Am I the only one who doesn't find these things cute?

Don't worry, you're far from alone. I sympathize with their desire to stand out from the other job ads, but this one is just silly. It gives the impression of a place, as Zed Shaw says, that identifies more with Rails than with their business.

It got them to the front page of Hacker News -- a "normal" ad would not have. I'm guessing that there are at least some of us that would look past (or not mind) the ad if the job looked good.

All that and they don't bother to mention salary. Seriously, they want someone "super-smart, motivated", blah, blah. They want to suck you dry so millions of women can shop better and for what in return? To piss away your super-smart, highly motivated existence programming Rails? Vision care? yeah, they do apparently have a health policy that through no fault of their own, you can't keep after they suck you dry. So what can you keep? Well, I'm sure the stock option contract is 20 pages of pure "screw you". If it wasn't, why not publish the options contract? They drop the hint several times that this may be a good job for a perv that wants to collect data on millions of women!! What genius thought dropping the "women, hint, hint!" line several times was a good idea.

No, the only thing you walk away from most any job with is $$$cash$$$....they leave that part out!!!

The ad is well written. And cute. But here's my message to companies: Tell us HOW MUCH!!!

wow, I sure woke up on the crabby side of the bed, today ;).

Just include a salary expectation with your resume and cover letter. Then if they follow up, you know they're willing to negotiate around that number. That's not so hard, right? Everyone knows if you're not a founder, you aren't getting stock that's worth working for peanuts.

"Everyone knows if you're not a founder, you aren't getting stock that's worth working for peanuts."

Which is precisely why parading it as a perk makes the ad bad. A great startup should publish their stock option agreements. Let people see how great it is. "psst, I'm gonna show this secret agreement, don't tell anyone else what it says..."

After all this time of so many thousands of startups, we've finally gotten to a point of having a library of startup contracts, investment contracts, etc... You should be able to say "We use Law Firm X's published stock agreement. Its well vetted and easy to understand."

If you want to attract great talent, show them the money!!!

Transparency Rules!!!

Yeah, this turns me right off too. Largely because I wouldn't want to work with people who found this kind of thing cute.

A job ad with well-written English is much more impressive.

Makes me think they have too much free time.

They're trying to be clever and witty. It is starting to look like they're trying too hard. Phrases like "Uber-Productive" and "Super-smart" make it worse.

At least they should use proper Umlaute.

I like their puzzle at the bottom and the subsequent page. I for one really like pomegranates.

I wonder how many cover letters they will get with that in them. Fun puzzle, but does it really help selection?

Agreed. If I were looking for a job and saw this, I'd skip over it without a second thought.

I'm wondering if that was inspired by the #songsincode meme on Twitter a short while back.

    class Applicant < ActiveEngineer
      require 'mad_skills'

is an odd way to express it, because it doesn't actually say that Applicant has MadSkills. Presumably they mean:

    require 'mad_skills'

    class Applicant < ActiveEngineer
      include MadSkills

Also, ActiveRecord? No thanks.

     require 'mad_skills'

this is where I stopped reading.

I stopped reading at "Job description written in Ruby", heh.

that's because they misspelled it

require 'mad_skillz'

I wonder if it would be a good idea to actually include real code in a job description, such as few choice code snippets from the company's source code.

Like something that could be hairy, but isn't. Too show off how pleasant your code is?

Yes; something a few lines long that demonstrates a particularly pleasent piece of code from your source tree. Obviously there are limits as to what you can infer from such a small slice of code, but I think it would provide more information about how the company develops software than most job descriptions do.

There's a substitution cipher at the end. Spoiler alert:

zllh://ooo.kzghallgew.uge/yggvbgt

http://www.shopittome.com/goodjob

this simple rot-8 approach feels too simple for a puzzle like this.

Can someone explain why this position would require a bachelor's degree? Did anyone actually learn any Ruby in school?

Someone really oughta code up a resume in Ruby and submit it. I think they wouldn't have any choice but to hire you.

I had this idea months ago... but I have a job. I still call dibs on it.

Here's what a start-up ad for a programmers should look like:

* mycomapny.com [link to google maps]

* tech skill required: x, y, z

* [full-time || contract] && [local || remote]

* growth or biz model [link to mycompany.com/biz_model]

* investment [link to mycompany.com/investment]

* salary range $x to $y depending on experience

* benefits - health care, etc [link to mystartup.com/employee/benefits]

* employee rules [link to meycompany.com/employee/handbook]

* stock options [link to mycompany/com/employee/options]

If you want more high quality applicants, provide these details up front...Transparency Rules!!!

Skip the multi-paragraph fluff. You don't want to read it in the resumes, and job searchers don't want to read through it the job ads. Also, skip the puzzles. Puzzles limit your pipeline to those that have loads of time on their hands to solve your captcha. Do you want an applicant that has loads of time on their hands or the applicant that has the skills and right attitude?

Wouldn't work for this company. They clearly don't test their code.

Wow. A company with the balls to outsource their HR and management to a Ruby script. Manfred Macx would be proud.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the bugs caused by unforeseen interaction of a) turning < and > into HTML entities and then b) stuffing them in a pre tag.

Unsurprisingly, ubercool job ad is for a site that uses table layouts riddled with inline CSS.

I do not find this code too nice.

i used math notations <for intro> when i applied to grad school

something like ... there exist <my-name> such that bla <insert math mumbo-jumbo describing me as a unique subset of engineers>

result? i got in and studied there

why don't the boolean methods have ?s in the names?

why did they put an english description too? either the ruby one is good or it isn't. make up your minds.