What You Pay For

The following is an actual job posting from a university's job board. We have highlighted the more interesting bits (and redacted any identifying information). It was posted in the spring of 2012.

This is a screenshot of the website, as of September 2012. Apparently any applicant that was qualified enough to work for them for free, was also qualified enough to get a paying gig.

2016 Election Web 27.0 Mash-Up Artists Wanted

Our start-up, Politics-Yo!, is working hard to get a jump on the 2016 presidential elections. Our industry-wide respected analysts have predicted that Web 27.0 will be the deciding factor in the election between Ayn Rand and Karl Marx.

We are now in the process of hiring the fresh, hip talent needed to put it all together. Our research shows that people are looking for even more ways to alienate their friends and family through social media based campaign propaganda. Political status updates, re-tweets from the candidates, re-blogs from The Puffington Host, impromptu hashtag polls, that is all too 2012. How about Google Glass Contacts Projection Marketing thrown together with eyePhone 7gs4sRedux Politico App? How about Telepathy Blogging your reactions to Special Interest Mind Bullets about the Space Debates? Get on our level!

Applicants will need to be down with all of the reverse-retro internet technologies, including those that won't be invented until at least 2015. Skillz with dropping the (political) base, twattering the platform, and wubbing the vote also desired.

Looking for Readers

Our think tank, Great Minds Think A-Awesome, has identified an untapped market in lackadaisical enabling reading resources. We are now moving into stage 23.b.5, having successfully raised the venture capital needed to implement a prototype of our service.

We are now in the process of looking for talented individuals to bring our world-crushingly amazing idea to fruition. Applicants should have experience in programming and design. And you better be good. The only conceivable way our venture will fail is if the developers suck.

Without a signed NDA, all that we can reveal about the project is that it involves crowd-sourcing the reading of books. Each year, millions of students are forced to read the same classic works of literature. Our service will let each student read a small part, and then compile the summaries into a much shorter book. The process can then be recursively iterated with our patent pending technology until the final summary is only a page long.

We have applied a pre-alpha prototype to this advertisement as an example:
The our of.

The Cloud Needs You

Looking for cloud developers that are well versed in c++, joomla, drupal, ajax, and x86_64 assembly. Experience with BSD, YellowDog Linux, MachOS and Windows NT recommended, but not required.

Our startup is looking to migrate common applications that have been a staple of general purpose computing for the last 20 years to the Cloud. We will take the applications that everyone has come to depend on, and make them available only over a reliable, low-latency network connection.

We are also fairly certain that we have fixed all those pesky “data corruption” problems. On an unrelated note, we are also looking for experts in, um, “data un-corruption?”

iPhone Dev Needed

Fly-by-Night Inc. is an exciting new app developer based out of the former Soviet Union block, and we are looking for talented iPhone developers for our flagship product: Flashlight App.

For days now, our app has given users the ability to turn their phone into a flashlight, using our patent pending technology. Now, we need your help to monetize our app.

Applicants will definitely not be asked to mine iPhones for personal data. Applicants will certainly not need experience in wire fraud. Finally, applicants should not know anything about advanced cryptanalysis.

Don't miss this opportunity to work for a rapidly expanding company, offices in Nigeria opening soon, alongside some of the most experienced ex-KGB members in the industry. Join us, and become part of the Family. Forever.

Aggregation Specialists

Our fast growing, content* driven site is in need of Aggregation Specialists. Expertise in Watermark Replacement is a must, as well as a certain "moral flexibility."

We are also in need of Content Locators. Responsibilities include scouring the Internet for humorous content, and passing it along to our Aggregation Specialists. The content will then be re-appropriated, an displayed on our site.

Finally, we have several openings for psychologists. Their responsibilities include convincing users of the Internet that they should visit our site instead of the sites of the actual creators of the content. Applicants should also be prepared to find new ways to rationalize what we are doing as we make money off of the backs of people who are working hard everyday to create new, original content.

Oh yeah, we are also going to need a ton of lawyers. Or at least one loud mouth one that doesn't mind having his mother accused of making love to bears.

* Note: none of the content is actually made by us.

New Blogging Platform

The Internet has a plethora of blogging platforms, each one offering a comparable and well understood feature set. Users can make posts, anyone can read said posts. Pretty simple stuff.

Which is where we come in! We are looking to build yet another platform, but one which is completely incompatible with every other platform, despite the similarities in functionality. Want to subscribe to posts? Just use the industry standard RSS… hahaha! Just kidding, you need to create an account and join our platform. Would you like users to be able to comment like they can on every fucking website made since 1998? Well fuck you. Comments are ugly, and it might clash with our stylish preset CSS themes such as “Black text on white background.”

So, if you are a go-getter that is ready to reinvent the wheel by eliminating those pesky round bits, then apply today! We have created a blog for our future applicants: http://lookingforprogrammers.blogspot.com/

FOURTH WALL BREAKING NOTE: This was the last post on our old blog: http://programmerswanted.tumblr.com/