Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Cute, but maybe a little too out cute.

> You are prone to quixotic behavior.

They are looking for people who are prone to irrational, unrealistic behavior? It makes for nice prose but I have a feeling that some of the personality disorders that could be described by their phrasing wouldn't be particularly welcome.

> Full-stack.

What stack?

No really, you're hiring me for the full stack. What is the stack?

Would I ever be writing a line of CSS? Or JavaScript? Or Ruby? SQL?

At least they say "Largely PHP" a little bit later, but that makes me wonder just what their definition of full-stack is.

I appreciate pleasant writing for the sake of it, but there's a lot of information they could have imparted but chose not to. I wonder if they'd respond favorably if I actually replied in kind. Do they really want quixotic behavior? Is being scant on technical details an OK thing for a technical job posting?

I'm tempted to send a cover letter talking about how the best CSS (would I be writing CSS?) is made with oil paint and that I wear a tea cozy for a hat. I could claim to have independently discovered punctuation and talk about how I navigate code by wind chime.

re Quixotic Behavior: We want people who are comfortable taking a stand on an issue and going off on a mission to solve the problem. Not every great idea seems reasonable before people see it working.

re Full-Stack: We're looking for people who design and build full systems from low to high levels. Some have made their career working just as a front- or back-end hacker. We want to meet people who wouldn't dream of letting someone else take half their work or who would be comfortable throwing part of the problem over the fence. People that are a good fit probably don't care that much about what the stack is beyond some reasonable constraints.

If you end up sending that cover letter there's a chance that we'd all be amused enough to read your resume.

But is the stack LAMP? And is the "P" Python, Perl, or PHP? What database are you using? etc.

The point is that we're not looking for specialists in any particular language.

To cure the curiosity, however, we're largely running on Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP with many other tools thrown in the mix.

At the risk of being rude, that additional description leaves it just as open-ended and confusing.

Is everyone at Etsy amazing all every part of your stack?

Suppose I've done most everything except zero database work in my life, should I apply? Or is that not full stack enough?

What if I've done everything but high level design work? Not full stack enough?

What if I've done everything including design work but realized I'm not that good at it, so I hired out design for my projects? What if I determined the reverse with low level database stuff?

What if I have written the full-stack of a few webapps but always used Rails, and haven't ever touched any of the low level bits?

What if I've done only database and web design and have never really touched PHP? Or did PHP but never did any JavaScript? Good enough?

I know what your reply to me is going to be, you'll say by all means, apply, etc. But that's not what I'm trying to point out here. I think that your listing and subsequent clarification might suggest to many that all of the above are inadequate, and I imagine you may be turning off several (very good) candidates that doubt their own full-stack-worthiness, merely on account of the term here being so nebulous.

In other words, to any given pair of eyes that fall upon the ad, all they know is that you want everything.

Full-stack here seems to be about mindset not skill set.

I have a different criticism: it's hard to own the stack without being empowered to change it, to make wholesale changes. And that's hard to do as software grows and ossifies, as deployment gets more uncertain. To do full stack right you need to limit team size, I think.

> people who wouldn't dream of letting someone else take half their work

As someone who is routinely doing full stack development this phrase worries me. To be honest I'm more than happy to give someone half my work if they are talented. Are you making this point because...

A) The overhead is so low that you want "full stack" people to keep margins low (so by wouldn't dream you actually mean wouldn't expect).

B) You want people that are willing to silo themselves, not incorporating exterior feedback or following direction from someone that may have a better handle on the given task.

Wanting someone that does full-stack is nice, but do you REALLY want someone like that and WHY. I mean, this sentence "you don’t flinch at the idea of writing largely PHP for a living" flies right in the face of everything else. It is like saying the following:

Do you dream of creating time-tested architectures? Do you spend nights dreaming up the next great cathedral or monument? That's cool, so we want you to put in our bathroom tile.

You are asking for a dreamer, an innovator, a creator, a designer and an architect to .... primarily ... write .... php .

With that said, it is written very well and etsy is a pretty cool company so I'm sure you'll get plenty of hits.

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