Finally, someone has a QA job whose title I approve of:
However, they left the e out of Maneater.
(Sent in by reader Dave H., who presumably sent it in because the careless job poster misspelled the title, not because omitting the hyphen in the year spans makes it look like they want someone with almost six decades of QA career behind them.)
You know you’re in for a wild spelling ride when you’re looking at a job posting for a Web Contruction / Editor Analyst, and the job listing does not disappoint on that score.
The best part, though, is the compensation:
You get experience points, too? Awesome! You’ll finally get to 18th level Tester and can think about multiclassing.
In Springfield, Missouri, the Craigslist designers are ganging up on one local company.
1:
2:
3:
You know, I once worked at a dysfunctional company. No, I mean crazy dysfunctional. It was run by a guy named Bob who went from selling printing services in the 1970s and 1980s (like business cards and whatnot) to building PCs in the 1990s. He was a scatterbrained, power-drunk mad professor with no technical skill or business acumen. His wife and a couple of employees loyal to his wife, who also worked there, kept the business afloat. Bob would rant and rave at employees, he would fire people at the drop of the hat (one woman brought in doughnuts every time she was fired). And I caught on in 1994 as a Clerk Friday, which meant I did some shipping/receiving, some filing, some accounts receivable (violating many Federal statutes given my training–”Here’s a printout of late customers. Here’s a phone”). The fellow and I once had an argument about my name, as he addressed me as Mark repeatedly and was confused when I corrected him. Then he fired me, and I didn’t come in to work for the celebratory doughnuts (since the woman was fired the same day), and he called me at home to ask where I was. We argued about whether he fired me or not, so I quit. “Without warning?” he asked. As you can tell by this run-on paragraph, I still get riled up about it. Also, it makes for some interesting asterisking if I’m ever asked if I’ve been fired.
So these kinds of companies can stay in business for years and decades. What a world.
Also, it makes me wonder what sort of market I’ve moved into here where good Web designers, or at least self-confident Web designers, start at $14 an hour.
In addition to another response to the St. Louis job listing I noted yesterday, we find another case of Craigslist backlash in Minnesota today. Is it cropping up everywhere, or are my loyal Minneapolitano readers joining in the fun?
First, the job posting:
The riposte:
To misquote Dwight Yoakum, apparently the responding designer ain’t that hungry yet.
But I wouldn’t expect to see that small company become a larger company anytime soon. One wonders what the full time salary would be if each project is $200? Maybe since their Web pages are served, they would go for the waiter minimum wage.
In the St. Louis area, another job seeker has lashed out at someone looking to hire. In this case, someone specific.
The job posting:
In the interest of full disclosure, I have had some dealings with the recruiting company in question, and, boy, they sure are recruiters over there.
The riposte:
In which the $60 an hour designer, or the person who would be a $60 an hour designer if anyone hired him or her, shows a stunning grasp of the English language. It sure left me speechless. Let’s see, what is that, 19 grammatical mistakes in the rant? I’m only skimming here.
Sounds like a lot of designers. Put them words in your pretty Web sites and see who notices. Probably nobody in IT but the QA you cannot afford since you’re paying the designers $60 an hour. Or would if they had their way.
UPDATE: The next day, the following response to the response appeared:
The recruiter, the friend of the recruiter, or another catty designer? You decide!
I think some HR people and consulting recruiters already have a little cabin fever in Minneapolis. Two recent job postings seem to indicate something ain’t right.
Job 1: A combination Web developer/shipping and receiving clerk/delivery driver:
Job 2: A Java development position whose consulting company recruiter is only phoning it in. The headline of the job posting is Date Resource:
The lede:
Date resource is required: 01/11/2010
Anticipated end date: 05/30/2010
Location: Minneapolis, MN
The vendor is expected to thoroughly screen the candidate to ensure the Self Assessment form is accurately filled out. We have little patience for candidates who have overstated their skill level / experience We are looking for a highly qualified Web Services developer to join an on-going Wachovia, Wells integration project.
Note the admonishment to the recruiter that he or she should pay attention. You know my position on recruiters, particularly those who post on craigslist. You are in good hands, applicant.
Hey, speaking of bad craigslist ads, here’s a whole blog of them: You Suck at Craigslist.
Someone else trolling craigslist jobs postings reacts to the common postings for jobs requiring 10 years of skill out of part time interns and offering a bit lower than the prevailing wage:
Sadly, I fear this person reads the craigslist job listings as serious and expresses his frustration at not being able to find a job through these listings. I hope this poster’s pride doesn’t lead to starvation if he cannot find a job with the salary he thinks he so richly deserves.
Me, I troll craigslist job postings just because they’re funny for the very reason stated here and because they’re often rife with errors that I can make fun of for your amusement.
I was reviewing this job posting, and its skills required list touched lightly upon one of my pet peeves:
Skills:
Quality Center
Clear Quest
I hate job postings where they require detailed knowledge of a particular brand or flavor of QA software. Instead of focusing on the underlying skills that the tester will need, organizations focus on the superficial. It’s akin to a job as a home remodeler being predicated on whether someone has experience with Craftsman tools versus Kobalt or Black and Decker.
I know why that junk is in there: so HR interns can winnow some people out of the crowd. However, it also winnows out skilled people who worked at places with smaller budgets and elevates lesser applicants who worked for comparably-budgeted QA departments, particularly when any of the big packages are named as required.
Could this be the world record in typos in an ad recruiting for quality assurance people?
Given that the recruiter misspelled 3 of 50 words, that’s a 92.5% success rate. Acceptable!
Also, note the hourly rate: $27-33. Don’t be fooled. That’s -6. He expects you to pay him six dollars an hour for the privilege of acting as his personal spell check.
If you want to combine software with barbecuing, we have a job for you:
(I know, they probably mean the AWeber e-mail software package, but that’s not what it says, is it?)
In Minneapolis, apparently they’re looking for software carpenters/remodelers:
But you know what? I start out every morning with a brief internal prayer of “If I Had A Hammer” myself. Except we don’t get to verses about songs or bells, and it’s Thor’s hammer I’m wielding, and….
In a cast-a-wide-net e-mail from recruiter, I note three distinct bullet styles:
We have:
I love the amount of conscientiousness spent here trying to woo a quality professional. You know how they say that when you interview with a company, you’re interviewing the company, too? Well, I say when you send me your documentation about a job, I see your resume. And I’m not going to call back something this rife with errors.
Because this recruiter would no doubt take as good of care of Applicant 9748 (that would be me) as he did of Blast E-mail 298.
Off topic, but here’s an ad on Craigslist for a Technical Writer:
That many exclamation points might indicate:
Personally, that many exclamation points in three sentences makes my teeth hurt, and the only remedy I have is to read the sentence in a Waynesworldian fashion, substituting NOT! for each exclamation point:
We are looking for a Tech Writer to join our team-NOT!
Job listing asks for relevant experience:
You know, they might mean Point of Sale, but they might mean the other. And we all have experience with that, hey?
Perhaps they should have followed the best practice of spelling out words before using abbreviations. But the simpleton recruiter suffers from the same hubris that designers and developers (and some defect writers) do: you know what I mean syndrome.
A job posting asks for someone who can speak two languages:
This bilingual job candidate needs to speak Arabic and Urdu. In a bilingual speaker, that leaves no available slot for English.
But the posting goes on and points out that actual QA knowledge isn’t required, either, so we’re not dealing with the most literal or logical of employers anyway.
Maybe it’s an add for a detrigonometry position.
What kind of company wants desiners?
The kind of company that has a desgin process and works on brand indetity:
And that lacks a standard for presenting Web site as one word or two:
That is to say, ultimately, a company like all the rest.
I’ve never encountered a compensation package of Opened before this:
You know, beer might be better than some of the other compensation packages you see listed on Craigslist.
Someone was probably playing in a WYSIWYG editor to come up with this Monstrosity:
It looks all right in IE, which means two things: 1, that IE is more forgiving of extraneous <span> tags, and 2, whomever built this page looked at it in IE but not in Firefox/Safari/Opera/Anything Else.
Ha! Just kidding. #2 is not necessarily true. It’s entirely possible no one looked at it before posting.
Co-blogger sends a lead to this craigslist job listing and probably counts the lead as his annual post:
I know you’re thinking, “How can a compensation of $1 depend on experience. Brother, it’s all in the picture on the dollar?” If you’re just out of college, you get the Zimbabwean dollar; if you’re a low level tech rock star, with things like MCSE and MIT on your resume, you get a loonie.
Speaking of which, he’s hunting for a job in the Minneapolis area. If any of my demicanadian readers know of a QA or, apparently, system administrator/PC technician positions available, drop me a line at thedirector at this domain.
Well, it’s a purported “job posting” for a IT Program Quality and Compliance Manager, but the compensation offered tells a different story:
Many jobs on Craigslist cover the fact that they pay nothing relative to the professional scale by using terms like market or depends on experience. This company, on the other hand, comes right out and says it.
If you’re interested, remember to put JOB TITLE in the subject line of your message.
