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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 o

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.
  - lemming 16y ago
    Sounds fantastic. Why don't you say that in the ad? The specific toolchain is the least important part of what you just described. I could care less if I'm doing those tasks in Ruby, Javascript or Java, if you want to sell it to engineers I think the actual problems are far more interesting - certainly that's what I'd want to know. While you're right that it's important your candidates understand the non-tech aspects of the role, I think you sell the tech part short.
    - MrIncognito 16y ago
      Yeah, I would include it if I could edit it (it doesn't appear to be editable).
  - davidu 16y ago
    Why aren't you saying what company it is? What do you think you gain by keeping it secret?
  - cperciva 16y ago
    I agree with lemming: That comment should be in your job posting text.
nkurz 16y ago
I think it might be a question of which double-speak speaks to you. The listing of languages is concrete in a sense, and says lots about the sort of culture they aspire to, but tells me nothing about the job. The other ads also say a lot about the culture you'd be working within. Personally, I would care tremendously about what I am doing, and not just which tools I'd be allowed to use. The fact that you respond positively to it means that it's serving its purpose as an advertisement, but I'm not sure that means it's any more or less clear as to the job description. So while I'd probably prefer being part of this mystery company to being a "Front-End Architect" in a cubicle, I still have no idea what the job would be and the ad doesn't offer enough specifics to make me excited in the abstract.

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.
- lemming 16y ago
  Sounds fantastic. Why don't you say that in the ad? The specific toolchain is the least important part of what you just described. I could care less if I'm doing those tasks in Ruby, Javascript or Java, if you want to sell it to engineers I think the actual problems are far more interesting - certainly that's what I'd want to know. While you're right that it's important your candidates understand the non-tech aspects of the role, I think you sell the tech part short.
  - MrIncognito 16y ago
    Yeah, I would include it if I could edit it (it doesn't appear to be editable).
- davidu 16y ago
  Why aren't you saying what company it is? What do you think you gain by keeping it secret?
- cperciva 16y ago
  I agree with lemming: That comment should be in your job posting text.

nkurz 16y ago

I think it might be a question of which double-speak speaks to you. The listing of languages is concrete in a sense, and says lots about the sort of culture they aspire to, but tells me nothing about the job. The other ads also say a lot about the culture you'd be working within. Personally, I would care tremendously about what I am doing, and not just which tools I'd be allowed to use. The fact that you respond positively to it means that it's serving its purpose as an advertisement, but I'm not sure that means it's any more or less clear as to the job description. So while I'd probably prefer being part of this mystery company to being a "Front-End Architect" in a cubicle, I still have no idea what the job would be and the ad doesn't offer enough specifics to make me excited in the abstract.