A job posting for the 21st century

Zak at Upverter recent wrote a post titled Interns: How to hire Porn Stars that had a few links to my old articles on hiring interns (which we Waterloovians¹ call "co-op students"). I had totally forgotten about Try not to need to advertise for employees, which I recommend as background for the following.

Since my series of articles is about four years old now, the Upverter post reminded me that maybe I should make an update with some of my observations since then. Here's what I've learned.

Silly job titles have become cliches.

I may have been the person who started the recent trend of ridiculous job titles, starting with NITI's old Human Cannonball and Evil Death Ray co-op jobs. In its prime, NITI became infamous among Waterloo co-op students, and those co-op students (ie. spies) have since spread everywhere. I heard fairly reliable rumours that Research in Motion was seriously considering their own silly job descriptions at one point, using ours as a direct model. And I heard that Akoha's original "Python Charmer" video job ad was inspired by one of our co-op students who worked there. As far as I can tell, the "Ruby Ninja Pirate" knockoff job descriptions all find their roots in Akoha's video job ad initiative.

Here's the bad news: Akoha partly missed the point, and everybody after that really missed the point. The point of these job ads was to do something unique that would get people's attention and be really memorable, while accurately representing our work environment. They don't work once they stop being unique, and they don't work if they don't accurately represent your work environment.

We now live in a world where stupid boring companies think they can fool people by using Ninja Python Rock Pornographer job descriptions. It doesn't work; in fact, as far as I'm concerned, stupid job descriptions now have a negative correlation with the kind of company I'd want to work for. If you don't understand why you're being silly, then you don't understand your own fundamental human motivations, so your company has a pretty high probability of failure. That's not sexy.

The silliness was never the point.

I covered this in my earlier Job Titles and Roles article, but it bears repeating: the reason we didn't use standard job titles was that standard job titles come with preconceptions. Preconceptions mean instant inflexibility. Meaningless job titles mean that nobody really knows what their job is, and that's a good thing, because startups live or die by the flexibility of their people.

But silliness and standardization are orthogonal. (Just look at IPsec.) The more famous nonstandard job titles, like "Just a Programmer" or "Member of Technical Staff," also achieve these goals without the distracting silliness.

More rumours from my spies: after a while, Akoha supposedly switched away from silly video job descriptions, because they discovered that the silliness was selecting more for silly people than for good programmers. The Human Cannonball / Evil Death Ray job descriptions were subtly balanced in a way that silly video ads aren't. (I admit that this "subtle balance" was more accidental than purposeful.) For example, you have to be literate to understand the Human Cannonball ad. You even have to use your imagination a bit to understand what a human cannonball has to do with writing software at a startup. (Hint: think of a bull in a china shop.) But you don't even need a working brain to hear, "Porn rocker hermit laser monkey!!" and say "Ooga booga! Me want!"

The people who want to pad their resumes are right.

Zak's article links to another article that suggests people are somehow wrong to want to work at Google to make their resume look more impressive when applying for a "real" job after graduation. Instead, the advice is to get a job at a startup, because you'll get better experience there.

No!

Let me badly paraphrase some ancient wisdom, to wit: Respect your enemies, or they will beat the pants off you.

As a company trying to attract students, you are competing with Google. All the rules of business competition apply, including this one: if you badmouth your competitors, it just makes you look like a sore loser, with emphasis on the "loser."

Google is, from all reports I've ever heard (and oh boy, do a lot of my spies^H^H^H^H^H former co-op students work at Google), a really excellent place to work. Furthermore, it's widely acknowledged that investors are, on average, happier to give money to a company founded by "former Googlers" than by other random people. And you know what? If I was hiring someone, even a student, for my company, all else being equal, I'd absolutely prefer someone who's worked at Google or Apple versus someone who hasn't. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon? The same, maybe not as strongly.

Why does Google make great resume padding? Simple: because they're a great pre-filter. They have a really complicated job interview process and acknowledged high standards. That you managed to sneak by their filters doesn't automatically mean you're great, but it sure means you're great enough that you should get by my (by comparison, stone aged) initial resume filter and probably phone screen. We might as well fly you in right away; we already know Google did and then they were happy enough to give you a job.

Maybe your noname startup has great screening/hiring practices too; we sure did. But a random interviewer at a random company won't know that. They will know about Google.

So anyway, if you're a startup and you want to attract students, that's what you're dealing with. Every student absolutely, positively should try to pad their resume with a job like that. Even if they sat at Google and twiddled their thumbs and stared at the screen in shock and fear and tried not to get noticed for four months, that doesn't matter; they can just lie on their resume and in your interview. It won't work every time, but it's sure better than not having the option.

Will you try to tell students that working for a startup is more valuable than that? If so, instant fail. You'll be lying. They'll know it.

Working for a startup is still valuable experience.

Okay, so working at Google is great for the resume, and as a bonus, if you put some work into it, you'll probably also learn something. (I don't know, I've never worked there, but spies confirm this too.)

But don't get me wrong: if you really want to learn stuff, there is nothing like working at a startup. Every student who wants to get wide experience - as every student should - ought to work for a startup, at least for a while. This is not either/or. You should work for Google or a big name company. You should work for a startup. If you don't do both, you're doing it wrong.

Furthermore, Google recruiters are smart. If you have experience working at a startup, they know what that means. So let's say Google rejected you this time around. If you work at a startup, all that new experience should increase your chances of getting the Google offer next time.

So with all that in mind, here's how I might write a co-op job ad for the 21st century:

RENAISSANCE PERSON >>

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Hmm, maybe I'd better at least apply for a few other jobs in case Google doesn't want me. I don't know how to cook. I really need that free gourmet cafeteria food if I want to survive... but maybe, worst case, with another job, I could work something out. Pay someone to make food for me, somehow. Can you even do that? Or maybe mooch off a co-worker."

THIS IS THE JOB FOR YOU.

If you're smart, you'll make sure to have at least one brand-name company on your resume by the time you graduate. But that's not all you should have: you should have real-life experience working in every aspect of product development and release, from building office furniture and installing your operating system to coding features, fixing bugs, answering support calls, and substituting for the CEO while he's away on his biweekly bender.

This job isn't easy. You'll need every skill you have, plus more. But that's okay, because one of our full-time developers will be your personal mentor and help you develop those skills.

We work reasonable hours, except when we don't want to, and then we work unreasonable hours. Our co-op students release more code in an afternoon than Google co-ops release in a whole work term, and sure, their code works and ours doesn't, but we have PRIDE, dammit, PRIDE, and we'll fix the bugs tomorrow before anybody notices.

We can't hire as many people as the big companies, which means you're going to have to be the best of the best if you want to work here. But that also means we'll give you more responsibility than you'll get anywhere else, which means you'll learn more than you would learn anywhere else. This company was founded by Waterloo co-op students, so we know co-op students can be trusted with responsibility. We also know exactly what we wished we knew when we were your age, duckies, and we'll tell you so you can ignore us and go learn it the hard way.

Here are some skills you should have:

• (list of skills)

And here are some projects we'll be working on:

• (list of projects)

If you do your job right, next time around, you'll have so much experience that you'll get that Google job for sure.

If we do our job right, you won't want it.

Bonus Interview Tip from People Who've Done This Before

When you wear a suit to your interviews, the only jobs it helps you get are the ones where they care how you dress more than how you code.

...

¹ For those who don't know, the University of the Waterloo is the university in Canada with the "best reputation." (Yeah, I know, it's not as good as being objectively best, but we take what we can get.) It also has, by a very very very large margin, the best co-op/internship programme of any Canadian university I'm aware of. Students in the co-op programme, which is most of them, have six different four-month work terms before they graduate, at up to six different companies. NITI hired students almost exclusively from U.Waterloo simply because it was consistently easy and the students were consistently high quality, and if you want word-of-mouth to spread among students, it helps if they're all in the same classes.