[johngalt]

Par for the course for IT/Sysadmin type jobs. "We expect you to build the hospital while running the emergency room and operating room." They are just being up front about it. There are a few areas where they glossed over it. I will translate:

"You need to have a crazy-person level of attention to detail" - We will judge you based on anything you've overlooked, rather than what you've done.

"A motivated self-starter who can overcome or workaround issues independently" - Don't bother telling us we are asking for something impossible, that's your problem.

"Flexibility to travel up to 30% of the time." - Not only should you be able to do four jobs, but you should be able to do them from an airplane/car/hotel room with permanent availability.

"Should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment." - Note this doesn't apply to you, only we will be insulting prima donnas. You will conform.

"Flexibility adapting to deadlines, changing schedules, priorities and unpredictable events in a fast paced environment." You should be able to meet deadlines that are assigned arbitrarily. You'll have no control over your own schedule, but you'll be expected to give highly detailed attention to whatever the project of the day is.

"It’s rarely we call on it, but if something breaks in the middle of the night, you are expected to be on call to address that issue 24/7." - We'll cheap out at every opportunity, buying shitty hardware and cheap services, because it's not us that has to fix it when it's 2am Christmas morning. If you keep shit running, then we were right to be cheap. If it fails, then you're a bad IT person. That you recommended a different option is irrelevant.

"we are not money-motivated group" - We aren't motivated to give you any money.

PA will surely find someone who meets their requirements and accepts their level of compensation. PA will be lucky to hang onto them for more than a year. Anyone who has accumulated all of the skills that this post requires, will also not stay in this position for longer than it takes to put it on their resume.

[danudey]

I wrote a huge long reply to this comment, but by the time I got to the end I realized you were just making cynical, shitty comments because you're upset with them for whatever reason.

'attention to detail' - If I hire someone I want them to have a good attention to detail and not just do whatever works. It's the little things that make the difference between a good server admin and a great one.

'motivated self-starter' - I don't want someone who's going to run to me to get every decision made. If you are able to identify things that are part of your job, decide how to do them, and do them, that makes my life much easier, and your job more efficient.

'Flexibility to travel' - They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?

'creative and offensive environment' - Well, they can certainly be offensive; sometimes intentionally offending stupid people, sometimes unintentionally offending normal people. I won't get into this (but I've railed against them in the past for shitty comments).

'flexibility with deadlines, schedules, etc…' - This is project management. Anyone who's managing projects (either their own or someone else's) needs to do this. This is entirely normal.

'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal. Ideally, you set things up so that they don't break in the middle of the night, or if they do you don't have to deal with it immediately. Shit breaks, that's life.

You seem to assume the absolute worst of every possible thing they say, even though all of this is part of most senior IT jobs.

[johngalt]

You're right, I'm not being charitable in my assumptions. I would edit it and trim it back a little, but I don't want to take away from your response.

To examine this more seriously:

Individually their requirements fit in the broader context of IT. However, taken as a whole the job post screams 'toxic environment', and 'setup for failure'. It's possible I'm entirely wrong, but the post throws off a lot of red flags. Such a long list of requirements and roles without one mention of decision making or authority. Not even one mention of responsibility. Most skilled IT people are comfortable meeting a high standard, but are wary of entering situations where they will be 24/7 solo on-call for variegated environments that they get no authority over.

The issue with the requirements isn't being oncall or managing projects, or travel, or attention to detail, or fexibility, or offensive environment. It's oncall AND projects AND travel AND details AND flexibility AND offensive environment WHILE cheap AND alone.

How would they fix it? How could this job post be better? Change the language to reflect more of a management position. Talk more about selecting and managing tech vendors, projects, strategies. Make it sound like they are looking for an IT Director for guidance who is not afraid to roll-up his sleeves. Right now it appears they are looking for a skilled slave to do it all.

Having been around many highly skilled IT teams, I can guarantee you that most senior IT people aren't filling multiple roles while being on-call for all of them.

EDIT: "The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?"

I'd reach out to my network and find someone who's already solved the problem of large scale wi-fi and rent them. Or contact a large wi-fi equipment provider and see if we could make an arrangement for equipment support/manpower in exchange for PAX floor space. The last thing I would do is ask the IT generalist who's been on-call for three months straight and is in the middle of updating the website. "Hey can you figure out convention wifi?"

[danudey]

You're not wrong in that there's a lot of questions left unanswered by this post. Where you see 'terrible work environment', though, I see a pretty decent likelihood of 'Lots to do, and also I have no idea how to write a good IT job posting'.

I would have a lot of questions for them, for sure. I've worked as sysadmin for $10/hr with 24/7 on-call (when I was desperate, broke, and nearly homeless), and I'd never go back. That said, if you're the only IT guy… well, obviously you're going to be on-call if something breaks. I would definitely negotiate this up in my contact if I were interviewing for the job.

The interesting thing to me about the potential here is that they already have all of their infrastructure; they have the website, the servers, the CDNs, and whatever else they need to run the site. The job would involve taking over those responsibilities and bringing them in-house. They already have redundancy, monitoring, and distribution taken care of, so you wouldn't be asked to build a new server infrastructure from scratch and take care of it. You might be tasked with bringing it in-house, but that's definitely doable by one person if there's no strict (unreasonable) timeline on it.

As for the wifi: yeah, I wouldn't want to do it either, personally. There's lots of other people who can do it far, far better than I could.

Looking at the PA guys, I'm willing to make a bet that their biggest IT problem is that they don't know what they don't know. Can awful wifi be solved? Presumably, right? But they're dealing with tens of thousands of people. How do you do that? Who do you call?

So, what they need for the wifi example, for example, is someone who can step in and say 'These are the things we don't know and need to learn', or 'these are the questions we need to ask', or 'this is the discussion we need to have' (which ties in with my 'don't know how to write a good tech job post' point above).

One thing I've learned in tech jobs is that having no answers is far, far better than having no questions. Maybe they're trying to hire someone to ask questions.

[ceol]

> They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?

Their website developer is supposed to be in charge of their convention networking?

> 'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal.

Not if there's only one person handling everything. Normally, you have the main developer and someone who is on-call. However, PA wants a developer, a sysadmin, a DBA, and an IT guru all rolled into one, and they want this unicorn to be on call for all four of these jobs 24/7. That's not normal. That's horse shit.

[rhizome]

It's also a single-point of failure. I have to wonder what the turnover for these unicorns is. Maybe that's why they're trolling LinkedIn with this stuff.

[danudey]

They post all of their job posts on LinkedIn, and then they tweet them to a hundred thousand people, and have them retweeted to millions. LinkedIn is just a place for them to put the text they want to show people.

[rhizome]

Well, who cares about LI, that part was a afterthought, but his desire to show people these particular words is the trolling

[lolcraft]

If I hire someone I want them to have a good attention to detail and not just do whatever works.

Crazy-person level of attention to detail. Not good. Not adequate. It asks for perfection, or lunacy: both of which are abusive to ask for. [1]

They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. [...] How do you mitigate that?

Try hiring four people to do the job of four people. If they fucked up the wifi because their intern-slave is busy updating the site's CSS, managing the databases, backing up the file server, fixing the wifi, carrying down the booths, making coffee, cleaning the toilets, and has to catch a plane for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow at 6 a. m., guess who's failing at his job. And it's not the guy making the coffee.

'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal.

Maybe it's normal, but that doesn't mean those who accept it for a pittance are not suckers.

[1] "Oh, but they're joking, it's hyperbole". I presume the salary is a joke too?

[criley2]

I feel like his cynicism is closer to reality than your painful rationalizations.

The fact is, he's right: if you have that skillset, chances are they're not paying well enough for what they're asking for, and you'll likely not stay longer than it takes to make the resume look good before you move into a position where you're paid well.

Or maybe they're paying near the top of the industry, seeing as they're asking for near the top of the industry in terms of one-man-team talent.

[nsxwolf]

On-call 24/7 is normal? I thought good IT departments had rotating on-call schedules.

[nucleardog]

I think it depends on the size and how organized you are.

Most of the smaller organizations I've worked at don't have an on-call schedule for various reasons, but I'd posit it's primarily that there aren't enough people for a good rotation.

One guy might be able to do something with a server in a pinch, but there's probably only one guy that deals with them as a regular part of his day.

Imagine if, instead of trying to find one 'unicorn', PA hired four separate positions: Server Admin, Developer, General IT, DBA.

Is it really all that effective to have the Server Admin picking up when the issue is that payments on the website have stopped going through? Or the General IT guy answering because the server's down? Sure, if someone gets hit by a bus the other people can probably put out fires if need be, but it's a lot more effective to have the person who regularly works on something and specializes in it working on it when possible.

The 'good' IT departments you're thinking of are probably large enough to have multiple employees in a role.

[scott_karana]

> I think it depends on the size and how organized you are.

This is the argument, of course. If four people were hired for the various jobs, as the post advocates, there could be a reasonable rotation of on-call responsibility.

There are three technicians at my organization (2000 users) and we get interrupted on-call only once or twice a year.

[danudey]

When you're the only person charged with any technical issues? I would say yes (in my experience). In most cases, though, there's not really a lot of issues that need taken care of, and I doubt they have a sufficiently complicated infrastructure that things would break often enough for this to be a problem (unless, in the course of doing your job, you make things worse).

[jmccree]

It really depends on the definition they are using of on call. In many small companies/IT teams everyone is "on call" 24/7, but it just means you may get called on 24/7, but there's no availability requirements. Being actually on call should mean compensation, defined hours, and expected response times.

[6d0debc071]

If that's what they expect, then they should just say that. It's difficult to trust someone to have reasonable expectations when they just throw a bunch of buzz-words; that could mean anything from 'we basically want you to run the technical side of our entire company for us' through to 'we want a person who's not a total pain to work with'; at the wall.

[ShirtlessRod]

> "They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?"

By hiring enough qualified people to handle setting it up properly instead of relying on a wing and a prayer and an under-appreciated, underpaid worker doing too many things at once?

[WettowelReactor]

What about most folks who work for not for profits? Often their wages are below what they could make in other positions but they value they derive from their work has merit. I am not claiming that working for PA has a feel good social cause but by the same token they may offer other value to those who want to work there.