Cute, but maybe a little <i>too</i> out cute.<p>> You are prone to quixotic behavior.<p>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.<p>> Full-stack.<p>What stack?<p>No really, you're hiring me for the full stack. <i>What is the stack?</i><p>Would I ever be writing a line of CSS? Or JavaScript? Or Ruby? SQL?<p>At least they say "Largely PHP" a little bit later, but that makes me wonder just what their definition of full-stack is.<p>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?<p>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.
Question for HN, how do you generally feel about the 'Intrinsically Motivated' requirement?<p>I'm deeply motivated about a great many things that are important to me, but helping to implement or maintain someone elses idea isn't one of them.<p>For a price I'd be happy to turn up and give you eight hours of hard work per day. I take pride in my work, am passionate about improving my skills and would do my best to translate them into tangible benefits for your organization.<p>But my motivation for doing so would be mostly based on a financial arrangement, in other words, extrinsic. Does that someone like me shouldn't apply for a job posting like this or am I misunderstanding?
Well, I enjoyed the classics references. Had to look up Manichaeism (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism</a>)
Etsy is a terrific company for development, especially for continuous delivery and how to build great systems. Their tech blog is excellent: <a href="http://codeascraft.etsy.com/" rel="nofollow">http://codeascraft.etsy.com/</a>
Yes, a beautiful job description. However, for me these two statements are inherently contradictory:<p>"You consider critical thinking to be among your core competencies."<p>"But technology is a means and not the ends for you, and you don’t flinch at the idea of writing largely PHP for a living."<p>I interpret this as "think critically, but don't criticize the technology choices we have already made."<p>Yes, technology is a means, but that does not mean that it's something to just mindlessly accept. This is particularly true in the realm of software where there are so many technological possibilities to choose from.