6 ms·
Best job description I ever wrote. This was while I was a Microsoft building a new team. Are you a lazy program manager who could care less about PCs,
by cek 12y ago
Best job description I ever wrote. This was while I was a Microsoft building a new team.
Are you a lazy program manager who could care less
about PCs, devices, networking, and other technologies
in the home? Have you always dreaded working on a
product that you would LOVE to use? Do you yearn to
work in a huge, lumbering, group working on the same
old stuff forever? If so, have we got a job for you!
We are looking for a newbie program manager to hinder
us in building the next version of Windows Home Server.
Our team is ginormous, moves excruciatingly slowly and
indecisively, and we are thoroughly hating life. And we
need more PMs to suffer along with us! Interested?
You will be a non-player helping to design and build
the 42nd version of a product that has been around
since before you were born. We are still in startup
mode, and as part of a startup, you’ll have to do one
task repeatedly over and over. You need to be ready and
willing to do whatever I say when I say it even if it
makes no sense whether that means screwing up features,
angering partners, ignoring the community, creating
bugs, and maybe even stealing a little code and hacking
into a bank. We are in need of Program Managers with
weak design skills; goof-offs who can take ownership of
a user scenario area, ignore requirements, design a
useless technology for technologies sake (forgetting
about the user experience), and work with dev, test,
UA, usability, etc… to cause them all to quit. And then
do it again.
Candidates should have poor consumer empathy, a deep
dislike of cutting edge technology in the home, and the
ability to cause political issues in small team where
everything is already figured out and there’s nothing
really left to do.
Candidates must have less than 4 days experience as a
program manager working on shipping products.
Experience doing customer research and designing
consumer UIs will immediately disqualify you. The less
technical knowledge you have of networking, storage,
and Windows server technologies the better. Candidates
should have a B.A. in Basket Weaving or equivalent and
should have been fired from their previous two jobs.
- tjr 12y agoDid you get any qualified applicants?
- dsr_ 12y agoI hadn't realized that Microsoft encouraged that degree of honesty or introspection. Did you actually post that anywhere?
- cek 12y agoYes, I posted this to several mailing lists that had thousands of people on them. I got about 500 responses. Most were of the "LOL" variety. One said "I found this to be in very poor taste." I got 11 solid leads, and 2 of those turned into hires. More here: http://ceklog.kindel.com/2011/10/27/my-best-hiring-stunt-to-date/ http://ceklog.kindel.com/2011/10/27/my-best-hiring-stunt-to-...
- MichaelCrawford 12y agoThis thread is about to get a lot more popular. I just posted your job description to Craigslist.
- makeset 12y agoThis would actually explain my experience with Microsoft products! It's funny because it's true?
- opk 12y agoDon't you mean to write "couldn't care less" in the first sentence.
- Someone1234 12y ago"Could care less" is the sarcastic form of "couldn't care less." It works much better in speech than online (since the sarcastic tone on "could care less" does not travel over text).
- cek 12y agoActually, in all honesty, when I wrote "could care less" I was more stoopid than I am now.
- Immortalin 12y agoNot true, "could care less" is american english while "couldn't care less" is british english
- Avalaxy 12y agoThey mean completely different things.
- bane 12y agoNot when used colloquially. It's called language, not logic.
- shamurti 12y agoUsing "could" instead of "could not" does not make it "colloquial".
- bane 12y agoIf it has a commonly understood colloquial meaning you could use colors, hand signals, flashing lights and a presentation of types of mollusks and it wouldn't matter at all. It's the phrase that has the meaning, not the words -- those are inconsequential. This is why people who think it matters stay constantly confused at common turns of phrase and try to correct them, they've completely lost the forest for the trees.