our lead Agile Coach was the main advocate of this particular approach.

amiller2571
Places I have worked in the past preferred to say "meat in the seat"
monkeynotes
Office environment!

I recently interviewed at a lunch meeting, and then second interview in a coffee shop (very casual interviews). By the end of the second interview they wanted me to make a suggestion for their offer. I said I needed to see their offices and look at their product before I'd consider moving from my current position.

I was rather taken aback that they didn't really consider I might want to see the environment I'd be spending a lot of my time, nor want to see what I was going to be working on.

Eventually I got to see the offices and the product, I loved the product but just couldn't jive with their office. It wasn't terrible or anything, but compared to where I work now I wasn't prepared to make the switch.

I feel extremely fortunate to be able to be picky about where I work. Every day I come to work I think about how fortunate I am to be happy with my work.

misja111
+1 for salary range. It's bizar that some companies require you to first go through the entire interview process and only do the salary negotation at the end. At which point you might find out that there never was a possibility for a match and you both have wasted your time.
mindcrime
At which point you might find out that there never was a possibility for a match and you both have wasted your time.

Exactly. It's ridiculous to do that.

What's arguably even worse is when you know that the company knows what your salary expectations are ahead of time, and they still go through the entire process, and then at the end either come up with an offer that's way below your bar, or decline to make an offer because "paying you that much would create a disequity on the team". Yeah, I got that last one once... AFTER going through two rounds of interviews. I'm thinking "if you knew you weren't willing to pay me what I was looking for, why did you waste hours of my time interviewing?!??"

handbanana
Agreed. These days I'm always sure to communicate very clearly what my salary requirements are, and I haven't had that happen recently.
oceanghost
I've turned down interviews from Lucas Arts, Dream Works and other companies for this reason. n n
handbanana
If you don't know the salary up front and they won't divulge that info, then why bother interviewing? How often would it be a pleasant surprise?
mindcrime
The times I've been in these situations, it's usually involved a recruiter, and I've had verbal confirmation from the recruiter to the effect of "I gave them your number and they are OK with it". Now it's possible the recruiter misstated things somewhere along the way, so who knows? But that's what made these things all the more surprising when they've come up: the fact that I was told specifically "I gave them your number and it's within their range" or "they're OK with it" or some similar verbiage.

Had I been applying direct (no recruiter involved) I probably would not have gone through that much process without demanding more details. Knowing what I know now, I definitely wouldn't.

handbanana
You can always try to find the salary range online, too (sometimes). Glassdoor, paysa, + indeed and other sites sometimes try to provide a guestimate range. Take each with a grain of salt of course. I'm very direct with recruiters typically, as I don't like having my time wasted (as it has in the past).
hiyer
That's pretty much the norm in India.
klenwell
In addition, a summary of the hiring process.

The standard one-line HN Who's Hiring summary is also more informative than most the boilerplate crap I come across. Example:

> FormulaFolios | Full-Stack Rails Developer | Costa Mesa, CA | ONSITE Full-Time | $80k-100k

As a hiring manager, I've put a great deal of thought and effort not only in our job posting but in our whole process. It requires extra effort for sure, but having been on the other side of the process and suffered the many indignities of job hunting, I try to be spare our applicants from them as much as possible.

This means responding within 48 hours to any applications and notifying applicants when they've been rejected for consideration as soon as possible. These messages are all templated but I tailor them to each candidate.

Since I take some pride in our job postings, here's our most recent one:

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/172538/full-stack-rails-devel...

(We're closing it soon so link will probably be dead by end of the week.)

cmorgan8506
Do you see any benefits on the hiring side of things when you're more transparent?
klenwell
Candidates seem to appreciate it. It saves everyone time when something like salary expectations are clearly out of alignment.

I've been using this approach for the last 2-3 years and I have found it to be successful (across 2 companies) and worth the extra effort. I haven't received any negative feedback about our process (which I don't take to mean there isn't any or the process is perfect) and I haven't regretted any of the hires we've made (probably around 12 in total). Even when I have to send out a rejection notice, I often get thanked by the candidate for it.

One other important point is that I've worked with management and my team to constantly refine and improve our process. Their buy-in is critical and I feel it needs to be an agile process just like our software development process.

handbanana
This but missing one of the most important for me: PTO in days. If it's unlimited, that's vague and could mean 10-50 days, but it's better than not knowing
ryandrake
At least I want to know if they distinguish between Vacation and Sick leave. I’ve seen a lot of the recent trend of lumping it all into “PTO” so if you get 2 weeks of PTO a year and you get sick for a week, you only have one week left for actual vacation.
herhor
Exactly! When I send my CV to a future employer, I don't send a list of what require, but what I have to offer.

However, very little job offers are actually "offers" but rather "requirements list".

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robohoe
Communication stack, documentation, and development methodologies.
molly0
If not remote, what my colleagues interests are, so I know that they won't talk too much about sports.
jasonlotito 

  Salary (Competitive salaries aren't competitive, they are average).
  Vacation policy.
  Remote work options.
  Office plan (Do I have my own office?).
  Tooling used (including hardware provided and upgrade policy).
Tharkun
Remote (yes, no, how often).

Salary. Over here in .be, it's very difficult to compare salaries. When posted at all, it's usually a single monthly number before tax. It's impossible to compare that with other postings, because one offer might contain a better pension fund, or a company car (what kind?) or meal vouchers (worth?) and dozens of other potential forms of non-cash wages. I'd much rather see an annual number which includes the net worth (or employer cost?) of all that nonsense.

Company size and/or size of whatever the team the ad is for.

Office, pictures or description.

dominotw
What level of flogging can you expect in the interview.
Thriptic
* Company mission statement, department mission statement, role mission statement, and how all 3 of those things fit together. I want to make sure that people actually know how they fit into the grander scheme of the company.

* Salary range

* Actual responsibilities and day to day activities. If the job is going to be to hack on some awful legacy code base then you should say that.

* How large is your company, where are you at with funding, and where are you at with product development.

* Interview process

ISL
Clear description of the project and customers. Accurate description of the team, philosophy, tooling, and culture. Reliable salary range. Links to employment contract and any NDA that might be required.

If the company is private, a link to a fiscal summary equivalent to the SEC's 10-K.

If any of the statements above are intentionally misleading, the job candidate is due compensatory damages.

goatherders
>>> ISL 18 minutes ago [-]

"If the company is private, a link to a fiscal summary equivalent to the SEC's 10-K."

Good luck with that.

lowry
Depends on the country. I work in a secretive company that still discloses lots of financial and personal information, including CEO salary and private addresses of board members because local regulation requires it.
ISL
Posed question asked: "If you had it your way, what info would every job posting include?", not "What can you realistically expect an employer to share?"

In practice, though, assessing the financial future of an employer before committing your most essential resource, time, is important.

onion2k
Entirely selfishly - absolutely nothing.

I'm quite happy to find a phone number and call the company directly if I want to know something. In my experience that gives me a huge advantage over 99% of candidates who are only willing to read adverts passively.

V-2
Having to do this for every single ad you might be interested in certainly is some way of proving patience, persistence or phone handling skills, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to work at a company where that's what is seen as a huge advantage over other candidates...
zerr
Salary, part-time possibility and work-life balance info in general, and whether REMOTE is possible outside US or no.
randcraw
Was the person I'm replacing promoted, fired, or did they leave voluntarily, and how long did they work there? What are the criteria for promotion? Describe three people in the group (in the last decade) who were promoted. What made them special?

How many hours of meetings each week? What fraction of my time is spent outside creative software development (req specing, designing, and coding)?

linux2647
Who the company is (beyond their name), what they do, or what their mission is.