Joblint: test tech jobs for sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails

It&#x27;s a good idea, but penalizing jobs for mentioning pizza, beer or ping-pong is ridiculous. In fact calling those &quot;hollow rewards&quot; at all is ridiculous. They suggest a friendly, social atmosphere, arguably one of the more important features of a job.<p>They also call swearing &quot;unprofessional&quot;, as if that&#x27;s a bad thing. Again, it suggests a laid back atmosphere, where no-one cares if you swear when you&#x27;re dealing with a particularly nasty bug.<p>A degree of political correctness can be beneficial, but overzealousness like this is counterproductive.

This is the same kind of person who would write software to find anti-Islamic comments had he been born in Iran, or to hunt down dissidents if born in China. The kind of person who reflexively genuflects towards the current state-sponsored ideology, whatever it is (quick test: is Obama on your side?), because he loves the rush of feeling holier-than-thou.<p>As an example, the lint checks that &quot;bro culture&quot; is bad, but female-friendly (like Minted.com[1]) is assumed to be good. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Very predictable. Like any neo-Puritan, he then comes after profanity, and beer, and even (god forbid) competitive-sounding job descriptions! His vision of the startup future: an HR drone stamping on a programmer&#x27;s face, forever.<p>So how about thoughtlint? Avoid hiring rowanmanning, or anyone on their helpfully provided list:<p><a href="https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint#thanks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rowanmanning&#x2F;joblint#thanks</a><p>People like this will spend their time being Adria-Richards-esque thought police rather than shipping code. Contrast with Max Levchin, who actually sold a startup for a billion-plus dollars:<p><a href="http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blakemasters.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;21437840885&#x2F;peter-thiels-cs183-...</a><p><pre><code> Max Levchin: The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible. There are a few reasons for this. The most salient is that, as a startup, you’re underfunded and undermanned. It’s a big disadvantage; not only are you probably getting into trouble, but you don’t even know what trouble that may be. Speed is your only weapon. All you have is speed. </code></pre> If you want to work in an environment full of rowanmannings, that is your prerogative. Many others will select out and find places where people who enjoy bullying others with modern taboos on gender and the like don&#x27;t self-appoint themselves as priests. Do you really want a team member who spends their free time getting people to upvote their new heretic-finding software to the top of HN?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-particular-things-Minted-does-to-be-female-engineer-friendly" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-are-some-particular-things-Minted-...</a>

Sample test data for joblint.<p><pre><code> A team comprising of few Python superstars, vim gurus, emacs superstars is now looking for a software crafts(wo)man who would be interested in being part of the team to juggle a pool of challenging problems and use cutting edge tech to find solutions that are of top quality and guarantee a win over competiton. We pay better than competition, fail fast to learn early. We provide catered lunches from the best restuarants around. And inspite of tight deadlines, we would encourage a healthy work-life balance and not promise hollow benefits like beer&#x2F;pingpong&#x2F;nerf&#x2F;dart&#x2F;pool etc.</code></pre>

My first thought is that this is a great filter.<p>My second thought is how is this any better than the automated resume screens that companies use on candidates?

I would move &quot;frontpage&quot; to its own warning category, not just &quot;notice&quot;.

Creating a new working environment straight jacket are we?<p>It&#x27;s in diversity that we strive, we need bro companies, black tie&#x2F;white shirt companies, and everything in between. Moreover I&#x27;m pretty sure that the boringnest job posting would have a very good score with this.

The bubble rules are definitely in order :<p><a href="https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint/blob/master/lib/rule/bubble.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rowanmanning&#x2F;joblint&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;rule...</a><p>I&#x27;d argue that the <i>var temptations</i> array is applicable to the &quot;bro-culture&quot; rules as well.<p>It&#x27;s good there&#x27;s one for tech :<p><a href="https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint/blob/master/lib/rule/tech.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rowanmanning&#x2F;joblint&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;rule...</a><p>For the life of me, I never understood why any mention of an editor was even necessary most of the time. If there&#x27;s a local copy of the codebase you&#x27;re working on, how in the world does that have any bearing on what someone else on the same project is using? If it&#x27;s major, that&#x27;s what source control is for. If it&#x27;s minor and nitpicky (I.E. tabs vs. spaces) plenty of editors can be configured for substitution on whatever standard that&#x27;s adopted.

This tool might be useful for quickly sifting heaps of job descriptions, but it is easy to fall victim to attaching too much meaning to its results.<p>Putting anyone into a category because of the wording of his statement is generally only of limited use.<p>You&#x27;ll get a lot of false negatives - in this case, it won&#x27;t save you from wasting time interviewing with an abusive employer who was smart enough to game political correctness and legal.<p>And some false positives - There is no employer without issues, but some issues weigh much heavier than others. I would rather work for an employer who is clinging to some sacred technology than under a devious manager. If I would rely on the wording, I could detect the former, but not the latter.<p>That said, this filter still can be useful, as soon as the rules become more sophisticated (they will, as the author is aware of this). But if it does, and becomes popular, be certain that this will also used by the other side, creating a race similar to spam vs. spam filters.

I think this is a great project even if no one ever actually runs it against a real job description. By listing and categorizing the various rules, rowan has spurred a great amount of discussion on what makes a good job application.

If someone made this into a cut and paste tool online, it&#x27;d be pretty successful I think

Nice job, funny idea!<p>Mentioning Dreamweaver should be handled as an error rather then a notice. :-)

If you haven&#x27;t yet, you should do machine learning on actual job postings from companies that typify certain undesirable traits–assume Oracle is synonymous with &quot;hates freedom&quot;; one could find common words and phrases from Oracle job postings and add them to a &quot;hates freedom&quot; rule.

This is great. I&#x27;ve been thinking about the reverse idea lately: a site for gender, cultural and educational-blind job searches and first-round interviews. At the very least, resumes, cover letters and initial skill evaluations could be &quot;linted&quot; and sanitized.

It&#x27;s a fun idea but you&#x27;d have to be sifting through a lot of jobs to make automating the task worthwhile. I&#x27;d be worried a decent job would slip through the cracks because of being filtered out.<p>I&#x27;d suggest the best way to find jobs you&#x27;re interested in would be to filter things with an inclusive filter, rather than an exclusive one. After running joblint, you&#x27;ll end up with a list of jobs that survived, rather than ones that stood out.<p>I can&#x27;t see this ever being genuinely useful during the next time I&#x27;m job hunting. I can see it being useful for recruitment companies who want to sanitise their listings, though. Maybe commercialise a site that can handle that as a service and aim it at them?

how about checking for racism?<p><a href="http://www.inc.com/vivek-wadhwa/face-of-success-blacks-in-silicon-valley.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;vivek-wadhwa&#x2F;face-of-success-blacks-in-si...</a> <a href="http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;prod&#x2F;2013pubs&#x2F;acs-24.pdf</a><p>&quot;According to U.S. Census Bureau data, in 2008, blacks and Hispanics constituted only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the Valley’s tech population —well below national tech-population averages of 7.1% and 5.3%. You hardly find any blacks in positions of leadership in Silicon Valley companies. There is at least an unconscious bias.&quot;

Cool! One feature suggestion: a .joblintrc file or configuration option. Some people are very proficient with Eclipse or Vim &amp; would actually prefer to work with it for example. Nice tool- I hope recruiters &amp; HR authors use it!

the problem is that you are evaluating the recruiter, not the job.<p>There are many places, most famously google, which have shitty recruiters, but are actually decent places to work. (Google is legendary for it&#x27;s poor taste in recruiters. I&#x27;ve known a few people who didn&#x27;t like it an left, but most of the people I know there seem to think it&#x27;s pretty good. The weird part, to me, is that it seems like the time between &quot;I don&#x27;t think google is great&quot; and no longer working for google seems to be... shorter than at most companies.)<p>Really, it&#x27;s a lot like the problem employers have; resumes and interviews are a shitty way to evaluate potential employees... but what else do you have? This is an example of the same thing in the other direction. The style of the recruiter is a shitty way to evaluate company culture... but what else do you have?<p>Either way, if you know someone on the inside? that&#x27;s going to be your best channel for evaluation, really, in both directions. But... that has all sorts of other problems, many of them having to do with only being able to move within your existing social group.

This is as useful is the filters recruiters use on candidates.<p>You can make up your own mind as to whether that is negative or a positive comment.

git page would benefit from an example run.

Does anyone know what font that is in the screenshot? It&#x27;s rather nice (disregard the fact that all fonts look nice at that size).

Would using the expression &quot;guys and girls&quot; in a job ad be sexist? Joblint would catch it.

whatever job spec i pipe, it tells &quot;No issues found with the job spec!&quot;

nice idea.

Seems overly simplistic - an advert from a girls school would appear under the sexism ruleset, an advert mentioning that they have a pool of company cars that you drive would fall foul of bubble ruleset.

Mentioning gender is the biggest sin? Wow.

Political correctness, enforced by a software busy-body. Mind your language people - neo-puritains are watching!