Joblint: test tech jobs for sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails (opens in new tab)

Pizza, beer and ping-pong in the job description suggests it's a social requirement to be involved in those things: it's almost literally being described as part of the job.

It indicates that there is likely a poor attitude towards work-life balance and employee health and is probably a marker for hidden prejudices disguised as "culture fit". Frankly, I value those rewards highly negatively.

As a philosophical exercise: consider replacing pizza with sushi, beer with wine, and ping-pong with Zumba. Still a sensible ad for a tech job? Why/why not?

Swearing at a bug and swearing at a potential employee are contextually different. I have no problem working in an environment where swearing at a bug is acceptable; swearing at an employee or colleague should be no more acceptable than swearing at a valued client (for clarity: not acceptable under normal circumstances).

The appropriateness of swearing is highly contextual - putting it in a job ad likely shows that you don't know where sensible boundaries are.

Now, the real point: swearing. I think it's great when companies allow casual clothes and swearing and obnoxious music. It's a real problem when they expect those things. When someone puts that in a job posting, which seems more likely? What if the best distributed-systems programmer in the world happens to be a bit old-fashioned about such things? Why should they be excluded because of that, any more than if the company were traditional and they were all bro-ish? Hipsterism has become its own kind of PC.

"Sure, we had to work until midnight, but there was pizza" rings a bit hollow when you are older, have kids or other forms of life outside work.

More than often they are not only hollow rewards but hidden age/background preferences, it basically means "we want somebody straight out of college" or "people who got nothing better to do than stay long hours at the office". At a certain age or situation, you're usually no longer excited by the opportunity of playing ping-pong and drinking beer at work, you want to do your job, get paid, and go home.

Pizza and ping pong aside, mentions of beer and alcohol are a big no no and making those things present at work is a horrible idea. It alienates those who don't drink and those who have previously had drinking problems and, if my experience is accurate, those types of places heavily rely on drinking events for socializing, which further alienates.

A job posting is sort of like an elevator pitch except that the target is prospective employees and not investors.

With time and space limited, what a company chooses to include in a job posting reveals a lot. Unless a company really believes that pizza, beer and ping-pong are important components of its value proposition, I'm not sure how mention of these things can be expected to stand out as a compelling differentiator in the eyes of most candidates.

> ...a friendly, social atmosphere, arguably one of the more important features of a job.

An employer can create a friendly, social atmosphere without seeking to provide a social experience. Too many startups don't recognize that there's a difference.

I don't like them because they can potentially be yet another bad force trying to dictate what software culture "should" be. I personally would hate to work in a VBScript shop, but who are they to say it's "uncool"?

I don't particular want to be sworn at. That'd be my main concern if I saw someone swearing in a job advert.

Swearing at work, I don't find particularly unprofessional. I've worked (and currently work) in environments which rival pirate ships for off-color jokes and profanity.

However, these same workplaces never put swearing in a job ad. To me, that would be kind of a red flag. In the spoken case, it's an ephemeral, off-the-record kind of thing. In the written case, in an official HR document no less, it's quite different. Frankly, I'm not sure how profanity would make it into an official job posting.

Of course, it's a very different matter if you're emailing your college buddy to ask him to come work for your awesome company, but then this would not be a job ad for public consumption, would it?

Personally I prefer professionalism at the very least in the job posting, I don't particularly care if it's laid back and neither does anyone at a firm in the financial industry or most Fortune 500s.

A guy I knew got himself a new job once, he was excited about it because they had helicopters the programmers could play with. I was like "So uh, what do you do?"

If a job advert tries to distract from the actual job (you know, the thing you're supposed to do for 8 hours a day to get paid) with 'fun' benefits, it suggests that the job itself isn't all that awesome.

I like the rule. If only because I like to pretend I'm distinguished enough to not approve of beer and pizza, :p.

For myself, I would not want to work at a place that advertised pingpong, beer, or pizza, because to me, those imply both a homogeneous age (young) and a desire for long hours at the office.

As I get older, I prefer to eat more healthy (haha I wish) and limit my working hours to spend time on the people that matter. I prefer to work cooperatively with my colleagues, not competitively. A positive, supportive working environment is very important to me. If people are swearing at each other, that's a huge red flag.

That doesn't mean that the kinds of work environments are intrinsically bad. For some people, they would be perfect! But if I'm looking for a job, I know up front, they're not for me.

But that's why I work for the government instead of for a startup. :)

I have worked in an environment with one rowanmanning in it. It was awesome.

A more open-minded, funny, smart and generous guy you couldn't hope to meet. More to the point, he was one of the best coders any of us had ever worked with.

A company full of rowanmannings would therefore be a chilled out place where we'd learn from each other while having a laugh and turning out enough quality code to crush an army of pizza-fuelled dinosaur brogrammers waving their false-victimhood like a banner.

Or perhaps he just doesn't want to work with douchebags.

And I'm curious as to why you (or anyone) should feel this tool is different than all of the other methods employees use to weed out employers: salary, benefits, location, job role, technologies used, company reputation, etc. This tool simply adds "culture fit" to that list.

It is entirely possible that some of these "Adria-Richards-esque thought police" developers, as you call them, weren't very good, but labelling Rowan or the contributors as incompetent is just plain ignorant.

My counter to your comment is that if you want to hire developers who's performance is based entirely on the lines of code shipped, then that's your prerogative. I, on the other hand, prefer to hire developers who can think for themselves, who have the motivation to be creative with their work, and who like to involve themselves in other projects.

You're confusing a non-discrimination policy with a positive-discrimination policy.

Ah yes, someone who writes a simple tool to check for red flags and warnings common in job postings for their industry is totally a fascist looking to hunt down fellow citizens for the state.

> As an example, the lint checks that "bro culture" is bad, but female-friendly (like Minted.com[1]) is assumed to be good. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Very predictable.

Bro culture is bad, it implies the people working and doing the hiring are looking for a very narrow type of person and aren't really open to having different kinds of people employed. Further, being woman-friendly is a huge plus, because usually that means women are able to access leadership roles in various capacities, something that isn't common in our industry. Unless, of course, you think that companies that actively look to correct that imbalance are the problem, in which case I would pose that you are the problem.

> Like any neo-Puritan, he then comes after profanity, and beer, and even (god forbid) competitive-sounding job descriptions! His vision of the startup future: an HR drone stamping on a programmer's face, forever.

Some people don't like profanity in the workplace or highly competitive environments, those people have a right to know that info up front when looking at job descriptions. Nobody is forcing anyone to use this tool, there is no censorship being applied here.

Moreover, mentions of beer and alcohol in a job post are highly suspect, as such posts will automatically exclude people who don't drink or are alcoholics. These types of places often base social activity around drinking and that can be highly alienating to a wide variety of people.

> People like this will spend their time being Adria-Richards-esque thought police rather than shipping code. Contrast with Max Levchin, who actually sold a startup for a billion-plus dollars:

Ah yes, because calling people out on dick jokes at a professional conference is exactly like the thought police. Also, that Max Levnchin has made money off of creating mono-culture workplaces doesn't mean that is appropriate or correct for every company or potential employee.

> If you want to work in an environment full of rowanmannings, that is your prerogative. Many others will select out and find places where people who enjoy bullying others with modern taboos on gender and the like don't self-appoint themselves as priests. Do you really want a team member who spends their free time getting people to upvote their new heretic-finding software to the top of HN?

If you are selecting jobs based on those companies that will tolerate your sexism and delusions of oppression, remind me to never work anywhere you have, ever.

Whatever contrarian political angle you want to take on this, the primary use is for programmers to avoid being taken for a ride.

This illustrates an interesting problem of parsing natural language, but IMHO this should still give the same negative result anyway: why is beer an important consideration in a job ad at all?

You should rather spend the space telling me more specifically about what the job entails. You get a pass for talking about beer if the job involves classifying craft beers.

This one will actually scan the content of the document, instead of just distributing the applications into two halves and outright discarding a random half.

Easiest way to cull hundreds of applications for a single job advert.

Environmental setup also has an impact, a company might use project files that automatically setup the environment and set common standards. Sure you can come in and rewrite all of those things in your favourite IDE which you then have to manually sync when things change, but that's a lot of overhead.

There's also some people who will only work at companies that use their favourite editor (particularly common in Java with IntelliJ) and will ignore job ads which mention Eclipse.

It can also act as signalling (i.e "we're willing to pay for you to have the best-of-breed development tools") much like jobs ads which specify developer monitor sizes or hardware (Macbooks, SSDs, etc).

On mentioning editors, I like your explanation of why it's not good. I'm intending on writing a list of explanations for each rule at some point so it's useful to get other people's opinion on them.

But some people use IDEs. Some IDEs have nice integrated features that make a difference in a team environment. E.g. one place I worked we used Visual Studio and I wrote an add-in for running our particular suite of integration tests. In the Microsoft ecosystem the whole integrated thing is very significant.

Although I suppose if you were applying for a .NET job the choice of IDEs would be assumed unless stated.

Related: Douglas Hofstadter's satirical article on exactly that topic, which you reminded me of and which I'm glad I could remember enough of to find: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

So yeah -- seeing "girls" in a job ad would make me guess the workplace consisted mostly or solely of young men who weren't used to being around women, and I would only apply if that was what I was looking for. Whether you think that's a problem is up to you. (I happen to think there are good reasons that some women don't like being called girls, even in the "guys and girls" context, but it's sort of beside the point in terms of writing a job ad, right?)

For instance, a sentence like "We're looking for guys and girls to join our development team" would get flagged by joblint. And that might give you pause, and realise that "We're looking for people to join our development team" is a perfectly good alternative to use instead.

I'm not sure if that's actually a bug.