Tech jobs be like…

Chief Painting Officer #

Company Inc.

We’re amazing. We synergise business synergy leading to unique enterprise advantages. There’s at least 10 different ways to build market value and promote market goodness. We help to provide B2B for our DevOps customers leading to an innovation-first culture across our divisions.

[At least 10,000 more words here]

Incredible. Powerful. Adjusted. Flow charts. How do we know? We just know. Enterprise. That’s just plain value. [Pay attention. There’s often a sentence about what the company does around here.] That makes Company Inc. well positioned for B2B changes.

Job description #

We are looking for an experienced Chief Painting Officer with at least 400 years of painting experience dating back to the renaissance (preferably until when the first cave painting was discovered.) The right applicant must have experience using:

• Blue paint while sitting on an oblong shaped lead stool at a temperature of exactly 18.5 degrees celsius under a crescent moon
• Green paint manufactured by carcinogenic systems inc using novel carcinogenic rust-based paint
• Applied Purple by the United Painting Guild of Painters, including 300 years experience using Applied Purple
• Fad Co Purple Ultra-Ultra Purple More Purple Better Edition
• That weird scratchy tool used by Bob Ross.
• Red paint
• Paint brushes
• Use a canvas
• Brown paint
• …
• (We don’t personally use a lot of what’s here at Company Inc but think it looks intimidating and might scare some competitors.)

As chief painting officer you are expected to be able to draw, sculpt, and manage a work shop. We at Company Inc work with an ever changing set of techniques that are likely to require additional time outside of work to learn.

It goes without saying that the right applicant must be a motivated self-learner, and be just as excited as we are about a paint’s curing process!

Responsibilities #

• Word salad
• Copypasta
• Every ‘soft skill’
• Able to cook for team on short notice
• Motivated
• Synergy
• Punctual

Note: Please send your email to [address here].

Job success outcomes pt 1 #

1. Job was suppose to be removed months ago but company never got around to it.
2. Your resume was read by a bot and rejected for not including the word ‘plankton’ enough.
3. Your resume was read by a recruiter and rejected for …
4. Not enough experience using yellow paint. The hiring manager did however like your masterpieces that included green paint. But they weren’t willing to risk their reputation on such an unknown.
5. Your painting experience was overlooked for being done with non-guild approved painting supplies.
6. Your painting knowledge was overlooked because you are not a member of the painting guild.
7. Could not guesstimate how many 3b pencils could fit in a man hole

Job success outcomes pt 2 #

1. Hands were shaking too much to paint during interview. Alternatively, interviewer kept mumbling and you painted a landscape instead of a portrait.
2. Your knowledge of Ultramarine paint used during the 18th century was woefully inadequate. People like you make me sick.
3. There are no painting jobs at this time.
4. Maybe you just really can’t paint and need to work on that first?
5. You have too much painting experience. Yike$.
6. Past a certain point your ‘experience’ is transmuted to ‘age’ instead, and age = senility.
7. You want to be paid too much. That’s not to say your request is unreasonable, but the company won’t pay it either way.

How engineers post a job #

Jobs posted by engineers tend to be:

• Short
• Describe the overall problem
• Describe the main technologies already in use

That’s all you need. Nobody is going to be able to exactly address a small novel of requirements and the people who do have better things to do than try to convince you.

How companies interview #

Once a company attracts an engineer most companies will proceed to immediately insult them by assuming they’ve lied about or exaggerated all of their past experience. How does a company solve this problem? By making it the engineers, of course, and wasting their time.

Call me crazy, but I’d say anyone who sticks around after that is either desperate or foolish.

Alternative interviewing #

1. Be duck. Go ‘quack, quack, quack.’ I duck.
2. Look for other duck. They also go ‘quack, quack, quack.’ Doing duck stuff.
3. Hey, duck. I see you quacking. That cool duck stuff ur doing. Wanna join pond? We also got nice fishies and stuff here.

Also bad interviewing #

1. I duck. I know advanced duckery ((that we don’t use here.))
2. Hey, duck candidate. Can you do advanced duckery?
3. No ??? (V sad duck.)
4. .:. That duck is bad duck.

Graduating carbon copies or only copies that can exactly reproduce knowledge that isn’t used in your work place is bad. A much better question IMO is an open one like this:

1. Hey, duck. How would you design a good quackery system?
2. I’d […]

If they are vague you can ask for more details. But I wouldn’t give an F because they couldn’t recite back something you heard from TAOCP.

Interviewing and room for improvement #

There are studies in psychology that talk about bias in hiring based on gender, race, religion, age, etc (it’s complex, multi-relational; not all positive or negative.) Well, if you wanted to really make sure you were interviewing based on merit you could always mask an applicants face, voice, and name, and do it online (or all online for remote applicants.)

Blinded, provably fair hiring - and compensation could be part of that too. That would be an interesting experiment.