Job Offer Dissection
July 31st, 2008 by RadarI used to do these when I didn’t have a job, and since then I’ve been looking a lot less (read: not at all) for a new job. This, however, was accidentally clicked on in Apple Mail and I was tempted to dissect yet another one.
This is what made me cringe the most. If you’re a recruiter sending out recruitment emails, why do it from a gmail address? Why not use your own?
Who? It helps to list names. Names attract people. If I told you I was going to buy you a beer you’d get all excited. Then I would reveal it would be a Fosters, and you wouldn’t be so excited.
With / without tax? Numbers are great, but more information is definitely needed here.
Ah! There it is!
No really?
Rupees? Zimbabwean Dollars? Kroner? Helps to specify a currency… but I guess American is inferred. Also, “fee”? Do we owe you money if we refer our friends to you?
Ah, a smiley face. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Also, respect goes out to the use of non-professional language here, makes it feel much better.
“Aggressive product list”? What are we talking here? A few robberies with a weapon? Rape? Murder? Genocidal maniac?
The team should motivate the developer, but it does help to be self-motivated too. Each member of the team should feed off each other’s energy.
Running makes me sweaty. How fast are we talking?
Pepsi Max and a proper sleep cycle gives me all the energy I need
Rather not, I hear the commute from here to there is about 22 hours!
As compared to the other kind of requirements?
So, say, an aspiring Trolley Pusher wouldn’t be the right kind of person for this job then?
We spent long nights together in an orgy of code. There were files flying all over the place! A few commits took place, but nothing serious.
Ruby’s going monorail now, huh?
Inferred from last statement
ditto
Uh oh, -1 point for chucking in “semantic” in there. Big words make people sad. “Well-structured” is what I would put there.
I have nothing witty to say about this.
Well, given that the position seems to be a Software Engineer-like position, this is pretty much a given. All application development is “ongoing”
Ah, so the position is now more of a Software Engineer meet Tech Support meet Project Manager position now? Cool. Probably a bit overwhelming for one person (we have this in three separate roles @ NetFox)
Easy enough with Capistrano, which most Ruby on Rails developers worth their salt should know.
Overall, a fairly good job advertisement. Still struggling to come up with a reason for posting from Gmail, but I’m sure there’s a fairly good one behind it. Thanks for not using buzzwords (apart from the iffy “semantic”)! It takes me so long to pick them all out and decipher them… I once saw “increases business continuity” on a website and I’m still trying to figure out what it means.
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
hey Radar, this is not the worst I’ve seen, back in 2001 I saw some job advertisment that have as a requirement “at least 4 years experience on windows 2000″ and some “you need to be highly experienced in HTML/CSS, COBOL is a strong plus”.
anyway I agree that there might be a good reason about using gmail when sending an email, personally I often switch from my personal to the gmail’s one because my personal email server runs greylist, therefore I’m not entirely sure that the recipient’s smtp server will try to send the email again if it’s important.
see you in irc.
kain
September 20th, 2008 at 4:02 am
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October 1st, 2009 at 5:16 am
Thanks for the dissection, now I’ll give you a bit of color around it. Ahhh, the dreaded gmail.. Well, yes, of course our company uses other mail, but gmail has features I simply love and without going into too much detail, just more of a personal preference. We also end up in spam buckets and have other issues thanks to our host (yes, we’re switching) and on and on.. Not to be self righteous about it, but also I have been in the game long enough to stand on my reputation and while I would usually kick of a conversation with a new client using the magnet mail, which is on my card, I usually move it right to gmail–no complaints yet, but I always wonder if it rubs people wrong. To me, it’s email and google owns. I’m not on wall street so if that’s a deal breaker, so be it. I don’t wear a red tie and a blue suit to meetings either.
The position descriptions are writen by clients. In the event we do a retained search, we have a long meeting to do exactly what you’ve done here and get something really robust. This is really more of a turn and burn thing. As to the production support piece, it’s really something to discuss via phone and we don’t want to write volumes but the client is doing alot of debugging and getting their code standardized and running worry free over the next couple of months, then the person will spend 90 percent of time doing the fun stuff. Some teams write killer descriptions, others leave alot to be desired or in the case of tech, which we don’t do so much of anymore for many reasons, simply flood you with a thousand acronyms that are annoying, then you get the gig and it’s doing something completely different.
As to the referral fee, it means it is a fee, paid to you for a service provided. It’s pretty generous and we get a lot of these.. Good people know good people.
I want to thank you for taking a crack at this one. It’s definitely a search we grabbed out of nowhere and it’s contingent vs retained which leaves a lot of room for error (just comb thru our site on the pitfalls of contingency search) because it’s a rush job on every level. This ws for a friend, so we slammed it out.
Keep my mail, whatever you choose, out of your spambox and maybe the next one will really wow you.
P.S. last but not least.. The client name.. We can’t disclose this stuff usually.. You would flip out if you were a hiring manager and suddenly you’re getting direct calls from people.. These descriptions circulate widely now and we don’t want our clients names out there until we determine the candidate is going to be a fit or unless they ask us directly etc.
Cheers,
Ryan
October 6th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Such a blast from the past! Been over a year since I’ve even thought about this post, that’s a really well-thought out comment you’ve got, thanks for taking the time to respond.
So if you were changing hosts then I can understand the usage of a Gmail account. We have hosted Gmail at where I work now (Mocra) and we’re able to keep our @mocra.com domain so the email address looks all businessy whilst still being hosted by Google. By now I’m sure you’ve already found a hosting provider. Unfortunate that your old one was spam-blocked. I too do not wear suits, hell, I don’t even own a suit!
If the descriptions are written by clients then it is (obviously) no fault of your own if they suck. The client gets what the client wants. As for the descriptions most of it is “standard” now.
Senior positions go a little like:
3/4+ years Ruby/Rails experience, great knowledge of Linux server maintenance, Scrum, Agile, TDD & BDD methodologies. HTML, CSS, JavaScript are a big plus.
Junior positions obviously are a little bit more wound back, probably requiring a little experience. I find it unfortunate that there really doesn’t seem like there’s a company out there who’s willing to train minions up to be awesome at what they do, but then I guess they run the risk of them running off to a competitor. Hooray for employment contracts I guess.
I am curious as to how you came across it, like I said before I’d simply forgotten about it. I haven’t done a job dissection for quite a while, but I did write a page on this site called “Job Postings” @ http://frozenplague.net/job-postings/ about what I look for in a job posting.
As for the client name well, that’s quite a conundrum.
I think your email’s a keeper, would be good to have someone further to talk to about the job industry, I’m curious about its inner workings especially when it comes to hiring new software developers.