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Red Flags in Software Developer Job Descriptions
- FreeKill 8y agoMy favorite is always when the job description includes superfluous descriptors in front of the developer role. Like "Rock Star" Developer or "Super Star" Developer. In my experience, it's almost always code for we want to put a ton of responsibility on you, while at the same time having unreasonable expectations for both speed and quality of what you produce.
- Gibbon1 8y ago> put a ton of responsibility on you 'Ton of responsibility, but no real authority'
- ravenstine 8y agoI recently came across "programming athlete".
- baroffoos 8y agoI saw "ninjaneer" on one...
- arcturus17 8y agoKill me. Who writes these?
- jakobloekke 8y agoMaybe an HR position: One, who hires ninjas?
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoI guess it's like an imagineer, only you kill people.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoRock Star developers are a real thing. https://github.com/RockstarLang/rockstar https://github.com/RockstarLang/rockstar
- Nursie 8y agoHa, an old friend of mine is behind that. He's now started a tongue-in-cheek certification program at conferences he attends.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoBest. Thing. Ever. Tell them that for me. Seriously, such a good idea. Esoteric languages are fun, but an esoteric language that gives you the practical ability to stick it to these ridiculous job ad descriptions? That's just legendary.
- microtherion 8y agoI always wonder which part of the "Rock Star" personality those companies are looking for. Shooting Heroin at work? Throwing TVs out the window? Chasing teenage groupies? Dressing outrageously?
- davidddavidson 8y agohttps://i.redd.it/s3f1ruepjhuz.jpg https://i.redd.it/s3f1ruepjhuz.jpg
- souprock 8y agoWe sort of hired one. Would you count industrial metal, alternative metal, or nu metal? He had a song that was nominated for a Billboard Music Award. So far, he has behaved well. We got him using a normal computer keyboard. This is better for software development than the keyboard he had in the band.
- perlgeek 8y ago> In my experience, it's almost always code for we want to put a ton of responsibility on you, while at the same time having unreasonable expectations for both speed and quality of what you produce. If you want to hire me as a 10x programmer, and pay me 10x the regular programmer salary, I'm all for it :-)
- koolba 8y ago> “Early Stage Emmployee / Technical Co-founder / Person to Make My Thing” A typo in the word “Employee” is another red flag. Attention to quality extends to all things around the office including proof reading job descriptions.
- Gibbon1 8y agoMy mom when she was working for the IRS saw an internal job ad where one of the job requirements was 'experience in pubic speaking'
- stock_toaster 8y agoI bet /that/ candidate had some stories to tell!
- Nursie 8y agoYeah, I groaned (and immediately went to talk to someone) when I spotted the org I'm currently consulting with was advertising for a Phyton developer.
- Graham24 8y agoYeah, if they do not have attention to detail, I do not want to work there.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago1 was always caused by the requirements being made by HR. 4 is caused by people wanting to learn things on the employer's dime. If employers weren't so cheap with training budgets, employees wouldn't do learning projects that end up in Production... wanna see a dangerous company? Find a place that has 37 different technologies in their hiring ads.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> Find a place that has 37 different technologies in their hiring ads. If those 37 different technologies were all recent (or recently outdated) JS frameworks, or tools that are "hot" right now, I'd want to stay away. But if those 37 different technologies are a mix of tried-and-true pragmatic hacker's choice - say Bash, Perl, Python, R, etc. - covering a bunch of different problem domains, I'd think highly of the company that seems to be able to use the right tool for a job.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoThis. While not 37, the projects I work on, on any given sprint I can be doing some combination of C#, Python, C++(oooold C++), Java, JavaScript, Perl, BASH or PowerShell. I actually love it because I am not doing the same old thing day in and day out.
- rapsey 8y agoHow about fullstack developer using entirely different technologies on the server and client side. Just be an expert in everything and do it all.
- minitech 8y ago> How about fullstack developer using entirely different technologies on the server and client side. That sounds completely normal.
- jedberg 8y agoI know lots of devs who make clean, efficient, and readable javascript and also make excellent Python code. It’s not that odd to be good at two languages.
- rapsey 8y agoBoth backend and frontend code has an ecosystem that goes with it and the job descriptions are for the entire thing. Some js framework, css. Linux and databases.
- jedberg 8y agoYes but usually you’re not expected to be an expert in all of them. The database and Linux part are expected competencies not expert level.
- justinko 8y agoA decade ago it was possible to be a true full-stack developer that kept up with both ecosystems. Much, much more difficult to do nowadays. Hence the explosion of “frontend engineer” positions.
- mikekchar 8y agoI've been around a long time. I don't think it's any more difficult than it used to be. On the contrary, I think it's considerably easier -- everything comes with source code and all these new fangled frameworks are practically the same anyway. Back in the day we had client server architectures and it was exactly the same thing. Even more tiers would sometimes be added and there were frameworks for all of them. We didn't get source code. The frameworks were full of bugs. There was no stack overflow. Documentation usually consisted of a few trivial examples. You just had to hack, hack, hack and figure out how it worked. I remember when Swing came out and being very excited about being able to work on something that wasn't completely insane for client stuff (that's how bad it was ;-) ). This is just the life of the computer programmer. If you like learning new things, it's never a dull moment!
- un_montagnard 8y agoI'd forgotten about Coldfusion. Is anyone still using that technology?
- TwelveNights 8y agoI've only heard of it being used for internal tooling. I wouldn't be surprised if it was still kicking in some industries though.
- etxm 8y agoIt’s the new cobol. I think TechStyle still uses it.
- smcmurtry 8y agoThe Government of Canada is.
- wyqydsyq 8y agoThere was actually a post a few weeks ago about a project which is essentially a modern CF runtime, while I still can't imagine anyone using it to build new projects, I'm sure many orgs are still actively using it to glue their legacy systems to newer ones
- general8bitso 8y agoLucee. Also, the Coldbox platform/framework is pretty slick (currently maintained CF framework).
- zhte415 8y ago12 years experience in Vue or Backbone? Coldfusion was forgotten in a Flash, sorry for the pun. I do like jQuery, paired with it Coldfusion in the article, because of it's simplicity over what seems heavy React, Angular, and expect it to outlive them. I also expect human readable CSS to return, and for PHP to live a long life.
- abledon 8y agodoTerra, The largest essential oil company on the global scale.
- Macross8299 8y agoI occasionally see ads for jobs that request absurd things like having x years of experience in a technology where x is greater than the number of years the technology has been around, but I strongly suspect that these type of ads are not serious about hiring an outside candidate and are just put up for legal/compliance reasons.
- jedberg 8y agoIt’s either for legal/policy reasons or because something was lost in translation between the hiring manager and HR.
- colordrops 8y agoOther red flags: * t-shirts, foosball tables, etc as perks * overly specific job description (you will be building a table widget using knockout.js) * buzzword salad
- tschwimmer 8y agoair hockey okay?
- lwansbrough 8y agoGames are fine, but many people don’t consider them a perk. Let them be a surprise, no need to advertise them. (Mentioning games is a turn off for me.)
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAs long as you have a separate room for that... There's little more annoying than having a foosball table next to your desk while you have a job to do and are trying to concentrate. At one of my previous jobs, there was a foosball table that travelled between rooms - each 8-people open-plan room wanted really hard to be the ones to have it, but usually after a month or two of serving as company breakroom, they wanted really bad to get rid of it. The table kept making rounds between rooms until they finally freed a separate room to put it in.
- doctorRetro 8y agoYep. When the atmosphere is being pushed hard as an asset, that tells me they're padding to make up for other deficiencies. Like everyone's first resume.
- tomp 8y agoHave you ever worked at a bank (or another dead atmosphere place)?
- hessproject 8y agoNot OP but I work at a major bank and we have casual dress/ping pong/a game room. It's a pretty popular trend right now for major banks to build/buy offices specifically for tech and separating it from the suit and tie culture of the HQs
- keyle 8y agoI feel this could go well beyond a blog post. There could be a regularly updated list somewhere on the Internet. My favourite is 'flexible on lifestyle", meaning your lifestyle better be flexible, not theirs :) Or allowing work from home, but better be 'dedicated', aka. being responsive 24/7 and never leaving 'work'.
- taude 8y agoI agree, there's more to ta job than the technologies used. I'm biased, though, and been around awhile working in most tech stacks. Just some of the things I prioritize: 1) Engaged, smart teammates 2) Solving an interesting business problem. What's the reasoning behind the softer, I'd much rather work with some legacy technology if it means working with a company with a great mission, vs doing the latest trends for yet another ad-tech company. 3) convenient commute 4) Lifestyle (occasional work at home) 5) Corporate Culture Fit 6) Amount of unplanned work and changing directions all the time 7) Amount of Cognitive load of multiple projects at once 8) Location in town (not necessarily for commuting, but just having a nice place to walk to for coffee, out of office thinking time, etc.) 9) Co-workers passionate about their craft
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoRe 9: I don't care (directly) about whether my co-workers are passionate about their craft. I care because those who are passionate about their craft tend to produce a lot fewer messes and bugs - which I then have to deal with. So it's a good sign of other things, but it's not actually the thing I care about.
- spricket 8y agoMight as well add my own? Constantly recycled job openings - to spot this you need to be searching for a few months. But if you notice that the same posting is ALWAYS up for senior positions, and it's not a huge company, your resume has a huge chance of never being seen. From my experience, it's likely a company fishing for H1B applicants. Even if you're on a visa stay away. No intern program - as a general rule, companies with best engineers scoop many straight out of school. I have never worked at a company with top notch engineering that didn't have an intern program. Sometimes this is hard to see since they focus on certain schools, you may be able to find out from recruiters or Glassdoor. Heavy usage of third party recruiters - the best jobs are easy to advertise. Either the company is incompetent, the position is for legacy work, or the company is just unnapealing in other ways. If legacy work is your jam, go for it, otherwise be cautious. Note that this does not apply for specialized or very high level positions. Use of executive recruiters is normal since paying the cut is worthwhile. Low or no bonus - we're in a tech boom nearing 90's levels. Your bonus should be 10-30% of your salary. If the company is public, you need stocks. This is the primary way companies keep apparent wages low. The golden eggs are hidden in bonuses, perks, generous vacation policies, and especially public company stock. Old school practices - occasional work from home, somewhat flexible hours, casual work environment, free snacks. If they offer less than 3/4 you can find a better gig. Non technical management - this should speak for itself. I've done it before to much regret. Strange hiring practices - personality tests, panel interviews, minimum GPA rules, leetcode, asking about personal life (married? Kids? Political views?). If you like the idea of hanging out with people from MENSA, sitting in countless committee style meetings, or next to some frat bros or guys wearing MAGA hats maybe this is for you. But asking these things of you reflects the values of the organization. Birds of a feather flock together and humans are no different. Find a place with engineers that seem to love what they're doing, eachother, and writing code. If they invite you to lunch and everyone is chatting like old friends you probably can't go wrong. Bonus if they're actually excited to talk to you about technology and what they work on. There's much more but I'm sure the comment section will be flooded with it :)
- bproven 8y agoThese sound like good additions to me as well. Thanks for sharing Would be even more interesting to get a list of companies that avoid these (the good companies? :) )
- kbumsik 8y agoI saw a hilarious job posting last year: "5+ years experience with React". Come on, React wasn't even released 5 years ago from that moment.
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- myself248 8y agoTo me, this is the worst out of all the habits listed here, because it's clearly factually wrong. Either they're so clueless they can't do math, or they're actively trying to hire liars and only liars. I don't want to apply for a job that forces me to ignore the truth before I even get in the door. What else are they going to expect me to look the other way about?
- taude 8y agoYou all are overthinking it. To me it's just a sign of a larger company where there's an HR recruiting/hiring department that fronts the hiring manager.
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- oaiey 8y agoRed flag for outdated technology? That is hilarious. The IT world has already more work in maintenance than in greenfield projects and that will grow every day. When that is a red flag, good luck finding work in future.
- arcturus17 8y agoThere are technologies which are old but still relevant: Java, .Net, Python, etc. Others, like jQuery, might be in a much more precarious position. The point of the article is avoid these if you can.
- oaiey 8y agoNevertheless, jQuery might support very vital business processes, saves the lifes of hundreds people a day (literally) or Incorporated in something which creates millions every second. The most crap but working technology might be in places which earn money.
- jjoonathan 8y agoThat's fine so long as they pay you accordingly to account for the career hazard. They probably won't.
- olavgg 8y agoUsing jQuery is not a career hazard, the web is html, css and javascript. I don't tell my clients that I do React, I tell them that I solve their business problems.
- bartread 8y agoThis made me chuckle: "Companies advertising outdated stacks open you up to the risk of building the wrong sorts of skills, which can have far-reaching effects on your career." (Emphasis mine.) The wrong sort of skills? Like adaptability, strong diagnostic skills, pragmatism, self-awareness, and not being a massive diva all the time? Although it's true that these things can have a far-reaching effect on your career. Every company that's been around for a while has legacy code and you need to lose the fear of working with it. You also need to develop enough humility to realise that the code you're writing today is tomorrow's legacy.
- eternalny1 8y agoComparing jQuery to a "JS MVC" is a bit odd.
- hessproject 8y agoYeah and I think there is definitely still a solid use case for jQuery. No need to buy a yacht if all you need is a canoe.
- Xiaohang_Su 8y agoC++ expert
- smallstepforman 8y agoYou wont believe how many C++ experts apply for our developer roles (rolls eyes).
- franzwong 8y agoSome job descriptions include meaningless benefits. For example, in my country, the law enforces employers to contribute to pension. Some job descriptions include "Pension contribution" in benefit section. What????
- chrisper 8y agoI think that usually refers to that they take over a part of the required contribution or that it allows you to pay more into the pension.
- poilcn 8y agoI'd guess that means that there is a market of unofficial jobs in your country and the description says that they either contribute to your pension at full scale or at some degree by reporting your salary for tax services lower than it is. In my country half the companies do either of these cause all the taxes on the behalf of the workers and pension contributions are done by them, not the workers.
- franzwong 8y agoNot the same for my country. It's simply those companies cannot think of any benefit they can provide, so they just put the obvious one.
- oblio 8y agoThey might be copy-pasted from US job postings.
- zwetan 8y agolet's add the obvious one a long list of tech, skills, requirements, "must have", etc. with a low salary
- jasonkester 8y agoI disagree with these being red flags. In fact, for me, some of them are indicators of gold: Two Month Contract That's music to my ears. It signals two important things: First, it's a real contract and thus going to pay really well. Fake contracts present themselves as "contract to hire" or similar so that that they can convince you to agree to a rate of "half your salary, but paid hourly without benefits". But for two months? You're going to hear about my five figure per week rate. And it's short. Two months and I'm out of there short. So no matter how toxic the environment and how terrible the codebase is, it makes no difference. A guy can stand anything for a couple months. Especially in combination with that first point, which means that this is possibly the only gig I'll need to take all year. Cold Fusion Oh yeah, bring it on. This translates as "You are possibly the only person on the planet who knows how to do this work. Charge us accordingly." If you find this in combination with one of the short gigs from above, your life is about to get really good. Your only real problem will be keeping a straight face when you quote the rate you're going to charge for this contract. In the end, I think it comes down to what you're looking to get out of the job in question. If, like the author seems to be, you're looking for a long term career at a new company then no, you're right, run away from these places. But if you fancy a bit of fun quick contracting, this article is mostly a list of bill rate multipliers.
- dustinmoris 8y agoFully agree, a two month contract is music in my ears! Two months focused work with no feelings attached to the project, the people, the technology used there, etc, a really good pay for my work and afterwards 4 months off to South East Asia for surfing, sunshine and Pina coladas. As someone who refuses to take any permanent full time work these gigs are the best!
- SeriousM 8y agoAs I read the article I really feel the authors intention and I share his opinion because I love my craftsmanship and want to develop deep feelings with the product. As I read your answer I also understand your point and I agree too in case of short contracts. Thanks for sharing your view!
- dominicr 8y ago
- Nursie 8y ago> “PHP Contractor - 2 Months” While 2 months is short, if you don't want short(ish) term contracts of six to twelve months, awesome. Leaves more for me. I've got around 18 years experience in a variety of tech stacks, being a contractor/consultant is great. Come on board, either create a brand new piece for the client or help them with an existing problem, deliver, move on. God save me from rotting away in a corner at some huge corporate for years, pretending to care about the company vision. I've done my time at that. It helps me that here in the UK the market seems to be upside-down, compared to the US - Contractors are usually more highly skilled and almost always better paid than staff. That all said, that two month estimate had better be a well understood problem domain, with well defined requirements and a realistic amount of work, because most contracts that small are not, and you'll end up two months down the line with the client wanting to extend a month at a time and all sorts of pressure.
- kazinator 8y ago> jQuery simply doesn’t have the complexity or potential power of a full JS MVC jQuery versus MVC? What is this guy blabbing about. jQuery is a little DSL for accessing the DOM using paths and patterns, instead of verbose chains of accessors. If you just want to access some element nested in the DOM, there nothing wrong with using jQuery; and how does some MVC framework help?
- nikeee 8y agoI think it means that jQuery, being just a little tool, doesn't need to be mentioned as some important technology you'll work with. On the other hand if you're required to work with a full-blown MV* framework, this might be different.
- taurath 8y agoIt definitely implies that there's something fishy going on though nowadays. In almost any JS runtime jQuery isn't necessary anymore because most of the good ideas are already added to the language.
- kazinator 8y agoFishy like "OMG, I was still in high school when this five-year-old code was written"?
- taurath 8y agoFishy like you’ve got a 10 year old codebase that’s probably not had a lot of active development over its life.
- kazinator 8y agoWhoa! That takes us back to the Dark Ages of 2009. Did they even have Wi-Fi? Man, there isn't going to be any Angular, React or Ember in the code, let alone all three like I was hoping for.
- ahartmetz 8y agoReporting in from Germany where the software situation is still pretty bad in many companies. Red flags are "UML", "Enterprise Architect" (actual name of a software package), and "model-driven development". I can handle legacy code just fine - you have to when doing C++.
- tatoalo 8y ago“We want to make the world a better place”...(sensor for parked cars with office in a basement)
- SSchick 8y agoA true red flag I ignored when I was a very young developer was > 'Write code that does not need to be tested.'. being a requirement for a junior position. I came from a freelance background where tests were not a requirement or even unwelcome due to the work overhead and cost. Suffice to say I did not stay at this company for long.
- Benjamin_Dobell 8y ago> Competitive salary Which is code for: > We know that if we display our salary range, we won't get any applications
- aboutruby 8y ago"Looking for Ruby/Elixir developers" -> They just want Elixir developers but put Ruby to have more applicants. And in general there is a lot of keyword stuffing in job descriptions.
- taude 8y agoI don't think this is an example of keyword stuffing. I hire a lot on complimentary skills. I bet there's a lot of Ruby Devs out there who'd like to learn and work on an Elixir project. I've even interviewed at some shops that were Rails-based, but since I had a lot of good OO programming experience, designed and built large-scale systems, had skills with other parts of their stack, I had a better overall skill set than some of their existing Ruby devs. And they accounted for this with part of their onboarding process to get me up to speed in their Ruby codebase....
- rhizome31 8y agoReally? This is good news. I thought they just lured with Elixir but actually had a legacy Ruby app to maintain :)
- pythonaut_16 8y agoI always assume the opposite. They have at least touched Elixir code but most of your time will be spent maintaining and/or writing Ruby apps.
- bungie4 8y ago#1 Red flag discoverable during your interview. Ask if this is a new position or refilling and existing position. With some discovery, you'll find if the churn rate on the job offered is high. If so, run. Something is very wrong.
- rms25 8y agoThis is a very good question, saying this as some one who just took a job with a high churn rate
- tyingq 8y ago"X+Y years of experience with THING that has only existed X years" is my favorite red flag.
- PretzelFisch 8y agoAt this point seeing "cs fundamentals" looks like an age discrimination red flag to me.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoIn which direction? It could be saying "High-school super-hacker who knows Python? Don't bother."
- kirykl 8y agoA non technical manager of mine once posted a job calling for a "COBALT developer".