In response to "Stop speaking in bullshit"

I was reading Danilo Campos' blog post earlier entitled Stop speaking in bullshit.

If you've got the attention span of a gnat, get straight to the point at tl;dr

This is a topic I find strangely compelling and agree in essence with the point he was making. The excerpts he used though didn't really describe to me what he was getting at though. I will rip the excerpt right out of his post to give you a feeder into my response, but I recommend you go and read his whole blog post directly.

We’re profitable, and we’re looking to hire a smart all-around programmer as our first hire. It’s a cliche, but we want people who like tackling complicated problems.
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Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus.
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we like people who don’t put themselves in a box. You should be comfortable thinking about the product as a whole, and how changes are going to impact the hundreds of thousands of people who use it regularly.
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We’re profitable, make the lives of hundreds of thousands of people better every month, have a rapidly expanding user base, and napping is an encouraged part of our corporate culture.
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Basically, you’ll get to be the first employee of a small successful startup, while getting a paycheck and equity, and feeling good about the impact you’re having on the world.

Danilo posits that this is not vague or fluffy at all which I find er... not true. They appear to write some kind of web application that may or may not require integration with some related or unrelated iPhone and/or Android application. They’re looking for the first employee – read: the first person who doesn’t make a billion when the product is bought out by Google. Do you wanna be that person? This is what that ad says to me:

We’re striving to change the world. We’re all young and fresh out of school, so we’ve got no idea what we’re doing. We have somehow managed to blag enough funds out of companies to make our startup profitable by appearing to solve a problem everyone told us couldn’t be solved. This means we can afford to actually pay you something. Plus, because you’re gonna be the first developer we’re gonna give you some equity too just to make it seem like you’ll get rich when we sell out, even though that’s probably not the case because you’re an employee – don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re like us.

The reason we’re needing a developer is that we need someone to actually deliver what we said we could and help avoid making complete arses of ourselves.

Our core application is a Ruby on Rails web app with iPhone and Android integration because that’s the path all the cool kids seem to be taking and we want to appear hip and trendy like them.

So if you’re the kind of developer that can help with that, we want to hear from you… quickly, before our investors realize that we have no idea how to deliver the vision we’ve already sold them.

To add insult to injury, not only does the ad give me remarkably little useful information other than the languages they program in and an implication of a platform they're developing for, it's completely devoid of personality. Who are these people? Do they have a personality? Do they still live at home in their Mom's basement? What is their vision? What do they believe in? Why should I care about them?

Does nobody study creative writing in this day and age except the authors that make the New York Times best sellers list every month with the same formulaic drivel that keeps me coming back for more with every new release? It's obvious that none of these writers ever show up in marketing departments or in HR where they could sorely be used to write adverts for a career posting or two.

Hey, we’re a small [and by small we mean there's 2 of us, me and Tank, he's called Tank because he used to service Tanks for the Marines, true story], profitable startup with a compelling vision and a long list of contacts from the porn industry my Mom knows - don't ask. It’s been hard to find time between all the partying, but somehow we’ve managed to knuckle down and get enough work done to garner some respect from the development community [I know, we don't understand it either]; deliver a couple of awesome products and everyone thinks you’re some kind of god… as if getting a decent product out of the door is rarity or something. Given that we’re both gods, you’d think we’d be capable of handling all the work ourselves. We tried, but somehow these idiotic things called keyboards just can’t keep up with this shit – I swear, that’s the God’s honest truth… really.

Anyway, because of this archaic input device, we’re gonna have to hire some lesser gods to help input teh codez…

We’ve got this pioneering Ruby on Rails web app you’re gonna love. It’s the first to solve a genuine problem for our “target market” that everybody else was too chicken to work on. The problem is, we’re short of a couple of pieces that we need you to handle for us:

iPhone and Android integration… and maybe Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry down the road… WP7… C#… shudder, doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Anyway, let’s not kill the mood just yet, we’ll get some other poor schmuck to handle that and spare you the indignity of having to work with C#.

Because we’re profitable, we’ve actually got a pretty well decked out office with a Starbucks next door – Next. Door?! Can you believe that shit?! Me either! Anyway, that means you won’t have to come over and work in my Mom’s unfinished basement and listen to her drunken friends getting it on upstairs or put up with Tank’s over friendly and grossly overweight cat drooling all over your keyboard while you work.

You will have the freedom to choose the hardware and software build of your development box because we hate having that imposed on us, so we figure you’ll hate that too. We can also afford to pay you! Bonus, right? Pay you! Imagine that! That’s a pretty novel concept for a startup. As an addition to that we’re not above bribing you with some equity in the company which will be worth millions down the road.

So if you can put up with working in this ridiculous environment, please come along and help us out and we’ll hook you up ;)

In short, I think that creative writing can make for a far informative and compelling advert while giving the reader some entertainment. The bonus to this is that you'll stand a far better chance of attracting a developer that's a far better fit for your environment and working style.