Crystal's Adventures in Webdev Land » rant

Job Posting from: Company Confidential

Crys — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 04:47:58 +0000

I am not currently looking for a new job (I like the folks I work with already) but I like to take a look at job openings for similar positions to my current one, or that are a step up from my current one, so I can see what skills and abilities are in demand that I might need to strengthen in myself to stay competitive and to see what direction the industry is going. I consider it getting the lay of the land. I’ve also got several friends in the industry who are looking, and I like to pass particularly interesting postings along to them.

While looking at a few postings on a few prominent sites in the last couple weeks, I’ve noticed a rash of postings that refuse to name the company. I will never pass these postings along to my friends. Here’s why…

I recognize “Company Confidential” may mean that you’re looking to fire your current designer and don’t want them to know. But you know what “Company Confidential” says to prospective employees about you? That you are a company people don’t want to work for, so you’re afraid to say who you are in the ad. It says that you are underhanded in your dealing with your current employees (otherwise your current designer would know you’re looking to replace them and you wouldn’t have to hide). It says you are not trustworthy as a company. Either that, or you’re a headhunter and you don’t really have a position lined up; you just want to trick a designer into paying you to find them one.

In any case, no one but a desperate job seeker would apply to the ad.

Then again, maybe that’s what you want: people who are desperate for a new job because desperate people are more likely to work for less pay and less benefits. Ask yourself: do you really feel comfortable hiring someone for a detail-oriented job when you haven’t given them the option to show whether or not they’re capable of even basic research, based on how much they know about your company by the time they get to the interview? I wouldn’t be.

“But,” you say, “we just don’t want to deal with a barrage of phone calls from people!” Then put that in the ad: “No phone calls please. Anyone who is incapable of following this one simple instruction will be barred from consideration for the job.” You’ll still get phone calls but you can easily weed out the people who didn’t bother to read the whole ad, who are likely to be just as half-assed in their work for you as they were in reading the ad. These are not people you want to hire. Consider it winnowing the field.

Giving prospective employees a chance to find out what your company does (what it really does, not what your marketing-ese says you do) and what your company culture is like, on their own terms, makes the process of attracting new employees self-selecting. If you are a large energy company with wall to wall cubicles and everyone has to wear a tie no matter how far removed from customer contact they are, people who would be stifled or uncomfortable in that environment know to steer clear of sending you their resume. Likewise, if you’re a startup who hasn’t quite figured out where long-term funding is coming from and you have very little in the way of office rules, people who need strong structure and stability know to skip your ad. If they have no way of knowing these things, and they apply, you are wasting each other’s time. Wouldn’t you rather the majority of your interviews are with people who will fit into your company?

Guess I’m just getting old

Web Design is a road…

Crys — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:33:05 +0000

Here I am again, stuck in IE7 hell. It struck me today, while I’m sitting here hacking up my layout’s css to accommodate the vagaries of IE7, that working on a layout is a lot like driving a car. There’s a lot of things you have to learn first to keep yourself from being a hazard to other drivers, but once you get the hang of it, those things all become second nature.

Designing for the better browsers, Firefox, Safari, etc., is like driving down a mostly deserted highway in Wyoming. Fast, smooth, straight-forward, easy to find yourself doing 100mph with the radio blasting while the scenery around you flies by (not that I’d know anything about doing that *shifty look*).

Most of the time, IE8 is the same. You may occasionally have to change lanes or slow down a little, but it’s easy to see those problems coming and just build in solutions from the start.

Now imagine you are asked to plot a route across the country that involves no highways, no stop lights and no stop signs. You have one hour to plot this route. Then you must drive it. From memory.

That’s what working with Internet Explorer 7 is like.

Yes, it’s pretty but it’s not a great web presence

Crys — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:55:25 +0000

There are a few things you will never get if I work on your website. I promise that you will not have a flash-only website that forces the browser to be the same size as the screen (if I wanted it that big I would have made the browser that big, thanks) and play loud music you can’t turn off with canned sound effects when you move your mouse. No hidden navigation that users have to “discover”. No flash-only “I didn’t want search engines to be able to index my site anyway” crap.

Yes, some of those sites are pretty. Very well executed, very artistic. Props to the artists involved. But a web presence it is NOT. Users should be able to tell at a second’s notice what they’re supposed to do on the site, how to get where they want to go and most importantly, what you do. Search engines need text, TEXT, for their spiders to index or you can kiss any kind of placement in search results goodbye. And finally, stop ticking your users off! If I want sound, give me a button that says “turn sound on”, don’t start playing it immediately. Stop resizing my browser. Stop playing movies and flash immediately on page load. Give me a button that says “Play Movie”.

This is not rocket science. Don’t screw with your user; don’t lock out every search engine on the planet.