All those chiefs
On occasion, I'll skim various job posting sites, looking to see the demand for people with my skill sets. I do this for several reasons: to see if I'm maintaining my skill sets, to check if others looking for the same people we're looking for, to know if I needed to find a job quickly I could. In the end, I glance at the various sites out of curiosity and little more.
I generally recall very few of the posts after I look at them. They mean little other than the casual glancing interest.
Every once in a while, however, I find one that just cracks me up. Today's job posting was for a Drupal developer to work on a hot hot hot start up with a group of dynamic people all striving to make this the biggest blah blah blah, the next myspace or flickr, or google or something. They lost me at "the next" part. Who wants to copy what someone else has done? Do something interesting.
I clicked through anyway, to see who these dynamic people at this hot hot start were. In my mind, web startups are full of programmers and designers and testers, people who can do, get things done and make progress. This company, however had a "Co-founder, Chairman, & Interim CEO," a "President & COO," a CTO, a "Co-Founder & Vice President of Business Development," a "Social Interaction Designer," and a "Consulting Designer" on the team page of their website. I read the descriptions, too. They went something like,
CEO: I tell you what to do
President: I also tell you what to do
CTO: I used to know what to do, but I don't any more. I just tell you what to do
VP: I'm trying to get us rich by begging for money. I tell you what to do.
Designer 1: I'm a Web 2.0 consultant. I just get paid. Oh, and tell you what to do.
Designer 2: I'm a developer. I'm drowning here. Help me. They keep telling me what to do.
I couldn't imagine taking on this job without like 50% of the equity of the company. Guaranteed the only person doing any work is the Drupal person they hire into the company, and it looks like a complete no win situation to me.
Thankfully, I managed to get a laugh out of the posting.