The Life of a Radar

Job Dissection: World Famous Cutting Edge Company
30 Mar 2008

Today’s job posting goes somewhat similar to all the previous ones:

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<blockquote>Position Title:  Ruby On Rails Web Developer
Position Type:  Permanent
Location: Orange County, CA
Salary: $70-90k

Work closely with Director of Web, Creative, and Technology teams to create original web pages/web sites utilizing standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. Architect and build dynamic web applications, utilizing Ruby on Rails framework and MySQL databases. Design prototypes, wireframes, and build proof-of-concepts.

QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED:

PLUS FACTORS:

If interested, please submit your resume online at http://webdeveloper.techjobslosangeles.com/-web-developer-272

Regards,

Kevin E. Jenkins k.jenkins at tech-source dot com

Tech-Source, Inc.

Advancing Careers. Empowering Companies.

www: http://www.techjobslosangeles.com LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinjenkins</blockquote> The title for it was “World Famous Cutting Edge Company”, and it’s another advertisement where they just so happen to forget to name this “World Famous Cutting Edge Company”!

Let’s move right on to the person who, if we got this job, we would be reporting to: “Director of Web, Creative, and Technology”. What’s that saying? The longer the title the smaller the intelligence? Something like that. I’ve never met the guy (or girl), so I can’t pass judgement. It’s just a long title; “Lead Developer” is fine, really.

It moves on to say that you should be able to build “prototypes” and “wireframes”, which could mean anything, for example: elaborate real-life models of how all your tables interconnect, kind of like people doing degrees in Science have the models of molecules and so on.

The first two points in the qualifications are fine, “knowledge of unix development” (pay attention to this first one) and “ability to write clean code”, but the third gets a little funky:

Familiar with Apache, SSH, SVN and CVS
Why the need to have familiarity with SVN and CVS? Surely all the projects would be kept on one (SVN, I hope) rather than the other.

It continues on listing the obviously needed skills, such as experience in Ruby on Rails (why would you advertise on rubyonrails-talk if you were looking for a Cobol developer?) It uses a whole string of long words in order to make the qualifications more than what they seem, but in reality all you’ll need is some decent understanding of Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Apache, and lets not forget the obvious Three Big Ones, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

It mentions in there also about being aware of accessibility issues, which is fine if you’re going to have people with a disability accessing your site, which I’m assuming they’re going to do. Just, don’t go over the top with this. I once saw a site which had a small video of a woman translating the page’s text into sign language.

Now remember before how I said to pay attention to the fact that they said “knowledge of unix development”? Well in this next set of text “Plus Factors”, it says “experience with TextMate, Transmit” both of which are Mac programs. Mac is part-Unix as well, but that wasn’t stated in the initial briefing that development would be being done on Macs, and I feel that would’ve been handy to point out from the offset, not that developing on Macs is at all a bad idea. TextMate apparently kicks the ass of anything else out there, I’m yet to try it.

It still bugs me that they didn’t name the company, although I can guess out of the very limited number of “World Famous Cutting Edge” companies around, that it might be…

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