Dumb Job Ads: .NET Web Developer / Foosball Champion
I’m not making this up. And I’m not seeking these out as much as you might think for three in four days. A friend sent this to me when he stumbled upon it on the Miami Craigslist here. It is a doozy, so be sure you have taken your proper dose of medication before reading it.
ichameleon/group/ develops innovative, high profile websites and applications that fuse video, audio and flash media for our clients. At least that’s our cover. We’re really secret foosball junkies.
We started an award-winning interactive ad agency that makes inventive marketing, web development and top-notch design services. If you’re a creative internet junkie ready to play around the clock to define the cutting edge, we want to hear from you. Just be prepared to engage in a grueling foosball match or two. Can you handle it?
Your skills, abilities & talents:
• Obsession with the latest and greatest technologies
• Mastery of OOP and design patterns
• Strong grasp of Database Design and SQL
• Ability to levitate office objects with your mind or script
• Know more than what the acronyms HTML, CSS, XML, JS, AJAX & UML stand for
• Team player, self starter, good communicator, detail oriented, multitasker, on-time delivery, problem solver and all that jazzHaving vast knowledge of these would be helpful too:
• C# (preferred) / VB.NET
• .NET Framework 1.1- 3.5
• MVC Design Pattern – MonoRail, Mavrick, Etc.
• 3rd Party API integration, Custom wrappers
• LINQ, T-SQL, Stored Procedures, Triggers
• Other programming languages (ASP,ColdFusion,Perl,PHP,Python…)
• ORM, Flex, AIR / Apollo
• Freezing time and throwing lightning bolts at will
• Safe Source, CVS and/or Subversion experience
• Flash Remoting
• The meaning of lifeif youCanHandleIt = true then
Submit your resume/portfolio, cover letter, including salary history and three of your favorite websites to: [email protected]
else
Thanks for taking the time to read this and have a great day.
end if
The ad is posted by what looks to be an otherwise respectable web development firm called iChameleonGroup. Despite having a lengthy and respectable list of clients, which I assume are not made up, their own website looks awful. It is only a little wider than a decent bookmark. Right - an actual bookmark that you use to mark your place in a book. And it is just a list of their clients and their work.
All well and good except that the introduction at the top says, “This site is simple. It’s simple because we’re so damn busy building websites for clients making sure they get the results that are important to them”. Except that, judging by this dumb job ad, the employees are actually busy playing foosball, goofing off, and having philosophical discussions about life. Which is a way of saying that those things you do after work are expected of you at work. Which is a way of saying that your whole life is your work when you work at iChameleon. The name of the company is more accurate than you may have first imagined, eh?
Lest you think it’s all fun and games, they want you to know about every possible web development language known to man - and a few that aren’t known to anyone. They say “vast knowledge” of those things would be helpful. I imagine being bulletproof and able to leap tall buildings might be helpful, too, but most employers are smart enough to narrow down their job requirements to the actual job. After all, is someone really going to be plodding along with C# in .Net and suddenly flip over to Monorail to build a back end for an Adobe Flex application front-end, all the while referring to a UML diagram? Huh? Not in any real world development environment. But as you can see from the job ad, the real world seems to be very far away from the Miami branch of iChameleon.
Incidentally, I took a look at their websites. Very nicely done. Very creative. But nothing terribly stunning in terms of technology when you pour over the code. Lots of Flash,, javascript, the usual. Someone used T-SQL on them? Where’s the beef?
This ad is dumb for one big reason though. It tries to look ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ and comes off as unprofessional and amateur. That would be fine for a radio station. But for a firm with a decent client list, you’d think they would try and really target a knowledgeable professional who can get the job done - if they were serious about their need.
I’m usually a huge advocate of destroying human resource departments. Or at least laying off 70 percent of the staff and crippling the rest. They are one of the biggest drains to productivity and hiring quality people.
However, in iChameleon’s case, I think it might be time for them to hire at least one person with an HR background. They almost border on violating the EEO Act with this ad, and at the same time, turn away any serious professionals from even considering them as anything but a garage outfit with a bunch of nose-ringed teenagers obsessing over their Macbooks and VW Jetta’s. Dumb. Just plain dumb.
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I think you might be right at the tip of being snowed under with these things. When people find out like photography, they give me old cameras. Usually useless old Kodak instamatics and the like, but I have to keep turning the gifts down.
Folks will blast you with funny job ads now.
I hate foosball. I never could get the hand of it. If I magically knew every web development related language out there, I couldn’t work there for this one reason.
LOL! Actually we have a dart board too.