
Ask HN: Creating the Perfect™ Job Listing for engineers. What needs to be in it? - cloogshicer
A few days ago, I posted “Trouble hiring senior engineers? It’s probably you - When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling” and got lots of great feedback here on HN[0] and reddit[1].<p>I was pretty negative about the quality of most job descriptions, so naturally many people asked for examples of good job listings. I’m now writing a follow up post for which I’m trying to create The Perfect™ Job Description for engineers. Of course, “perfect” is highly subjective, so I’d love to get your input.<p>Here’s a few random ideas I had so far:<p>- Salary range (an obvious one)<p>- We know you value focused development time and we understand that interruptions are costly. We keep meetings rare, light and short. Average meetings take X minutes.<p>- We understand that time spent at the office doesn’t equate to productivity. On average, team members work X hours per week.<p>- Here&#x27;s what the rest of our hiring process looks like: (Link with answers to: How many rounds of interviews? Coding challenges? Timeframes?)<p>What do you think should be in it? What should definitely NOT be in it?<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18955731<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;agajxv&#x2F;trouble_hiring_senior_engineers_its_probably_you&#x2F;
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towaway1138
\- Distinguish carefully between requirements and "nice to have". Don't call
it a requirement unless you're pretty much completely unwilling to hire anyone
without it.

\- Note oddities of your physical environment, like open plan office, non-
adjustable chairs, desks, monitors, noise like a loud restaurant, no public
(non-MITM) WiFi, etc.

\- Note oddities of your development practices, like forced pair programming,
daily meetings, Scrum/Agile/Flavor-of-the-Week, everyone must use Eclipse,
everyone must use Macs, source control in Perforce.

\- Note actual average weekly hours, with some hint of variance.

\- Note actual annual turnover.

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cloogshicer
Great points! Didn't think of turnover, which can be a really good indicator.

Office environment is of course also very important.

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towaway1138
Yeah. I once took a job paying FANG-level comp, but with a publicly inferrable
turnover of 35% per annum. _Big_ mistake.

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auslegung
Looks great so far. I’d like to know the company’s values, what dev practices
are in place (XP, scrum, etc) and what they actually mean to the company. How
difficult or easy deployment is. How much time is spent on features, bugs, and
maintaining legacy code, what the stack is for legacy and for the new stuff,
listed separately. Etc.

~~~
cloogshicer
Thanks for your feedback! That's all great stuff and some things I didn't
think about, I really like explicitly separating the current stack from legacy
code.

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cimmanom
One of the best job postings I’ve ever read was basically a description of
“this is what your typical workday will be like”.

