11 ms·

This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white male

This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer resumés.” This is so true, so important, and so many startups (and even bigger companies!) miss this. Job ads provide cues, conscious and subconscious, to the people reading them. Not everyone reading the ad is identical to the person writing it, and a badly written job ad can easily send the message "this company isn't for you" to a large number of skilled potential applicants. This applies not just to categories like gender or race, but even to personality types and personal interests. Unless you really want a company of only extroverts, for example, don't write a job ad that scares off introverts. In the canonical example, if you constantly ask for "rock stars", you will turn off people to whom that doesn't appeal, including tons of good programmers. But it goes beyond that: don't assume that all your applicants are any particular kind of person with certain interests. A job ad should focus on what the job actually is, and things that are important to the job. The best programmers often have a lot of choice in where they work, and as many HNers know from experience, if they see a job ad that turns them off in some fashion, they will probably not even bother reading further: they know they have better options, so yours probably isn't worth their time. If the vast majority of skilled programmers skip over your resume, it's no wonder you only receive resumes from unqualified applicants. In short, when writing a job ad, you need to think from the perspective of people applying. Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.

cookiecaper 14y ago
Indeed. My ad scoring program deducts 5 points and transparently kills off ads that contain terms like "ninja" and "rock star" because to my mind they indicate a propensity for either abuse ("a rock star should be able to code this in three days!!") or fad-following ineptitude ("rock stars are the coolest kind of programmers, I must have them! also, we write EVERYTHING in Ruby, it's like the Mac of programming").
- lawnchair_larry 14y ago
  Personally I think those terms indicate feeble attempts at psychological manipulation. I feel like responding to job ads like that would be like admitting you're a gullible fool. They're trying to recruit and stroke egos, not people.
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    Or they think of themselves as ninjas, which is too a big red flag.
  - novalis 14y ago
    You are on to something here. If people want o make it a hipster contest don't use the recruiting op and waste it. It simply does not add up unless you are stuck in a mindset that is not conductive to anything productive. Nihilists are us should never be a place one "wants" to work at unless there are no other ops available.
  - bestes 14y ago
    I dunno. Think about Steve Jobs recruiting for Mac engineers with a pirate flag flying from the building. If 'pirate' then == ninja/rockstar now, you might be missing a great job.
    - r00fus 14y ago
      Was that part of Steve's recruiting schtick? IIRC, that was just internal company culture and not something that Apple HR (or Steve if he was interviewing) would have mentioned. I do believe he used words like "changing the world", etc. These are more about results than ego. Huge difference.
- alphakappa 14y ago
  Your program would do the same for an advert that said something along the lines of "We don't care whether you are a ninja or a rock star"?
  - deleted 14y ago
reinhardt 14y ago
Ironically, a job seeker that rejects an ad based on a keyword or two is exactly the shallow reasoning this article criticizes; it's just the other side of the same coin. I'm pretty sure there are actually good startups that put out "cool" (lame) ads just, like good programmers that let a typo slip by.
- msbarnett 14y ago
  > Ironically, a job seeker that rejects an ad based on a keyword or two is exactly the shallow reasoning this article criticizes; it's just the other side of the same coin. Not really. The situations are asymmetric -- an employer seeking a talented programmer needs to be rejecting potential employees on as few arbitrary criteria as possible, to maximize their chance at finding just a single qualified candidate. A talented programmer, on the other hand, has Berty Wooster's time-management problem; there are far more people desperate to hire than he or she could possibly could ever hope to give attention to. You need to winnow out any opportunity that is even the slightest bit unappealing just to get the flood down to a manageable level.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    > You need to winnow out any opportunity that is even the slightest bit unappealing just to get the flood down to a manageable level. This is precisely what the article was talking about but in reverse, like the GP said. You're implying that job ads that rub you the wrong way on a minor point are ads that are at the bottom of the desirability list -- this is the exactly the correlation/causation fallacy the article discussed. In other words, that vast list of companies looking to hire the talented programmer is comprised of 1) companies that suck 2) companies that are OK, and 3) companies that rock. The occurrence of the word "ninja" or "rockstar" in their ad isn't an indicator of which group the company falls into. What you're advocating is no more scientific than throwing away unlucky resumes.
    - msbarnett 14y ago
      > You're implying that job ads that rub you the wrong way on a minor point are ads that are at the bottom of the desirability list -- this is the exactly the correlation/causation fallacy the article discussed. You've misunderstood. The employer faces the problem of there being too few really good programmers, and so must do nothing that would prevent them from possibly seeing one in their candidate pool. It's like panning for gold; you need to get as much crap as possible going through your pan to find anything of value. The good programmer has an entirely different problem. There are a ton of jobs out there that I would find stimulating, engaging, and fun. Finding them isn't hard at all. They show up on HN, they show up in my inbox, they show up in conversations at conferences and events, they show up in unsolicited offers from friends, acquaintances, headhunters, etc. They show up on a weekly basis. If I'm in the market for a job, I don't need to carefully grovel through every opportunity to find the one good one. I couldn't possibly, even if I wanted to, because my attention isn't infinite. Talking with every potentially interesting employer would take more hours than I have in the day. Instead I need to, like Berty Wooster, somehow winnow down the 100 equally plausible opportunities to something small enough that I can reasonably give my time and attention to picking between. That the heuristics for doing so are arbitrary is irrelevant; my only concern is grossly reducing the numbers I'm dealing with, because I have no reason to fear I won't find a good one among those that are left.
jamesli 14y ago
When I was open to new job opportunities, I immediately turned it down if the job description included words like rock starts, ninjas, etc. I am not against the mindset. It is just not a good fit to my personality. I want to work on products that I consider meaningful and work with good and serious engineers. It is nice to hang out with colleagues, have drinks, saying jokes, etc. I am a big fan of classic rock. But calling engineers as rock stars, ninjas, etc, or engineers labeling themselves as such personalities, really convey a somewhat negative impression to me.
- cosecant 14y ago
  Job descriptions just shouldn't have "rock star" or "ninja" unless they are hired on their ability to perform music in front of an audience or on their katana wielding skills.
  - Steko 14y ago
    Rock Star: that guy who shows up late and worked on a hit project 15 years ago that he's always bringing up. Ninja: that guy who's never at his desk and never says anything in meetings.
    - trotsky 14y ago
      wow, i never knew i was a rock star
    - jleader 14y ago
      You forgot to mention "brings his katana to meetings" (the sword, not the Suzuki motorcycle). It's kind of "friend-of-a-friend", but I had a boss who told me about working with a developer who actually did that, I think at a game company in the late 80s.
      - Steko 14y ago
        By any chance was it puts on sunglasses John Romero? YEAHHH!
brazzy 14y ago
The article is almost completely useless. It claims you shouldn't throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that only correlates with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: "I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development." Right. Sure. Every single one of the 500 applicants. Good luck with that. Get back to me in 6 months. It's nice in theory to be super-inclusive about everything except "actual programming", but almost completely divorced from reality. It sounds like someone who, hearing about heuristic solutions to the traveling salesman problem responds that "I cannot possibly accept a solution that may not be 100% correct! It's the computer's job to give me a correct answer, and I'm damn well going to wait for it, no matter how long it takes! Exponential, schmexponential!" Heuristics have their place. Something that strongly correlates with what you're looking for but is much easier to test for can be very, very useful.
- JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling. As someone who worked at an investment bank, I'd go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren't properly aligned or formatted. The irony was amplified by the fact that we were not a client-facing trading desk. Here the heuristic used (resume formatting) did not correlate with the desired attribute ([trading skills]) but did correlate well with some undesirable attributes (insecure children more concerned with form than function).
  - erikb 14y ago
    Like in every skill you need to choose your heuristics carefully and like in most jobs, HR and CTOs often aren't the best. That doesn't mean the whole idea is crap. The thing about formatting I can't answer if you are right or "most HR people" are right. The argument they bring seems as legitimate as yours: People who care about the looks of their result are more disciplined, probably faster (because they get the content and the formatting in the same time frame) and care more about working in that company. Does that sound unreasonable? Which one is right can only be told with data. And because of that I tend to support the HR guys. It's more likely (of course not 100%) they have more data and experience then you and me. (So indirectly I also agree that work experience can be a good discriminator concerning future work quality expectations)
TheBoff 14y ago
This reminds me of that job advert which specifically asked for programmers with MacBooks only. No way in a million years would I apply there! I have an iMac, but only because I'm interested in different sorts of computer. I mean seriously, not everyone can afford an Mac. I've had this on my chest since I saw that advert. Just needed to vent :)
- simonbrown 14y ago
  I can't fine one exactly like that. I remember: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022 http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html
  - kharasoft 14y ago
    Reminds me of this steaming pile from last year http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-...
  - TheBoff 14y ago
    Ahh, I can't find it. I just remember that it was looked like a normal HN story but you couldn't comment on it, and that it didn't ever actually mention the company name.
zanny 14y ago
I'm a semi-introvert graduating with my BS in CS and am looking for jobs right now. And this is all I ever feel. I read dozens of job ads across the country (I look through all of them because I really want to get out and move some place new, see the world - being fresh out of college is the best time for me to do that and all) and in the process I see only two kinds of jobs for someone like me. The ads either come across as wanting rock star geniuses that could develop in a month the entirety of the next facebook or google in their sleep, or they come off as grossly incompentant in that they don't know what they want from an employee. When an ad lists skill sets from assembly to rails to genetic algorithms I just sigh because the company obviously doesn't know what they want, and I want to work some where that I can not only get better at my trade and create great things but also have confidence in the business not going under in a few months. Simultaneously, the other set of job seekers want 5+ years experience for a startup and they use the rock star vocabulary, and I get turned off on that because I am not the second coming of John Carmack or Bill Gates, I wish I was, but I just am not that smart. Compound that with the reality that I have a passion for software and as a result I only want to work on things I find interesting and useful myself (eating my own dog food) and I might consider one ad in a hundred. And I'm not even location limited! It just seems to me like there is no middle ground, either you are a genius rock star or the employer appears clueless about what they are after in a developer. It really grinds my gears with all this job hunting shenanigans.
- cgag 14y ago
  I feel the same way, when I hear about this talent shortage, I can't help but assume they mean there are only so many people at the top of stanford/mit's classes.
  - chrisrhoden 14y ago
    This is wrong. I don't know a single Rails developer (with or without a degree) who doesn't have more work than they can handle available to them. Sometimes the jobs are more concentrated in certain areas than others, but I personally get several cold calls from recruiters every week, and I have no degree, and I am no rockstar.
cgag 14y ago
What exactly is a ninja or a rockstar in terms of programming? If you're not a rockstar what are you? Would anyone ever actually describe themselves as a rockstar programmer? I was pretty glad to see "anyone who uses rockstar as an adjective" on the list of people take out in the God Bless America trailer.
- stray 14y ago
  > What exactly is a ninja or a rockstar in terms of programming? Someone who enthusiastically engages in RDD (resume driven development). Someone who knows whatever is currently fashionable in the blogowhatever...
einai 14y ago
What's worse: Looking for: Leonardo da Vinci 2.0, Einstein reincarnated Compensation: We cannot afford to pay you now but we promise equity
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  What's worst: Looking for: the lovechild of Richard Feynman and the second coming of Jesus Compensation: small salary with some equity Actual work: it's like Craigslist, but for social mobile
alexbowman 14y ago
Something this article doesn't mention, is identifying the success of an individual in the culture of the organisation they've applying for. Roles and job descriptions change, in startups and MNCs alike. Sure, do technical evaluations, but explicitly, do not assume: 1. An analysis of factors which make someone in your organisation successful, and be critical, an example in being critical may be 'manage explicitly conflicting goals' 2. Map candidates both to the 'now' of what is needed, and the factors of success needed in your organisation short medium and long term. It is quite easy to find great people through technical questions. It is bad for all when great people don't fit. This is not behavioural interviewing stuff or psychological surveys, simply match proven success and/or evidenced motivation.

cookiecaper 14y ago

Indeed. My ad scoring program deducts 5 points and transparently kills off ads that contain terms like "ninja" and "rock star" because to my mind they indicate a propensity for either abuse ("a rock star should be able to code this in three days!!") or fad-following ineptitude ("rock stars are the coolest kind of programmers, I must have them! also, we write EVERYTHING in Ruby, it's like the Mac of programming").

lawnchair_larry 14y ago
Personally I think those terms indicate feeble attempts at psychological manipulation. I feel like responding to job ads like that would be like admitting you're a gullible fool. They're trying to recruit and stroke egos, not people.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  Or they think of themselves as ninjas, which is too a big red flag.
- novalis 14y ago
  You are on to something here. If people want o make it a hipster contest don't use the recruiting op and waste it. It simply does not add up unless you are stuck in a mindset that is not conductive to anything productive. Nihilists are us should never be a place one "wants" to work at unless there are no other ops available.
- bestes 14y ago
  I dunno. Think about Steve Jobs recruiting for Mac engineers with a pirate flag flying from the building. If 'pirate' then == ninja/rockstar now, you might be missing a great job.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    Was that part of Steve's recruiting schtick? IIRC, that was just internal company culture and not something that Apple HR (or Steve if he was interviewing) would have mentioned. I do believe he used words like "changing the world", etc. These are more about results than ego. Huge difference.
alphakappa 14y ago
Your program would do the same for an advert that said something along the lines of "We don't care whether you are a ninja or a rock star"?
- deleted 14y ago

reinhardt 14y ago

Ironically, a job seeker that rejects an ad based on a keyword or two is exactly the shallow reasoning this article criticizes; it's just the other side of the same coin. I'm pretty sure there are actually good startups that put out "cool" (lame) ads just, like good programmers that let a typo slip by.

msbarnett 14y ago
> Ironically, a job seeker that rejects an ad based on a keyword or two is exactly the shallow reasoning this article criticizes; it's just the other side of the same coin. Not really. The situations are asymmetric -- an employer seeking a talented programmer needs to be rejecting potential employees on as few arbitrary criteria as possible, to maximize their chance at finding just a single qualified candidate. A talented programmer, on the other hand, has Berty Wooster's time-management problem; there are far more people desperate to hire than he or she could possibly could ever hope to give attention to. You need to winnow out any opportunity that is even the slightest bit unappealing just to get the flood down to a manageable level.
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  > You need to winnow out any opportunity that is even the slightest bit unappealing just to get the flood down to a manageable level. This is precisely what the article was talking about but in reverse, like the GP said. You're implying that job ads that rub you the wrong way on a minor point are ads that are at the bottom of the desirability list -- this is the exactly the correlation/causation fallacy the article discussed. In other words, that vast list of companies looking to hire the talented programmer is comprised of 1) companies that suck 2) companies that are OK, and 3) companies that rock. The occurrence of the word "ninja" or "rockstar" in their ad isn't an indicator of which group the company falls into. What you're advocating is no more scientific than throwing away unlucky resumes.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    > You're implying that job ads that rub you the wrong way on a minor point are ads that are at the bottom of the desirability list -- this is the exactly the correlation/causation fallacy the article discussed. You've misunderstood. The employer faces the problem of there being too few really good programmers, and so must do nothing that would prevent them from possibly seeing one in their candidate pool. It's like panning for gold; you need to get as much crap as possible going through your pan to find anything of value. The good programmer has an entirely different problem. There are a ton of jobs out there that I would find stimulating, engaging, and fun. Finding them isn't hard at all. They show up on HN, they show up in my inbox, they show up in conversations at conferences and events, they show up in unsolicited offers from friends, acquaintances, headhunters, etc. They show up on a weekly basis. If I'm in the market for a job, I don't need to carefully grovel through every opportunity to find the one good one. I couldn't possibly, even if I wanted to, because my attention isn't infinite. Talking with every potentially interesting employer would take more hours than I have in the day. Instead I need to, like Berty Wooster, somehow winnow down the 100 equally plausible opportunities to something small enough that I can reasonably give my time and attention to picking between. That the heuristics for doing so are arbitrary is irrelevant; my only concern is grossly reducing the numbers I'm dealing with, because I have no reason to fear I won't find a good one among those that are left.

jamesli 14y ago

When I was open to new job opportunities, I immediately turned it down if the job description included words like rock starts, ninjas, etc. I am not against the mindset. It is just not a good fit to my personality. I want to work on products that I consider meaningful and work with good and serious engineers. It is nice to hang out with colleagues, have drinks, saying jokes, etc. I am a big fan of classic rock. But calling engineers as rock stars, ninjas, etc, or engineers labeling themselves as such personalities, really convey a somewhat negative impression to me.

cosecant 14y ago
Job descriptions just shouldn't have "rock star" or "ninja" unless they are hired on their ability to perform music in front of an audience or on their katana wielding skills.
- Steko 14y ago
  Rock Star: that guy who shows up late and worked on a hit project 15 years ago that he's always bringing up. Ninja: that guy who's never at his desk and never says anything in meetings.
  - trotsky 14y ago
    wow, i never knew i was a rock star
  - jleader 14y ago
    You forgot to mention "brings his katana to meetings" (the sword, not the Suzuki motorcycle). It's kind of "friend-of-a-friend", but I had a boss who told me about working with a developer who actually did that, I think at a game company in the late 80s.
    - Steko 14y ago
      By any chance was it puts on sunglasses John Romero? YEAHHH!

brazzy 14y ago

The article is almost completely useless. It claims you shouldn't throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that only correlates with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: "I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development." Right. Sure. Every single one of the 500 applicants. Good luck with that. Get back to me in 6 months. It's nice in theory to be super-inclusive about everything except "actual programming", but almost completely divorced from reality. It sounds like someone who, hearing about heuristic solutions to the traveling salesman problem responds that "I cannot possibly accept a solution that may not be 100% correct! It's the computer's job to give me a correct answer, and I'm damn well going to wait for it, no matter how long it takes! Exponential, schmexponential!" Heuristics have their place. Something that strongly correlates with what you're looking for but is much easier to test for can be very, very useful.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago
The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling. As someone who worked at an investment bank, I'd go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren't properly aligned or formatted. The irony was amplified by the fact that we were not a client-facing trading desk. Here the heuristic used (resume formatting) did not correlate with the desired attribute ([trading skills]) but did correlate well with some undesirable attributes (insecure children more concerned with form than function).
- erikb 14y ago
  Like in every skill you need to choose your heuristics carefully and like in most jobs, HR and CTOs often aren't the best. That doesn't mean the whole idea is crap. The thing about formatting I can't answer if you are right or "most HR people" are right. The argument they bring seems as legitimate as yours: People who care about the looks of their result are more disciplined, probably faster (because they get the content and the formatting in the same time frame) and care more about working in that company. Does that sound unreasonable? Which one is right can only be told with data. And because of that I tend to support the HR guys. It's more likely (of course not 100%) they have more data and experience then you and me. (So indirectly I also agree that work experience can be a good discriminator concerning future work quality expectations)

TheBoff 14y ago

This reminds me of that job advert which specifically asked for programmers with MacBooks only. No way in a million years would I apply there! I have an iMac, but only because I'm interested in different sorts of computer. I mean seriously, not everyone can afford an Mac. I've had this on my chest since I saw that advert. Just needed to vent :)

simonbrown 14y ago
I can't fine one exactly like that. I remember: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022 http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000433.html
- kharasoft 14y ago
  Reminds me of this steaming pile from last year http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-...
- TheBoff 14y ago
  Ahh, I can't find it. I just remember that it was looked like a normal HN story but you couldn't comment on it, and that it didn't ever actually mention the company name.

zanny 14y ago

I'm a semi-introvert graduating with my BS in CS and am looking for jobs right now. And this is all I ever feel. I read dozens of job ads across the country (I look through all of them because I really want to get out and move some place new, see the world - being fresh out of college is the best time for me to do that and all) and in the process I see only two kinds of jobs for someone like me. The ads either come across as wanting rock star geniuses that could develop in a month the entirety of the next facebook or google in their sleep, or they come off as grossly incompentant in that they don't know what they want from an employee. When an ad lists skill sets from assembly to rails to genetic algorithms I just sigh because the company obviously doesn't know what they want, and I want to work some where that I can not only get better at my trade and create great things but also have confidence in the business not going under in a few months. Simultaneously, the other set of job seekers want 5+ years experience for a startup and they use the rock star vocabulary, and I get turned off on that because I am not the second coming of John Carmack or Bill Gates, I wish I was, but I just am not that smart. Compound that with the reality that I have a passion for software and as a result I only want to work on things I find interesting and useful myself (eating my own dog food) and I might consider one ad in a hundred. And I'm not even location limited! It just seems to me like there is no middle ground, either you are a genius rock star or the employer appears clueless about what they are after in a developer. It really grinds my gears with all this job hunting shenanigans.

cgag 14y ago
I feel the same way, when I hear about this talent shortage, I can't help but assume they mean there are only so many people at the top of stanford/mit's classes.
- chrisrhoden 14y ago
  This is wrong. I don't know a single Rails developer (with or without a degree) who doesn't have more work than they can handle available to them. Sometimes the jobs are more concentrated in certain areas than others, but I personally get several cold calls from recruiters every week, and I have no degree, and I am no rockstar.

cgag 14y ago

What exactly is a ninja or a rockstar in terms of programming? If you're not a rockstar what are you? Would anyone ever actually describe themselves as a rockstar programmer? I was pretty glad to see "anyone who uses rockstar as an adjective" on the list of people take out in the God Bless America trailer.

stray 14y ago
> What exactly is a ninja or a rockstar in terms of programming? Someone who enthusiastically engages in RDD (resume driven development). Someone who knows whatever is currently fashionable in the blogowhatever...

einai 14y ago

What's worse: Looking for: Leonardo da Vinci 2.0, Einstein reincarnated Compensation: We cannot afford to pay you now but we promise equity

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
What's worst: Looking for: the lovechild of Richard Feynman and the second coming of Jesus Compensation: small salary with some equity Actual work: it's like Craigslist, but for social mobile

alexbowman 14y ago

Something this article doesn't mention, is identifying the success of an individual in the culture of the organisation they've applying for. Roles and job descriptions change, in startups and MNCs alike. Sure, do technical evaluations, but explicitly, do not assume: 1. An analysis of factors which make someone in your organisation successful, and be critical, an example in being critical may be 'manage explicitly conflicting goals' 2. Map candidates both to the 'now' of what is needed, and the factors of success needed in your organisation short medium and long term. It is quite easy to find great people through technical questions. It is bad for all when great people don't fit. This is not behavioural interviewing stuff or psychological surveys, simply match proven success and/or evidenced motivation.