You don't get those kinds of productivity differentials in driving.

Moreover, access to the latest and greatest tech is a click away and costs nothing. If you were a professional driver and could click in your spare time to be in the driver's seat of a Ferrari or tank for free, of course you'd do it if you cared at all about your craft.

Finally, the hours and wages of computer scientists are obviously far better, so more demands in a CV are reasonable.

At best this is a sendup of the Craigslist naifs looking to build an FB killer at $15/hour...but I get the sense he's saying that employers shouldn't be so demanding.

Yet it is peers rather than employers who've set that standard, as there actually are a fairly substantial number of people who can do frontend and backend, full stack.

They're called hackers.

i'm not sure what you're arguing. that a professional programmer could optimize a program to be a million times faster than an unskilled programmer? or that the program would run a tiny bit faster but over the life of the program running continuously, it would do a million times more work?

a professional racecar driver racing around a circuit could finish a lap 10 seconds faster than an unskilled driver. over the course of a 24-hour endurance race, those 10 seconds would add up to a lot of time.

There are a few different ways to formulate the comparison in CS. For simplicity, consider a one-time eigenvalue computation on a large matrix (used for Pagerank and many other things). You could measure the total time from sitting down at the computer to having the numbers flow out onto the monitor. Let's consider the ratio of total time taken by skilled programmer one vs. unskilled programmer two.

The first obvious point is that many unskilled programmers wil not even be able to formulate the problem, leading to a ratio of infinity (i.e. any solution by programmer one will be infinitely faster than no solution).

Contrast to the driving example. Legions of smart engineers have made driving as simple as turning a key. So driver one and two will both be able to get started.

You can continue the analogy. As the size of the matrix gets larger, some programmer twos will get bogged down in trying to compute every eigenvalue, while programmer one uses something like the Arnoldi-Lanczos algorithm to pull out only the ones they need. Depending on matrix size this can quickly become literally one million times as fast as the naive solution.

This is not a theoretical example, but very similar to the tech behind Kaltix, one of Google's first acquisitions. It's not too hard to find many more examples. Moreover, this is for just one problem; when accumulated over time as in the hypothetical driver comparison, the ratios get even greater.

But if a company isn't comfortable/capable of measuring someone's abilities, it's easy to get caught in a spiral of lax recruiters, exaggerated resumes and skill creep.

Lastly, reject any job ad that requires 20 years of RoR experience. Instead focus on what the company does. If it is interesting to you, apply. I found that most employers arbitrarily choose requirements, and I just avoid all that want certifications: they tend to be too enterprisy for my taste.

For web people: look at what the perspective employer's product is using for language/framework. It is easy to do and will win you points. It will also help you avoid maintaining legacy systems running on NT if that's not your thing.

What I found funny, and unfortunately all too true, was the pay offering. They want it all, but are only willing to pay slightly above minimum wage to get it.

So, a person who is applying to a driving position should be so passionate about 'cars' that they should have a background in rally driving and heavy tanks?

I think this reveals your ignorance of vehicles. Similarly, I think the sort of job posts that this post is mocking reveal an ignorance on the part of whoever is posting the ad.

In my experience, those who are passionate about a topic want to learn about all of the topics surrounding that topic. If you like to drive, you're probably going to want to know what makes a car tick and even get your hands dirty. I know that's not true of everyone, but generally speaking, I think it is.

You don't have to be passionate about driving to be a good driver. However, given the choice, why wouldn't you want to hire the guy who lives and breaths cars if they are also an excellent driver? Their additional skills will not hurt to have around, even if they are not directly applicable to the job at hand.

If you are at all interested in the job, you're going to apply no matter what the ad says is required. However, the long list of requirements gives you some insight into what the company does. Asking for a C++ programmer could mean anything, but if you also need MySQL experience, you've got a good indicator that you're going to be writing code that interfaces with a database. This helps you weed out the candidates offering jobs you may not be at all interested in.

1) I know several people who are absolute car nuts. Some of them are excellent drivers. Few of them do their own 'dirty' work. (note: I do my own dirty work, but I realize that has less to do with a passion for cars than a passion for independence and understanding systems)

2) That has nothing to do with the article that was posted. Reread it. Note the bit about rally, tanks, and F1 experience as a plus.

the long list of requirements gives you some insight into what the company does

That really doesn't have much to do with the original post, either. It's talking about the (sometimes/often) ridiculous specificity and enormous range of requirements you'll find in job postings. Employers complain of being unable to find "good candidates," yet they'll reject a senior engineer for lacking one bulleted item, regardless of its complexity in relationship to the other requirements. In my experience, this is largely caused by the HR gateway and general incompetence in first-tier candidate selection.

Similarly, refusing to interview a candidate for a bus driver position because the person has no experience driving tanks would be silly.

In other words, the subtle critique of the job market isn't really accurate. "What if clowns were hired like programmers?" "What if Wal-Mart greeters were hired like programmers?" Invalid.

More precise would be, "What if [carpenters|plumbers|machinists|general contractors] were hired like programmers?" The writeup on that topic wouldn't be quite so snarky, I think.

When I read specific and unlikely combinations of required experience like that, I always think "I wonder who's had that ad written in support of their H1B application?"

Finding people with that combination of skills is impossible? Unlikely, sure, but... I have those skills. In fact, I did everything from x86 asm to Python to DB work to writing a complete web frontend in my last startup (while I was the only tech person). Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see this constellation of skills in a number of startup founders, where you have to wear many hats.

It may happen, but I'd be surprised if it's regular enough to be considered how programmers are hired.

That's because your buying into the meme stating a good programmer is worth 100 times more (totally arbitrary btw) a mediocre one. Or something like that.

All this dates back to "Wozniak/Allen" can write a basic compiler in a weekend falacy. And of course the brass ring multi million dollar payday that everyone wants even if they go down in flames (and most of course will).

The point being made seems to be that there is a tendency in help wanted advertising to try to get the entire kitchen sink.

I'm not going to argue with you about whether or not a skilled programmer is much, much more valuable than a mediocre/apathetic one, because that would be the world's silliest argument. A skilled anything is much, much more valuable than a mediocre and disinterested one.

"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer."

...which I've seen variations of lately.

I, and many others, can make a great deal of progress on anything in a week, but I wonder when looking at these ads, how many jobs must one have had in order to be experienced with so many different technologies?

Programming is about constant learning. How many of us have gone a single day without looking something up? What a programmer can learn is as important as what he has learned.

--Senior Expert in Italian cuisine and consumables distribution for Round Table Pizza.

I didn't find the link to be worth much, but it also took almost no time to read. It is hard for me to imagine any aggregator not having some poor content for any given reader, even if a filter was employed.

(I really see more and more low-level coder jobs require a Master's degree, at least more and more than I noticed before I got my Bachelor's)

and the hiring manager hires the one that reads the same car magazine as him because "he had to pick one on that hiring cycle"

can't wait to work only at the start up...

At a recent COMDEX, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT." But then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five per cent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.

10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

12. Everytime GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

13. You'd press the "start" button to shut off the engine.

I had one of those, a Plymouth Voyager. Going from our house in the mountains there was an intersection with a sharp down hill right turn. Sometimes the car would stall with a loss of power steering. My wife was small and she int like it all.