I don't get why this is seen as a good job posting. There's very little info about the job, the compensation and only minimal info about the skills needed.
When I was, say, 20, the blank slate might have been appealing. Now I'm actually good at stuff. I have deep specific skills and sorts of problems I like working on. Working in a job where I'm not using a significant subset of those skills is a poor use of my abilities. (Though, notably, doing the founder thing that happens anyway. ;-) )
To me this post basically reads as looking for, "young, excited and inexperienced", which may be their goal, but would be disastrous if used as a general template.
Agreed. Clearly jobs which list a million required "skills" are useless. But ones that list no problems to fix are also bad IMO (this one lists "you are..." instead - which is worse).
At least give an idea of the problem domain being faced (scaling, for example)
All that will happen is you will get a load of people apply who aren't really suitable for what they had in mind...
They also say they're interested in a "generalist", but then the list of skills makes it pretty clear they're interested in someone mainly skilled in web-related stuff (backend, frontend, design). There's nothing wrong with that, but it's pretty clearly a kind of specialty, and would be an inappropriate job for a candidate whose strengths weren't web-related, no matter how many other skills they had.
This sounds a lot like a perceiving vs judging issue. Judgers tend to like knowing what they're getting into ahead of time. Perceivers (such as myself) tend to get bored when their future is mapped out.
This posting definitely leans more toward the perceiving end of the spectrum. That isn't necessarily bad or good, but it definitely makes this posting different.
This is just another confusing, poorly written job posting.
The first section is titled "Position" which would make you think that it would be a description of the position being advertised. It's not. It reads like a list of requirements: "You have... You are... You are..." The second section actually makes sense, which is rare for a posting such as this. The third section is titled "Bonus Skills." I see a framework, an RDBMS, two languages, a technology, a skill, a service, another skill, specific knowledge, and a requirement. Nine bullet points: two actual skills.
Having experience with a language or a framework is not a skill, it is experience. Having knowledge of a language or framework is also not a skill. All the time companies take five minutes to write a job posting like this while perspective developers waste hours on resumes and cover letters. Most of the applications are thrown out because the company couldn't take a little bit longer to write a clearer job posting.
Funny timing. This Friday I talked to the HR person at work and told her I want to hire an IT person - someone to help me manage all the servers, users etc. Based on what I said, she did some research and made a draft job posting. It was a smörgåsbord of every technology I'd heard of in the past 10 years. I edited out a bunch of it but frankly, all I wanted it to say was "1. Must be able to learn anything when needed. 2. Must love technology and helping others." Frankly, the rest is just fluff.
Can you be specific in why you don't like Microsoft shops?
A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS products. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack. The impression I got was that they wanted to focus on the product and not spend time fixing ActiveRecord bugs, etc.
Are there really no good MS hackers out there? Is it a cultural thing?
To me, MS is practically a separate universe from everything else. That's not to say that there aren't any significant differences between the nixes, but they are at least similar in terms of the big picture. It would seem that learning to administer a Windows system would require a lot of unnecessary retraining for a nix admin. And I'm pretty sure that's doubly true of the opposite.
You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration.
First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN.
They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack.
Did they then administer it?
Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment.
There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.
IT is particularly like that, since there are so many different ways to do things. Is your storage iSCSI or FC? Are your server Windows or UNIX? Is your hardware Dell or Sun? The fact is that 80% of the technology is the same between them, and what matters is being able to learn new ones and adapt. People are still writing C99, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone still using Compaq hardware.
You're concentrating on what you want, but how about what I want? I think job ads should be a bit (a lot?) more descriptive about what the technologies used are and what the employee will be working on. I've always liked job postings which instead of listing requirements list things you'll learn, though I mostly see these kinds of things advertised for free software communities rather than companies.
Notice there are only three requirements, none of them language-specific. Even these can be thought of as only two different demands, since learning languages quickly and being a really smart engineer are nearly the same thing. This means that, probabilistically, there's a reasonable chance they'll get a lot of applicants that actually meet all the requirements and from there they can hire someone they like based on the bonus points section, people skills, etc.
In contrast, the average job listing makes it very unlikely that anybody can comply with all the requirements, so the hiring manager ends up hiring someone who does not meet requirements. This is the honest approach to the problem of hiring good hackers.
/learning languages quickly and being a really smart engineer are nearly the same thing/
Only if we're thinking of formally specified computing languages. Since it's a world travel business that demands just a few lines later that you travel around the world as part of your job responsibilities, I read the requirement as refering* to natural languages.
I think an ad like this could work for a small, high profile startup like this but it should really take a line to say, "we mostly write all this in [RoR|Arc|Django|Objective-C] and need to keep [Oracle|Psotgres|MySQL] back ends tuned." That way we'd have some clue what to expect.
As a basic "get everything right and nothing wrong", yep, it's a very good job posting.
Presumably interested applicants will be able to e.g. look at their site and figure out whether they want to work for the company (i.e. it doesn't sell the company, although it does sell the quality of engineering hiring, which is even more rare than quality engineering management!).
It's also good in that it has one firm and semi-measurable requirement (specifically one or more sites the applicant has done his stuff on; "semi-" qualification for their ability to know how much an applicant was really responsible for that).
It's nicely formatted, and it wasn't written by a retarded monkey, which is always good, but I really don't see how it rises above 'minimally acceptable' - it's all worded in vague HR speak, which is expected, but prevents it from being 'very good' in my opinion.
I don't understand why this comment was downmodded. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable. I'd be genuinely interested in someone explaining what's wrong with it.
17 minutes after your comment it's now a +2, but I too am curious.
ADDED: my only complaint is that it doesn't explicitly sell the company or the job; the former is something you have to do in an classified advertisement ("We are the leading...." is an example of the usual BS sort of copy that does that). For an ad on a web site, that's OK, although adding a bit of explicit selling of the job and maybe the company would make it better.
To make it perfectly clear, the emphasized "everything right and nothing wrong" is my acknowledgment that implicitly it does a hell of a job of selling the job (since that's so very rare and says so much).
This is a great job posting, but its completely focused on the benefits to the company, not the job seeker. In the context of the site it's fine because their main jobs page is awesome http://www.airbnb.com/jobs but if this was posted on a job board, it would need a lot of work to lure someone who didn't know about airbnb in advance.
Canada makes that easy. Here you can only call yourself an engineer if you're actually an engineer because it's a protected term. (Like doctor.)
We don't have the ridiculousness of sanitation engineer and the like so if the job posting includes engineer in the title you can easily assume they expect a degree and a licence with a proper Canadian accreditation board.
And in case you were wondering, software engineering is only slightly different in that the majority of software engineers don't keep up their accreditation licence so usually when you see a Canadian software engineering posting they're looking for the degree but not necessarily the licence and will often accept non-engineers with a comp sci degree. It's rare that if the posting asks for software engineer that they'll accept someone without a degree. (Those positions are usually titled programmer, developer or programmer/analyst (which is the title you typically get from a CEGEP (kind of like community college in the US) degree.))
That might be the case in the US as well (but it may not be enforced). For instance, the term "software architect" is technically illegal, but nobody actually enforces it if it's in the context of software.
I'm Canadian and I don't know if this is entirely correct. Afaik you can only get acredited as a software engineer in a couple of provinces(Ontario,Quebec and Alberta I believe). Many universities have software engineering as sub programs or honors programs in the cs and engineering depts. As for job titles, I don't know if that's entirely correct either. I've seen jobs that are programmer, developer, software developer, programmer/analyst etc. Require a degree so I don't know if you can really generalize there.
In elementary school (at least where I grew up) every day we'd have "recess" where we got to go outside for 30 minutes and play sports or play on the monkey bars or whatever.
This should be a requirement rather than a bonus. I can't tell you just how helpful it is to hire people who are customers/users of your service. They obviously believe in what you are doing because they use the service and have given the ultimate vote - opening their wallet.
Personally, I think 'believing in the product' is overrated. If you emphasize that too much, you end up with a bunch of yes men who can't see (or at least won't mention) problems with your product. Overconfidence is dangerous. The ability to be critical of yourself and your company is essential to avoiding death, I think.
That said, there is no way I'd hire a customer service person who wasn't a customer first. (but then, I sell a product that is of interest to technical people, and I target the low end, so really, #prgmr on irc.freenode.net is probably a fairly decent place to pick up cheap SysAdmins.) If I sold to, say, real-estate agents, I might feel differently. Also, if I was looking for an MBA, my customer pool would probably not be a very useful place to fish.
Really, people I know, and people who know people I know have been a more useful resource than anything else. (I don't mean people on my "social network" in the sense of facebook, but, for example, I met the co-author of my book because he was the roommate of one of my employees.)
I still like a range. I mean, fairly recently someone asked me for a recommendation... I did some legwork and found that one of the best people I know was looking around at the time. I made the recommendation, and kindof embarrassed myself. turns out, the guy wanted "a quick learner" (meaning someone cheap with little experience)
I mean, I think hiring people without experience is great; how else are they going to get experience? but if you are looking to pay $25/hr, don't waste the time of people who expect $200/hr. (and visa-versa.)
When I was, say, 20, the blank slate might have been appealing. Now I'm actually good at stuff. I have deep specific skills and sorts of problems I like working on. Working in a job where I'm not using a significant subset of those skills is a poor use of my abilities. (Though, notably, doing the founder thing that happens anyway. ;-) )
To me this post basically reads as looking for, "young, excited and inexperienced", which may be their goal, but would be disastrous if used as a general template.