Analysing Jeff Bezos's 1994 job posting
The post Jeff Bezos made in 1994 to hire an engineer for Amazon has been doing the rounds, and has been hailed as a great job post for an early-stage startup. I wanted to see if that’s true. To do that, I color-coded appealing parts in green, and unappealing parts in red:
Let’s look at the green flags:
Well-capitalized: great engineers want to work at a startup that has enough money to fund their vision.
start-up: great engineers want to work in the highly productive environment of a startup, unencumbered by bureaucracy.
extremely talented, motivated, interesting co-workers: great engineers want to work where the bar is high. Working with midwits is a huge turn off.
C/C++/Unix: this will attract the right people while repelling people who are not interested in learning or working on C/C++/Unix.
pioneer commerce on the Internet: “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems: A job post must must do two things: excite the right people, and repel the wrong people. It’s not about being neutral or inoffensive. This does both: people with this experience and skill will go, “Yes! This is for me!” while the others will know they’ll be rejected and so not apply.
Now let’s move on the red flags:
one-third the time: This triggers concerns of unreasonable expectations, that no matter how fast you work, you’ll be criticised by a businessperson who doesn’t know what’s a reasonable bar.
intense: This reads as “stressful to work with” to me. Maybe it’s just me.
On the whole, there are far more green flags than red, so this is a good job posting.