Haha yeah. The joy of looking for a programming job. Copy paste programming jargons and make your job posting look 'cool'.

I saw a job posting earlier today that 2 of the 4 bullet items were:

• Must be able to write computer code.
  • Must have experience in programming.
    No mention of languages, technology, etc. Not even any "buzzwords".

Haha yeah. The joy of looking for a programming job. Copy paste programming jargons and make your job posting look 'cool'.

If you think looking for a programming job is bad, try finding good programmers. Posting something on a public job board leads to a flood of emails, 95% of which are developers from India who are looking for a visa sponsor.

If you think looking for a programming job is bad, try finding good programmers. Posting something on a public job board leads to a flood of emails, 95% of which are developers from India who are looking for a visa sponsor.

This, a thousand times this. And local job postings, like Craigslist and KSL (the popular local classifieds here), result in dozens of resumes from people who are out of work for a reason. I've very rarely had anyone from public postings even make it past my smoke test. My smoke tests vary based on the position, but for a Javascript programmer it is to sort a list of strings by length, and alphabetically for those with equal lengths. It's not rocket science, it's not even meant to be tricky, but I've turned away a lot of programmers who spun their wheels for 30 minutes with open Internet access working on such a problem.

(For contrast, the last programmer I actually hired wrote an Othello/Reversi implementation in Javascript, complete with greedy AI, in under 30 minutes. He came via a personal reference.)

This, a thousand times this.

Assuming someone is not broke, desperate and completely without options: Why should they work for you? What can you offer that someone else doesn't? You're a company - sell me.

Here is the paradox: companies want people with good judgement, competence, honesty, loyalty, dedication, communication skills, experienced in business and domain - well guess what - your job offer fails on all this counts, making me not consider you. So better make sure the paycheck is listed and has enough digits, preferably 5 times above industry average. As is the case with other jobs in "shitty" industries.

Imagine a chef trying to recruit help, but has nothing to offer but a half-broken desk and a gas burner. Something is wrong and people know it.

Why does everyone want to work at Google? Marketing. Companies aren't attracting talent because they aren't selling. They reek desperation, dishonesty and incompetence through every word on their postings.

If a job listing says: "C++/PHP/JS/SQL at expert level", something is wrong. The number of people qualified for such post is miniscule worldwide and they work at Google or on Wall Street.

Hence connections work. Both know what to expect, nobody is trying to scam the other or at least not by much.

-------

I remember a job post along these lines. It listed hourly wage as (number made up): EUR3.215423/hour. Why? They took minimum wage and divided by number of hours. It required PhD or PhD in progress with 5 technology stacks at expert level.

Oh, the position was filled same week. By manager's good friend and long time neighbor. It was for a government funded company. Whose profit per revenue was 18x their standardized salary (top companies reach 5x).

We are an e-learning company specializing in the aviation industry. We are looking for a senior c# programmer with the following qua:
*over 10 years of software development experience
*over 5 years of C#
*Understand UML and Data model very well
*Egnglish english
*Team pleayer
[/quote]

Whatever company this is, they sound like they're about to implode.
[font="'Times New Roman"]
[/font]
[font="'Times New Roman"]
[/font]

While we're on the topic, why do some companies request a cover letter when they post anonymously? How is one supposed to write a cover letter tailored to a company when you don't know what company it is or even what they do? They do expect you to provide samples and ask for expertise in certain technologies, though.