I always wonder if the people who write job postings realize that "fast-paced, dynamic environment" sounds like code for "chaotic, messy workplace with loads of pressure". I feel like some of them think it sounds cool, and so they put it in, even when the workplace actually has things under control. But I see it and I think, "Do I even want to apply there?" — and I'm sure I'm not the only one. #jobhunt
@kagan I’m looking at changing jobs and I see the same thing. “Oh this is a manager job and a tech contributor job together because you fired most of the team and still need someone to do important work, got it.”
See also: One company I looked at seemed to have bad reviews on Glassdoor where people were saying they were awful micromanagers - and yet one of my current employees has applied there as they emailed me directly to ref check him, so he must not have seen the review or knows something I don’t lol
@hakirsch@kagan HR people almost always use long, jargonistic words to describe the worst parts of a job in a way that will bamboozle applicants:
"High performing" <- We believe in sweating our labour. You'll be set unreasonable workloads and deadlines. Hope you like working Sundays!
"Managing internal stakeholders" <- Fiona from finance has a cricket bat wrapped in barbed wire hidden under her desk, ready for the next time Tony from operations comes walking by. They both need to sign off on everything you do.
"Care about diversity" <- Our mainly white, mainly male board has been persuaded by HR to make you attend a diversity session once a year. They also know about Creepy Craig, and will gaslight you into resigning if you make any complaints about him.
"Values-driven culture" <- We have our six key values on our website somewhere. No-one knows them, and they'll never be followed in practice.
"Managing stakeholders" <- You'll spend more time in meetings or Teams meetings than actually doing work.
"Managing expectations" <- You're the poor bastard who has to tell the clients that the sales and marketing team lied their arses off, and there's no way the company can deliver half of what was promised. If they leave, you'll be blamed.
"Managing budgets" <- More specifically, the fact there's not enough money to do your job.
"KPI driven" <- We'll set you unreasonably high targets. Anything you do that these numbers don't capture means nothing. The only people meeting those targets are either gaming the system or committing fraud. If you somehow meet those targets, we'll double them next quarter.
"Solutions focussed" or "problem solving" <- The problem you'll be solving is how to do your job with half the staff we really need, and half the budget, without most of the basic tools and software you need to do it.
"Process driven" <- The department heads have set out lengthy sign-off procedures and convoluted processes to protect their turf. Disobey at your peril.
"Detail orientated" <- Your boss' boss is a micromanager. Nonsensical orders about insignificant details will constantly land in your inbox from senior management.
"Willing to go the extra mile" <- You'll be doing tasks beyond your job description, usually during unpaid overtime.
"Focussed on growth" <- The bosses here only care about making money.
FWIW, I think it'd be more effective for them to explain the less awful parts of a job in plain English, like this:
"In this job, you'll mostly be coding new features for our app. The people you'll be working with are friendly, and the staff turnover here is fairly low.
"If you need help with anything, then by all means ask, but otherwise you'll be left alone to figure stuff out without someone constantly looking over your shoulder.
"You'll be expected to come into the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Our office was renovated in the past few years, and is still modern, and we recently bought a new coffee machine for the kitchen."
"Our team is a close knit family"- We'll expect too much from you and probably make you talk about your feelings in staff meetings, but we won't hesitate to deny your leave requests or lay you off.
"Fun work environment" <- Our CEO or loves talking at the staff during our monthly in-office afternoon tea. You better have a damned good excuse not to attend the "fun"!
"Tasks include report writing" <- The CEO is too dumb to find the sales figures in our CRM system. You'll need to regularly, manually copy and paste them into a pretty PowerPoint slide deck that he'll probably never look at.
"Multitasking" <- We'll make you do the work of three people.
"Fast-paced" "tight deadlines" <- We overload you with tasks with unreasonable deadlines. There's no way you can get this project completed and signed off by everyone before the end of the week. We'll expect you to have it done by the end of the hour.
"Managing offsite teams" <- We outsourced our business processes overseas. You'll have to clean up the mess.
"Staying on top of market trends" <- Our CEO looks at the ways other companies in our industry enshittify their products or gouge their customers and says "let's do that too"!
"Agile work environment" <- You'll be micromanaged using daily standup meetings, JIRA, and kanban boards.
"Engaging with consultants" <- The CEO is being paid a five-figure salary to play Solitaire on his PC. Actual management decisions have been outsourced to KPMG. You have to deal with them.
"Some manual data entry" <- All the data is already in our core business systems. Unfortunately, management decided it was too expensive to pay for a Zappier integration to move it into our e-commerce platform, or for enough IT staff to set it up. So you'll need to input it manually, or else everything breaks. We'll hold you personally accountable for any errors.
"Supporting legacy applications" <- Our critical core business systems were originally written for a VAX machine and a Z80 system running CP/M. The people who wrote them are long dead. There's 40 years of cruft code. None of it was documented. They somehow sort of interface with the obsolete SAP and Oracle systems we picked up through a long-forgotten merger.
Data integration? Well, Anne from admin uses a Visual Basic front end to manually download a spreadsheet, which she then uploads into a Salesforce system that some of our departments switched over to during a failed IT transformation project 10 years ago.
Oh, and some of our backups are on Bernoulli disks in the cupboard. If by chance you see a working OS/2 machine pop up on eBay, make sure you bid for it.
Oh, and if there's any downtime, your job's on the line.
Add comment