I know bad job postings are a favorite topic of mine and I stumbled across another one that made me laugh today. Here’s the link but I’ll also copy the relevant sections below. Job posting.

This position is scheduled to start in August once we go through the rigorous hiring process. At that time you will be a full time contractor and we will retain you for a minimum of 5 months. Beyond that and through the successful launch of the product we will be transitioning all team members to full time employment positions. Equity will be granted for those that join our team but only after we have gone through the trial period. Compensation for this particular position will be $4,000.00 per month. Yes it is the Bay Area and we are all used to making more, but startups require risk and the willingness to take chances and we are looking for those candidates because they are the ones that will make it through the good and bad times with us.

Okay, why is this bad? First off, they’re hiring you for 5 months at $4,000 a month. Contracting with no benefits should pay at least that a week in the SF Bay Area. There is no equity for 5 months. They have no obligation to hire you. They could just drop you at the end and walk away without even blinking. If you’re going to work for that little amount of money for the skills they’re asking for you should be getting guaranteed equity (if that’s even a good deal).

There are other reasons to be suspicious of the people doing the job search because of the following skill set they want:

• Extensive experience in J2EE technologies, with a strong understanding of the common design frameworks like Struts & Spring.
• Deep understanding of query Tuning concepts, Web Security concepts like Man in Middle attacks, cross site scripting, sql injection, phishing etc.
• Extensive experience in configuring and deploying applications on JBoss, clustering
• Extensive experience with Apache
• db admin tasks like db clustering, db configuration etc (mysql)
• Experience in working with build utilities like Ant & Maven
• Automated build systems like cruise control
• ability to write db components like Stored procs, Functions, Triggers etc for MySQL
• basic Understanding of networking, and ability to work with SANs

First off, how many people with killer database skills also understand cross site scripting attacks? I can tell you that list will be pretty damn short. On top of that they’re not really even looking for a Java developer based on these skills but more an operations and system engineer that has some Java coding. They have one line dedicated to Java and it only mentions Spring and Struts.

Run, don’t walk, from this job posting. Seriously.