Things I wish people who write job postings would stop writing

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.

See if you can find a recording of the original Apple Computer radio ad. It was on their very first developer CD - "You can change the world!"

Well I expect Apple did, but now everyone says they're going to.

I've gotten to the point that when I see an ad seeking a "rockstar coder" I just don't apply.

How about a job posting that's looking for someone with more than ten years experience?

Someone whose products got reviews in the trade press, or sold well?

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

Specifically, that I'd probably hate to work there.

Rock stars blow their royalties and ticket sales up their noses, sleep with groupies, trash hotel rooms and die young.

- 'Interested? Email me at ted@coolstartup.com, include hackernews in subject line'

Finally, just a few minutes ago, I put a vacation response in my gmail account:

   Dear Friend,

   Thank you for writing, I'll get back to you soon.

   If you are an agency recruiter seeking to place me in a
   job or contract position, please be advised that I find
   my own work.  Please take me off your mailing list.
   Please delete my resume from your records as well.

   If you'd like to know why, please read this:

      Market Yourself: Tips for High-Tech Consultants
      http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/market-yourself.html

   Regards,

   Michael David Crawford, Consulting Software Engineer
   Solving the Software Problem
   mdcrawford@gmail.com

      Local Jobs, Local Candidates
      The Global Computer Employer Index
      http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/

    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 for a newbie program manager to hinder 
    us in building the next version of Windows Home Server. 
    Our team is ginormous, moves excruciatingly slowly and 
    indecisively, and we are thoroughly hating life. And we 
    need more PMs to suffer along with us! Interested?

    You will be a non-player helping to design and build 
    the 42nd version of a product that has been around 
    since before you were born. We are still in startup 
    mode, and as part of a startup, you’ll have to do one 
    task repeatedly over and over. You need to be ready and 
    willing to do whatever I say when I say it even if it 
    makes no sense whether that means screwing up features, 
    angering partners, ignoring the community, creating 
    bugs, and maybe even stealing a little code and hacking 
    into a bank. We are in need of Program Managers with 
    weak design skills; goof-offs who can take ownership of 
    a user scenario area, ignore requirements, design a 
    useless technology for technologies sake (forgetting 
    about the user experience), and work with dev, test, 
    UA, usability, etc… to cause them all to quit. And then 
    do it again.

    Candidates should have poor consumer empathy, a deep 
    dislike of cutting edge technology in the home, and the 
    ability to cause political issues in small team where 
    everything is already figured out and there’s nothing 
    really left to do.

    Candidates must have less than 4 days experience as a 
    program manager working on shipping products. 
    Experience doing customer research and designing 
    consumer UIs will immediately disqualify you. The less 
    technical knowledge you have of networking, storage, 
    and Windows server technologies the better. Candidates 
    should have a B.A. in Basket Weaving or equivalent and 
    should have been fired from their previous two jobs.

I think you're underestimating the number of people who tell themselves things like that.

http://joblint.org/ - Test tech job specs for issues with sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails.

Library source: https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint

I can hardly think of a better way to advertise that you only want young people to apply than to advertise for a guru rockstar gamechanging ninja who is awesome and wants a vague job description.

Clearly this was a lose-lose proposition.

Hilariously, I naively took them at their word and described amongst other observations how their application used far too many HTTP requests (i.e. they weren't using concatenation) and that the page size was phenomenally large.

Needless to say I got no response.

Another time an in-house recruiter for a company that creates a light-blue VOIP client that everyone uses, mentioned that there were free soft drinks and that the executive management were really down to earth. At which point I moved the phone away from my mouth, took a breath and regained my composure.

The level of detail goes both ways, though. The vast majority of people who apply don't even submit a pgp resume, which gives the impression that they didnt read the job description.

[1]: http://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=66c8368e9c756e78

    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

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