[msbarnett]

> Ironically, a job seeker that rejects an ad based on a keyword or two is exactly the shallow reasoning this article criticizes; it's just the other side of the same coin.

Not really. The situations are asymmetric -- an employer seeking a talented programmer needs to be rejecting potential employees on as few arbitrary criteria as possible, to maximize their chance at finding just a single qualified candidate.

A talented programmer, on the other hand, has Berty Wooster's time-management problem; there are far more people desperate to hire than he or she could possibly could ever hope to give attention to. You need to winnow out any opportunity that is even the slightest bit unappealing just to get the flood down to a manageable level.

[Domenic_S]

> You need to winnow out any opportunity that is even the slightest bit unappealing just to get the flood down to a manageable level.

This is precisely what the article was talking about but in reverse, like the GP said. You're implying that job ads that rub you the wrong way on a minor point are ads that are at the bottom of the desirability list -- this is the exactly the correlation/causation fallacy the article discussed.

In other words, that vast list of companies looking to hire the talented programmer is comprised of 1) companies that suck 2) companies that are OK, and 3) companies that rock. The occurrence of the word "ninja" or "rockstar" in their ad isn't an indicator of which group the company falls into. What you're advocating is no more scientific than throwing away unlucky resumes.

[msbarnett]

> You're implying that job ads that rub you the wrong way on a minor point are ads that are at the bottom of the desirability list -- this is the exactly the correlation/causation fallacy the article discussed.

You've misunderstood.

The employer faces the problem of there being too few really good programmers, and so must do nothing that would prevent them from possibly seeing one in their candidate pool. It's like panning for gold; you need to get as much crap as possible going through your pan to find anything of value.

The good programmer has an entirely different problem. There are a ton of jobs out there that I would find stimulating, engaging, and fun. Finding them isn't hard at all. They show up on HN, they show up in my inbox, they show up in conversations at conferences and events, they show up in unsolicited offers from friends, acquaintances, headhunters, etc. They show up on a weekly basis.

If I'm in the market for a job, I don't need to carefully grovel through every opportunity to find the one good one. I couldn't possibly, even if I wanted to, because my attention isn't infinite. Talking with every potentially interesting employer would take more hours than I have in the day.

Instead I need to, like Berty Wooster, somehow winnow down the 100 equally plausible opportunities to something small enough that I can reasonably give my time and attention to picking between. That the heuristics for doing so are arbitrary is irrelevant; my only concern is grossly reducing the numbers I'm dealing with, because I have no reason to fear I won't find a good one among those that are left.

[kharasoft]

Honestly, there are a lot of crap jobs posing as dream jobs as well. I remember talking to my (female) cousin once and she said to me "People act like it's only good men that are hard to find. The sword cuts both ways." Just because there's a higher ratio of Women to Men doesn't mean that the ratio of good women to not so good women is higher than it is for men. I didn't get what she was saying until I started dating heavily.

In the same regards just because there are more jobs than candidates doesn't mean there isn't just a high ratio of crap jobs. So the same 100 job ads will likely have 1 or 2 great opportunities and 98-99 posers. The candidate's job is just as tough as the recruiter.