Well-capitalized Seattle start-up seeks Unix developers

http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc?pli=1

by swombat • 16 years ago

160 82 16 years ago

groups.google.com

swombat4• 16 years ago

On a serious note, this is exactly how you should write job ads if you want exceptional hackers, imho.

j_baker3• 16 years ago

Perhaps minus the degree requirement though.

swombat4• 16 years ago

True. I disagree with degree requirements for hacker jobs too.

vinhboy• 16 years ago

so, we always say this... but doesn't the success of amazon, and other "degree" driven companies mean we are wrong??

maybe having a degree does matter?

spudlyo• 16 years ago

I got hired there in '97 without one, so it wasn't a hard and fast requirement.

lsc• 16 years ago

Nearly every job I've gotten past the age of 17 listed a degree as a requirement. I have about as much college now as I had when I was 17, which is to say, almost none.

Considering that I've never had trouble finding employment, I think that a degree being listed as a requirement in the job ad is quite often another meaningless bullet point that will be overlooked if you are attractive enough otherwise.

(obviously, there's some pretty strong observer bias here; the companies where that really was a hard and fast rule wouldn't have approached me, or wouldn't have given me an interview if I approached them. Still, I find that 'required' doesn't actually mean 'required' in many cases.)

chc4• 16 years ago

Yes, but it might be a bit deceptive if I started signing my recruitment ads as "Jeff Bezos."

mhartl• 16 years ago

True, but the ad is from 1994. I doubt many people had heard of Bezos at that point. :-)

argv_empty• 16 years ago

I'm not sure the ad as it stands quite convinces me I'd be doing interesting work (though it is possible I'd have thought of "commerce on the Internet" as pretty interesting at the time).

chc4• 16 years ago

At the time, e-commerce pretty much didn't exist, so it would at least be a novel and unsolved problem if nothing else.

cookiecaper3• 16 years ago

To be honest if I ran across this ad in the wild it would turn me off. Maybe I've just been burned too many times, but when someone suggests things like "do it in one-third of the time competent people think possible", that is a huge red flag to me.

Every time I've taken a gig with someone who has said this I've found it to be at least literal, though often you have even less time than they list. It's not just a fancy way of saying "can do work quickly" in most situations, it's more a declaration that "ignorant people are going to constantly and unreasonably hound you regarding completion of the project and they won't be satisfied when you get it done". I once had a guy who was looking for "rockstars" expect me to finish what is reasonably about a month of work in four days.

Aside from that, it's typical corporate-speak: "excellent communication skills", etc. Not very attractive as a whole imo.

SkyMarshal2• 16 years ago

While real communication skills are valuable, 'excellent communication skills' is certainly vague corporate speak implying whoever wrote the add doesn't even understand precisely what communications skills they need and why. Try this instead:

Wanted: The ability to explain complex technical problems and concepts clearly and concisely, to make things as simple as possible but no simpler (a la Einstein), so that the group can make sound, correct judgements and choose the best solutions.

Tamerlin4• 16 years ago

"do it in one-third of the time competent people think possible", that is a huge red flag to me."

I think your response is wise. That sort of statement usually means that it's a sweatshop.

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

Except the part about building in 1/3 the time...to get away with that you need to have some kind of reliable reputation so it is interpreted correctly.

adamt• 16 years ago

[quote from link] Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership. [/quote]

Yes, but will it ever be worth anything? ;-)

oscardelben• 16 years ago

If you have to ask then maybe it's not worth. I think that wherever you go you have the chance to make something meaningful if you really want to.

Edit: I didn't realize the date at first, so the downvotes are in order. I still believed in what I said tough.

pascal_cuoq• 16 years ago

You got downvoted for accidentally raising the very good point that the e-mail does not contain enough information to allow a prospective candidate to decide what equity would be worth? I don't know who gets downvoting power around here but they sure do not have much of a sense of humor.

imp• 16 years ago

Hmm.. I didn't know their original name was Cadabra.

kirpekar• 16 years ago

Bezos changed the name from Cadabra to Amazon because Yahoo would return search results alphabetically.

tigerthink• 16 years ago

Holy shit.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

I can't verify your claim one way or another.

Humourly, Amazon themselves don't seem to have a clue, giving both answer plus lots of spam: http://askville.amazon.com/Bezos-changed-cadabra-amazon-soun...

alexsolo• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if this is true, but I was told that it was because Cadabra sounds too much like "cadaver".

akl• 16 years ago

Fun fact: it was changed because of concern people might hear 'cadaver' instead of 'cadabra'.

(or so this book said: http://www.amazon.com/amazon-com-Inside-Revolutionary-Busine...)

Scriptor• 16 years ago

If anyone doesn't recognize the name of the poster (like me), this is what ended up happening:

http://amazon.com/

swombat4• 16 years ago

Looks like an interesting start-up, but with the IPO market still frozen, how will they ever exit? Their investors will clearly never get their money back. Maybe Google will buy them to hire their engineers.

tybris2• 16 years ago

Electronic books? I have no time for such nonsense.

barmstrong• 16 years ago

I like how he says "you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible"

jimbokun• 16 years ago

My first thought was "How do I become someone who designs and builds large and complex (yet maintainable) systems in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible?"

justinlilly• 16 years ago

The best way is to have done it before. Its easy to implement something in 1/3rd the time as someone else, if you've done it before and they haven't.

Tamerlin4• 16 years ago

Drop the "maintainable" part.

brettnak• 16 years ago

Does anyone know if Amazon's tech has been developing at 3x the speed that most competent people think possible?

Tamerlin4• 16 years ago

Having worked there, I'd say that's a resounding NO.

krosaen• 16 years ago

yeah, only issue is it might skew towards the egomaniacs. some of the best hackers are very humble

_pius• 16 years ago

... and very pessimistic, if they've actually built a complex system or read The Mythical Man-Month, which saw its first edition in 1975.

tzs• 16 years ago

In "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister, they report the results of various studies on programmer productivity that showed that the best are an order of magnitude more productive than the average. Similar results hold for companies as a whole.

Bezos was not being unrealistic in seeking programmers who could do things in 1/3 the time of what most competent people would think is possible. They are out there.

j_baker3• 16 years ago

That's true. But due to the Dunning-Kruger[1] effect, it's more likely to recruit less than competent people.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

iseff• 16 years ago

Only very tangentially related, my scrappy, not-too-well capitalized (from Founder's Co-op: http://www.founderscoop.com) Seattle start-up (AppStoreHQ: http://www.appstorehq.com) is also seeking developers:

http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/482789903/appstorehq-is-look...

EDIT: Err, why the downvotes?

graywh• 16 years ago

Inappropriate. There are better way to announce jobs on HN.

ams6110• 16 years ago

Heh.. I was actually job-hunting about that time. Wish I'd seen it....

TorKlingberg• 16 years ago

This part is cute:

"Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary."

Shows just how new the web was in '94.

tybris2• 16 years ago

Most software engineers at a company like Amazon or Google never start Apache or see a line of HTML. Bezos knew exactly what he was looking for.

wmf• 16 years ago

A great contrast to all the other job openings in 1994 that required five years of Java, HTML, and Linux experience.

paulitex2• 16 years ago

Wow, that's a really tough requirement. Java was first publicly announced in 1995.

starnix17• 16 years ago

I find it even more amusing that his one other newsgroup posting is on finding a good dog obedience school in the Seattle area: http://groups.google.com/group/seattle.general/browse_thread...

leftnode• 16 years ago

Funnily enough, it's not even him posting, it's his wife, Mackenzie, posting under his account.

easp• 16 years ago

Ah yes, the good old days of sharing email accounts with your spouse/partner. When I search for my name on Google, most of the results are for recipes my now-wife posted to rec.food.cooking back in the early 90's.

reduxredacted• 16 years ago

My wife did that for a while on a bunch of amazon forums bashing the Twilight series.

It was one of the driving factors for me buying her a laptop of her own that I never log into. I really need a prospective employer or friend Googling my name and seeing that I not only read Breaking Dawn, but that I felt strongly enough about it to bash it with a bunch of other ladies.

EDIT: Just to clarify: the forum was 99% women according to my wife. I am not implying that Real Men don't read Twilight, just that I'd feel like less of a man if I read it. To each his own.

Raphael• 16 years ago

Sadly, the logo no longer contains capitals.

jmtame• 16 years ago

why would that make anyone sad?

frouaix• 16 years ago

Amazon is still hiring ;) www.amazon.com/jobs

I don't know if we're developing 3 times faster than possible, but from the inside it's amazing to see how many projects launch on any given week without any part of the machinery ever stopping.

zackattack3• 16 years ago

There's a bug with my amazon prime account. Every time that I pay, I have to manually select "use my amazon payments" balance. I can't save this preference, in a payphrase or just as a normal cookied setting. Thanks!

theycallmemorty• 16 years ago

Note the signature on his message.

"It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." -- Alan Kay

SkyMarshal2• 16 years ago

Saw it, and to be pedantic, isn't that a bit of misquote? I've always seen it as:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

enntwo• 16 years ago

If Google offered its first public services in '98, where did these posts originate from? Did Google merge an existing message board system into Groups when it was released?

jonknee• 16 years ago

Usenet. They bought Dejanews and have archives back to the early 80s.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Dejanews had been archiving usenet as far back as the mid-90s but they (now google) actually have usenet archives donated by others dating back to 1981.

swombat4• 16 years ago

Yes. Groups mirrored the newsgroups which have existed for a number of decades.

donaq2• 16 years ago

Google's servers achieved sentience in 2002, traveled back in time and saved all the previous Usenet threads.

durbin• 16 years ago

Maybe this guy Larry should apply.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa108450...

_cbsz• 16 years ago

(1994)

lsd5you• 16 years ago

poorly-Capitalized uk Start-up seeks Money

Well-capitalized Seattle start-up seeks Unix developers

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