If the four people (actually five, I agree with Tom that number four is really two people) they're looking for got together on their own, they could start a killer startup of their own, and just hire a biz dev guy as a non-founder.
I'd love to know what this startup is, and what value the existing founders bring to the table.
Here is why:
-- A list of common languages is something that pushes me away. Why? Because it tells me (by experience) that they want someone who can do it all (impossible). Its fine to list 2-3 languages or frameworks, but more than that just makes me very suspicious.
-- A bachelor's degree. I don't have one, I will not get one. Why ask for one when a lot of CS graduates can't program?
-- Experience? Sure, lots. But when you get older (I'm 32+), everything looks the same: just data sets, and problems to be solved. There is a blurry line between languages/frameworks/etc. Everything is just more of the same (I do, however, enjoy it!). Ask for experience in engineering, and not for experience in the latest dohicketydo.
In this job posting across all four roles the most per job role is 3, i.e. Ruby, ObjC (presumably IOS) and/or Java (presumably Android). I'm curious which part you specifically take issue with as everything listed seems pretty vanilla to me.
I'm usually wary of postings that say things like "we use Python, Node.js, Ruby, Haskell, ObjC", but for different reasons because this seems to indicate they don't know how to select the best technologies for the job to minimize complexity and rather just choose everything that is in vogue.
> they want someone who can do it all
I'm not sure if you're implying "all at the same time", or just _can_ do it all. Great programmers can do most anything you throw at them (and I've come across a few like this).
You talk in technical terms, they do in business terms.
They want one hacker to solve all their problems.
My comment about the list of languages is not aimed at that specific posting, but about postings in general.
This is logically flawed. It is entirely possible that by removing the barrier of bachelor's degree, they will receive even more applicants who cannot program (percentage-wise).
I have no grounds on which to claim this is the case, but it seems entirely feasible and you have simply skipped over it.
Note that I am not taking issue with your personal choices regarding a degree. It is your choice to make, and I respect that.
> This is logically flawed. It is entirely possible that by
> removing the barrier of bachelor's degree, they will
> receive even more applicants who cannot program
> (percentage-wise).
If you get 10,000 applications a year (as enterprises like Google, Facebook, and Apple do), you don't really have to give a damn about your false negative rate. Go ahead and install severe formal requirements (e.g., needs CS PhD) -- you're still going to get a number of applications that is sufficiently large to statistically guarantee multiple highly suitable candidates, and you'll save tons of money and time in the process.
Non-behemoths can't really afford many false negatives because the applicant pool is far more limited. False positives at the CV/formalism stage are relatively easily filtered at the interview stage due to, again, smaller volume.
Heck, I know two CS graduates who work at a local fast food restaurant.
They are looking to meet a bunch of needs. You have an idea what the needs are and think you can meet many of them. So apply. It's unlikely to be set in stone that the needs have to be met by hiring the exact roles listed in the job posting.
Even if some people realize <what you said> and know to just go for it, the job description scares away some people who could otherwise be qualified.
And a new startup probably can't afford to scare away potential hires.
But it's a really hard problem. One suggestion I would have is to have a really clear list of things you're looking for that's separate from your individual job postings. Part of the goal with job postings is to get all the skills you're looking for listed somewhere on the posting site, because you want to make sure if someone with that skill sees your site, it registers with them. Need someone familiar with A/B testing but can't fit it into the well-defined roles people are looking for? Put it in a paragraph above all the roles.
I agree that a new startup doesn't have a lot of room to scare away potential hires, but they also don't have a lot of room to waste time looking into everyone that spams their resume to anything it matches.
In some respects a tradeoff needs to be made here, and I'd rather select for people who are willing to dive into something that looks a bit above their head than select for people who are looking to apply to jobs they are already perfectly capable of.
A job posting for a "project leader/lead developer" will ask for "an excellent project manager, team leader and software engineer, with the skills to communicate with clients and programmers", with some some technologies and methodologies thrown in. Every full-time manager can tell you that managing complex projects or teams is an art in itself. You can spend a lifetime excelling in only that. They could equally well argue it is ridiculous to ask that someone is an excellent software engineer as well. However, they don't: it is perfectly acceptable that one should be skilled in both project management and programming. That one should have people skills and technical skills, even though each of those could be a specialization in it's own right.
The exact same holds for design. If you are offended by people look for a designer/front-end programmer, but not by people looking for a project leader/software engineer, than you are suffering from a delusion of grandeur about the importance of 'design'. There are precious few companies that can use excellent 'pure' designers. All the others are perfectly content to hire someone with adequate design skills and a set of additional adequate skills that make him useful to fulfill several roles. If that is offensive to your, you need to leave your artist-ego at the door when you go looking for a job.
When looking at the description for the designer job in the OP, its not the design/technical combination that seems over-the-top, but those two jobs and a third job doing A/B and conversion rate testing. That needs to be delegated to somebody else, either a separate designer, a Quality-Assurance person, or the project lead.
The fact that it's a design position in this case is not the problem - I would have railed just as hard against an overloaded dev position.
And a link to a great article about how to actually hire Front End Engineers http://allenc.com/2012/01/how-to-get-front-end-developers/