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The strange thing about this article is I read the first patch of job descriptions and I thought you were poised to make fun of them - not the latter one. Thos

The strange thing about this article is I read the first patch of job descriptions and I thought you were poised to make fun of them - not the latter one. Those first descriptions make me wonder if it's really OK to run the same startup template again and again, even if you say that it makes you "human". I expect to read that first job description amongst a million three-person startups - besides maybe the profitable part. Is that really who you are? The cool start-up? The inability to show discernible qualities in this kind of company kinda worries me as it comes to differentiating yourself in product - are you also the same company that's the next Google that can do better SEO and just loves that Lean Startup philosophy? I mean, they're all real and we want to do them, but what does that mean? At least those automated, robotic startups aren't pretending to be something else. They're automated machines. But if your straightforward nap-centric job description is trying to adhere to a standard professed in this forum, I wonder about your true ability to imbue the unique competitive advantages that will ultimately make you successful.

danilocampos 16y ago
They pretty much had me at profitable. The way I read it: You're not a bozo, you know what you want your candidate to do, you make money. Pretty good to me. There isn't perfect clarity on the product, but they're keeping that under wraps for a reason. That posting gives you a better idea for your prospective gig than 99% of posts for launched companies.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  See, I read the "we're profitable" as "we make enough money to keep ourselves alive with ramen noodles and maybe hopefully pay rent". Perhaps I've just grown cynical in my old age...
  - pg 16y ago
    This particular startup is more profitable than that.
    - mechanical_fish 16y ago
      And you would figure that out in the interview. If it matters enough to you, you can figure it out in the first five minutes of the phone screen before going further. It seems to me that the literary criticism in this thread is getting kind of thick. The job posting is like a resume in reverse, and a resume is not designed to be a window into someone's immortal soul. It's a teaser. A job posting is a telegraphic commercial that's designed to describe the job in the broadest possible terms, so that the obviously unsuitable might be discouraged while the potentially suitable might be prompted to waste a few minutes on an email cover letter. That is why they use the same jargon, that is why they deal in cliches and fashionable labels ("Lean Startup", "Fortune 500 company", "lifestyle company" -- these terms may not be highly specific but they tell you important basic things about the company's outlook, just as the words "SWF, thirtysomething, seeks SM with LTR potential" tells you boring but crucial basic facts about your potential first date. Don't expect Tolstoy. If you want to learn what a company is really like you're going to have to pick up the phone or start an email discussion.
      - gwtw 16y ago
        "SWF, thirtysomething, seeks SM with LTR potential...boring but crucial basic facts about...first date." Do tell! All these threads read like so much 'startup porn'.
  - strebler 16y ago
    "Ramen profitable" would be the term for that :)
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Yes, but does any startup actually make the distinction between "ramen profitable" and "profitable" in their want ads? If so, props for honesty, but I'm not so sure about their business sense...
cperciva 16y ago
The strange thing about this article is I read the first patch of job descriptions and I thought you were poised to make fun of them Me too. This bit could describe the local transit system: "We’re profitable, make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every month, have a rapidly expanding user base, and napping is an encouraged part of our corporate culture." Maybe I'm unusual, but my idea of a perfect job posting is one which says something about the job. Don't write platitudes about how you're looking for people who think outside the box; say "we think the most exciting thing in the world is designing algorithms to target advertising better, and that's what you'll be doing if you get this job".
- danilocampos 16y ago
  In fairness to the original posting, there are concrete examples of what you'd be doing (as their programming generalist) that I omitted in the original draft of the post: "Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus." Updated now.
  - cperciva 16y ago
    That's part of the answer, but not all. Telling me what tools you need me to use helps me determine if I'm qualified or not; but it doesn't tell me what I would be doing with those tools. I'd rather solve interesting problems in a language I hated than solve boring problems in a language I loved.
    - MrIncognito 16y ago
      Heh hold your horses, Colin. The tools are only there to show you that you can't live in one and ignore all others here. And you're right, I spent a lot less time telling you what's great about the company than I did on trying to make it obvious who we're not looking for. That's because we're looking for a very specific breed of person. In this startup, you will not only be doing engineering, but also answering customer emails and chat messages. You will likely be an important part of strategy discussions, and you may have to write the odd press release. You may even need to go door to door and figure out what our customers want. Not every engineer is interested in that stuff, and I wanted to make sure those people didn't apply. You will basically a cofounder-level person coming in at a stage where a lot of the risk is removed. As far as some of the interesting challenges... Heavy image processing, data processing, and analytics. Primarily client-side web application with client side data processing. Very heavy database loads with poor potential cacheability. Data synchronization across multiple clients. Near duplicate document detection. Graph problems which need to be precomputed to varying degrees to make the application very responsive. Spam detection.
strebler 16y ago
Agreed. After reading the first job description, I know almost nothing about the company or the product. I feel the opposite from his rant about that description. The second job description (once you read the full thing) is actually quite reasonable. They describe their product, responsibilities, their financing, company size, languages in use, etc. It's not stellar, but it's far from bullshit.
MrIncognito 16y ago
Eh, it's hard to talk loudly about something secret.
danielnicollet 16y ago
Same here. Pardon my French (I can say that, I am French ;-) but there is also a lot of bullshit, predictable and lame developer's jobs in the world of hot startups too. How many devs join a young hot startup thinking they are going get a chance to create a great new product or improve on one, and find themselves working out the quirks of old core code, or regressing boring bugs all day long? or worse: find themselves without a job 3 months later because the startup ran out of cash? I think this article is full of "clichés".

danilocampos 16y ago

They pretty much had me at profitable. The way I read it: You're not a bozo, you know what you want your candidate to do, you make money. Pretty good to me. There isn't perfect clarity on the product, but they're keeping that under wraps for a reason. That posting gives you a better idea for your prospective gig than 99% of posts for launched companies.

nostrademons 16y ago
See, I read the "we're profitable" as "we make enough money to keep ourselves alive with ramen noodles and maybe hopefully pay rent". Perhaps I've just grown cynical in my old age...
- pg 16y ago
  This particular startup is more profitable than that.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    And you would figure that out in the interview. If it matters enough to you, you can figure it out in the first five minutes of the phone screen before going further. It seems to me that the literary criticism in this thread is getting kind of thick. The job posting is like a resume in reverse, and a resume is not designed to be a window into someone's immortal soul. It's a teaser. A job posting is a telegraphic commercial that's designed to describe the job in the broadest possible terms, so that the obviously unsuitable might be discouraged while the potentially suitable might be prompted to waste a few minutes on an email cover letter. That is why they use the same jargon, that is why they deal in cliches and fashionable labels ("Lean Startup", "Fortune 500 company", "lifestyle company" -- these terms may not be highly specific but they tell you important basic things about the company's outlook, just as the words "SWF, thirtysomething, seeks SM with LTR potential" tells you boring but crucial basic facts about your potential first date. Don't expect Tolstoy. If you want to learn what a company is really like you're going to have to pick up the phone or start an email discussion.
    - gwtw 16y ago
      "SWF, thirtysomething, seeks SM with LTR potential...boring but crucial basic facts about...first date." Do tell! All these threads read like so much 'startup porn'.
- strebler 16y ago
  "Ramen profitable" would be the term for that :)
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Yes, but does any startup actually make the distinction between "ramen profitable" and "profitable" in their want ads? If so, props for honesty, but I'm not so sure about their business sense...

cperciva 16y ago

The strange thing about this article is I read the first patch of job descriptions and I thought you were poised to make fun of them Me too. This bit could describe the local transit system: "We’re profitable, make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every month, have a rapidly expanding user base, and napping is an encouraged part of our corporate culture." Maybe I'm unusual, but my idea of a perfect job posting is one which says something about the job. Don't write platitudes about how you're looking for people who think outside the box; say "we think the most exciting thing in the world is designing algorithms to target advertising better, and that's what you'll be doing if you get this job".

danilocampos 16y ago
In fairness to the original posting, there are concrete examples of what you'd be doing (as their programming generalist) that I omitted in the original draft of the post: "Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus." Updated now.
- cperciva 16y ago
  That's part of the answer, but not all. Telling me what tools you need me to use helps me determine if I'm qualified or not; but it doesn't tell me what I would be doing with those tools. I'd rather solve interesting problems in a language I hated than solve boring problems in a language I loved.
  - MrIncognito 16y ago
    Heh hold your horses, Colin. The tools are only there to show you that you can't live in one and ignore all others here. And you're right, I spent a lot less time telling you what's great about the company than I did on trying to make it obvious who we're not looking for. That's because we're looking for a very specific breed of person. In this startup, you will not only be doing engineering, but also answering customer emails and chat messages. You will likely be an important part of strategy discussions, and you may have to write the odd press release. You may even need to go door to door and figure out what our customers want. Not every engineer is interested in that stuff, and I wanted to make sure those people didn't apply. You will basically a cofounder-level person coming in at a stage where a lot of the risk is removed. As far as some of the interesting challenges... Heavy image processing, data processing, and analytics. Primarily client-side web application with client side data processing. Very heavy database loads with poor potential cacheability. Data synchronization across multiple clients. Near duplicate document detection. Graph problems which need to be precomputed to varying degrees to make the application very responsive. Spam detection.

strebler 16y ago

Agreed. After reading the first job description, I know almost nothing about the company or the product. I feel the opposite from his rant about that description. The second job description (once you read the full thing) is actually quite reasonable. They describe their product, responsibilities, their financing, company size, languages in use, etc. It's not stellar, but it's far from bullshit.

MrIncognito 16y ago

Eh, it's hard to talk loudly about something secret.

danielnicollet 16y ago

Same here. Pardon my French (I can say that, I am French ;-) but there is also a lot of bullshit, predictable and lame developer's jobs in the world of hot startups too. How many devs join a young hot startup thinking they are going get a chance to create a great new product or improve on one, and find themselves working out the quirks of old core code, or regressing boring bugs all day long? or worse: find themselves without a job 3 months later because the startup ran out of cash? I think this article is full of "clichés".