Look at how similar this copy looks to any other SV startups these days (minus some buzz words like "Cloud", "Social", "Disruptive", etc). It goes to show that hiring (well) is hard. Even harder to gauge whether or not a company is worth applying to from the job descriptions alone.
Phrases like: "You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems" are so vague and ambiguous that if I honestly saw this post from some guy named "Bezos" in '94, I would have written off as a jokester.
At least in '94 they haven't started using the word "disruptive" as if it's something you can do to a whole industry overnight. Thank goodness.
I agree, based on this ad, I would discard the company as an overreaching startup founder with a vague idea of how to reach out to developers and destined to fail within the next two years.
The difference that you're missing is where the ad happened.
It happened on Usenet, before most people had heard of Usenet, naming technologies that were brand spanking new. How new? The most popular browser was Mosaic. Netscape was barely founded and had not released a browser yet. http://oreilly.com/gnn/ was the first commercial website and was under 1 year old.
That shows a lot of knowledge of the tech world of the day. "Overreaching startup founders" weren't yet a significant concern. The target audience would realize quickly that this was risky, but unlikely to be a BS ad.
> It happened on Usenet, before most people had heard of Usenet,
Wait what? Usenet had been established for many years by 1994, and many people were using it. You could access it via several online providers and their Internet gateways. (Here's the first message from an AOL account: (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/comp.dcom....) )
That should say, "before most people were even aware of the internet, and who would go on to use the internet having never even known that Usenet existed." Back in '94, I think that most internet users used Usenet to some extent, but certainly "most people" in the world had never heard of Usenet, and never would, and still haven't.
I'd say you shouldn't just write that off as a freak incident though. You should be reconsidering how you read these kind of job adverts - obviously, a company can succeed even with this kind of approach - and it can obviously fail with it.
That means that the language or style used to convey a job opening is probably NOT a good indicator of the success of a company. Maybe it's time to rethink prejudices?
Sure, it's not a good indicator of success, but it generally is a good indicator for what kind of people you'll be dealing with and how you will be communicating with them.
Depending on what you want, of course, you should look for different things. I'm not going to make the judgment call on whether a company will be wildly successful - I don't have the background for that. I'll see if they have any chance of surviving and if they do, if it would be a pleasant environment to work in.
Phrases like: "You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems" are so vague and ambiguous that if I honestly saw this post from some guy named "Bezos" in '94, I would have written off as a jokester.
At least in '94 they haven't started using the word "disruptive" as if it's something you can do to a whole industry overnight. Thank goodness.