

Now this is a job posting - daniel-cussen
http://www.airbnb.com/jobs/show/4

======
wheels
I don't get why this is seen as a good job posting. There's very little info
about the job, the compensation and only minimal info about the skills needed.

When I was, say, 20, the blank slate might have been appealing. Now I'm
actually good at stuff. I have deep specific skills and sorts of problems I
like working on. Working in a job where I'm not using a significant subset of
those skills is a poor use of my abilities. (Though, notably, doing the
founder thing that happens anyway. ;-) )

To me this post basically reads as looking for, "young, excited and
inexperienced", which may be their goal, but would be disastrous if used as a
general template.

~~~
ErrantX
Agreed. Clearly jobs which list a million required "skills" are useless. But
ones that list no problems to fix are also bad IMO (this one lists "you
are..." instead - which is worse).

At least give an idea of the problem domain being faced (scaling, for example)

All that will happen is you will get a load of people apply who aren't really
suitable for what they had in mind...

------
postfuturist
This is just another confusing, poorly written job posting.

The first section is titled "Position" which would make you think that it
would be a description of the position being advertised. It's not. It reads
like a list of requirements: "You have... You are... You are..." The second
section actually makes sense, which is rare for a posting such as this. The
third section is titled "Bonus Skills." I see a framework, an RDBMS, two
languages, a technology, a skill, a service, another skill, specific
knowledge, and a requirement. Nine bullet points: two actual skills.

Having experience with a language or a framework is not a skill, it is
experience. Having knowledge of a language or framework is also not a skill.
All the time companies take five minutes to write a job posting like this
while perspective developers waste hours on resumes and cover letters. Most of
the applications are thrown out because the company couldn't take a little bit
longer to write a clearer job posting.

------
chime
Funny timing. This Friday I talked to the HR person at work and told her I
want to hire an IT person - someone to help me manage all the servers, users
etc. Based on what I said, she did some research and made a draft job posting.
It was a smörgåsbord of every technology I'd heard of in the past 10 years. I
edited out a bunch of it but frankly, all I wanted it to say was "1. Must be
able to learn anything when needed. 2. Must love technology and helping
others." Frankly, the rest is just fluff.

~~~
mmt
For sysadmin postings, I like to see at least a blurb of "technologies we
use," since it allows me to avoid, for example, Microsoft shops.

~~~
grinich
Can you be specific in why you don't like Microsoft shops?

A few years a go, I worked at a web design agency that used a ton of MS
products. They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and
shipped it all on the MS stack. The impression I got was that they wanted to
focus on the product and not spend time fixing ActiveRecord bugs, etc.

Are there really no good MS hackers out there? Is it a cultural thing?

~~~
j_baker
To me, MS is practically a separate universe from everything else. That's not
to say that there aren't any significant differences between the nixes, but
they are at least similar in terms of the big picture. It would seem that
learning to administer a Windows system would require a lot of unnecessary
retraining for a nix admin. And I'm pretty sure that's doubly true of the
opposite.

------
daniel-cussen
Notice there are only three requirements, none of them language-specific. Even
these can be thought of as only two different demands, since learning
languages quickly and being a really smart engineer are nearly the same thing.
This means that, probabilistically, there's a reasonable chance they'll _get a
lot of applicants that actually meet all the requirements_ and from there they
can hire someone they like based on the bonus points section, people skills,
etc.

In contrast, the average job listing makes it very unlikely that anybody can
comply with all the requirements, so the hiring manager ends up hiring someone
who does not meet requirements. This is the honest approach to the problem of
hiring good hackers.

~~~
WildUtah
/learning languages quickly and being a really smart engineer are nearly the
same thing/

Only if we're thinking of formally specified computing languages. Since it's a
world travel business that demands just a few lines later that you travel
around the world as part of your job responsibilities, I read the requirement
as refering* to natural languages.

I think an ad like this could work for a small, high profile startup like this
but it should really take a line to say, "we mostly write all this in
[RoR|Arc|Django|Objective-C] and need to keep [Oracle|Psotgres|MySQL] back
ends tuned." That way we'd have some clue what to expect.

* Look, I'm qualified to write web standards.

------
hga
As a basic "get _everything_ right and _nothing_ wrong", yep, it's a very good
job posting.

Presumably interested applicants will be able to e.g. look at their site and
figure out whether they want to work for the company (i.e. it doesn't sell the
company, although it does sell the quality of engineering hiring, which is
even more rare than quality engineering management!).

It's also good in that it has one firm and semi-measurable requirement
(specifically one or more sites the applicant has done his stuff on; "semi-"
qualification for their ability to know how much an applicant was really
responsible for that).

~~~
j_baker
I don't understand why this comment was downmodded. To me, it seems perfectly
reasonable. I'd be genuinely interested in someone explaining what's wrong
with it.

~~~
hga
17 minutes after your comment it's now a +2, but I too am curious.

ADDED: my only complaint is that it doesn't explicitly sell the company or the
job; the former is something you have to do in an classified advertisement
("We are the leading...." is an example of the usual BS sort of copy that does
that). For an ad on a web site, that's OK, although adding a _bit_ of explicit
selling of the job and maybe the company would make it better.

To make it perfectly clear, the emphasized " _everything_ right and _nothing_
wrong" is my acknowledgment that implicitly it does a hell of a job of selling
the job (since that's so very rare and says so much).

------
j053003
I've wondered about this from other job postings I've read:

Does "Really smart engineer" mean someone, specifically, with an "engineering"
degree?

~~~
j_baker
Degree != smart

That said, it is a heuristic for determining who's smart. You just have to
realize that it's a very imperfect tool.

~~~
scott_s
I don't think he was asking about the smart part, but the engineer part.

~~~
smokinn
Canada makes that easy. Here you can only call yourself an engineer if you're
actually an engineer because it's a protected term. (Like doctor.)

We don't have the ridiculousness of sanitation engineer and the like so if the
job posting includes engineer in the title you can easily assume they expect a
degree and a licence with a proper Canadian accreditation board.

And in case you were wondering, software engineering is only slightly
different in that the majority of software engineers don't keep up their
accreditation licence so usually when you see a Canadian software engineering
posting they're looking for the degree but not necessarily the licence and
will often accept non-engineers with a comp sci degree. It's rare that if the
posting asks for software engineer that they'll accept someone without a
degree. (Those positions are usually titled programmer, developer or
programmer/analyst (which is the title you typically get from a CEGEP (kind of
like community college in the US) degree.))

~~~
j_baker
That might be the case in the US as well (but it may not be enforced). For
instance, the term "software architect" is technically illegal, but nobody
actually enforces it if it's in the context of software.

------
nathanh
This is a great job posting, but its completely focused on the benefits to the
company, not the job seeker. In the context of the site it's fine because
their main jobs page is awesome <http://www.airbnb.com/jobs> but if this was
posted on a job board, it would need a lot of work to lure someone who didn't
know about airbnb in advance.

------
jonp
Could someone explain what "recess on Thursday (yes, like elementary school)"
means? Thanks.

~~~
rjett
I think they go play kickball if I remember correctly from their interview w
JL.

------
terrellm
"User of AirBnB"

This should be a requirement rather than a bonus. I can't tell you just how
helpful it is to hire people who are customers/users of your service. They
obviously believe in what you are doing because they use the service and have
given the ultimate vote - opening their wallet.

Here's an old blog post where I talked about that with our company
[http://www.cattlemanagement.com/customer-service-hiring-
phil...](http://www.cattlemanagement.com/customer-service-hiring-philosophy)

~~~
lsc
Personally, I think 'believing in the product' is overrated. If you emphasize
that too much, you end up with a bunch of yes men who can't see (or at least
won't mention) problems with your product. Overconfidence is dangerous. The
ability to be critical of yourself and your company is essential to avoiding
death, I think.

That said, there is no way I'd hire a customer service person who wasn't a
customer first. (but then, I sell a product that is of interest to technical
people, and I target the low end, so really, #prgmr on irc.freenode.net is
probably a fairly decent place to pick up cheap SysAdmins.) If I sold to, say,
real-estate agents, I might feel differently. Also, if I was looking for an
MBA, my customer pool would probably not be a very useful place to fish.

Really, people I know, and people who know people I know have been a more
useful resource than anything else. (I don't mean people on my "social
network" in the sense of facebook, but, for example, I met the co-author of my
book because he was the roommate of one of my employees.)

------
paul9290
My job posting would be similar but would add "Bonus points if you are
musician who takes jam breaks in between coding." Which I do myself often.

Instead of just having Rock Band the game I'd have full on band equipment.

Working towards this type of environment!

~~~
nerme
Me too! And I do! I frequently work at my band's practice space. :)

Are you in SF?

~~~
paul9290
no opposite end of country - Bmore

------
es3754
Awesome job posting, would like to see some kind of salary range listed though
-- but I guess that depends on what you can bring to the table.

~~~
lsc
I still like a range. I mean, fairly recently someone asked me for a
recommendation... I did some legwork and found that one of the best people I
know was looking around at the time. I made the recommendation, and kindof
embarrassed myself. turns out, the guy wanted "a quick learner" (meaning
someone cheap with little experience)

I mean, I think hiring people without experience is great; how else are they
going to get experience? but if you are looking to pay $25/hr, don't waste the
time of people who expect $200/hr. (and visa-versa.)

------
bytebot
"MySql" ? Eh, call it MySQL!

