This is a great April Fool's article (from Slashdot) from Scientific American. Too bad it's all too true.

We all to often listen to the person who yells the loudest or agrees with us rather than the person who has proven their case with facts. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them wrong, especially when they have facts to back up their case.

Dix Communication has one of the worst job postings I've ever read up on Monster right now (It has since been removed). It's vague, poorly written, and no one has all of those qualifications. Let's break it down, shall we?

Dix Communications is a small media company based in Ohio. We are looking to expand our web presence via application development, including e-commerce applications, and to further integrate our print based products.

Basically this company has various newspaper sites and they want to get them online. They have a couple of sites up already (linked from their front page) and they obviously suck. Especially the ads and pop ups. Maybe they're hiring someone to fix it?

The chosen candidate must be a self-starter, willing to work independently as well as part of a team.

Standard, empty corporate speak. Anybody can say they are a self-starter and no one can really disagree.

Excellent communication skills are highly important in the daily interaction with multiple property-based sites.

That's a classic line. "highly important?" I think communication skills are "highly important" in writing online job postings too. And what the hell are "property-based sites"? Is this a real estate job?

This position also requires a good degree of creativity in process integration plus high level of productivity.

This sentence just hurts. "good degree of creativity"? "process integration"? "plus high level of productivity"?. Wow. None of that means anything. If you're looking for someone that works hard, just say so. Better yet, don't, because every applicant will say they work hard whether they do or not. Putting this in here doesn't help you in finding your perfect employee, which means it doesn't belong.

A bachelors degree in Computer Science is preferred. Additional education in graphic design is a plus. Solid experience in previous commercial site design is important as well. News based site creation experience and associated Internet technologies a plus.

Well, boy, that's a lot of pluses. Why don't you just say, We'd really like someone who has developed for the Internet before and if you've done News sites and have some design know-how, even better. Why the four sentence corporate speak? Corporate speak was designed prevent people from understanding your yearly reports, not to use in a job posting. The only reason I actually read it was to make fun of it .

But now it gets so much better.

Development Qualification: Should be skilled in most if not all of the following:

-PHP,

Yeah, I got that one ...

Perl, Python,

Both? Well, most people only have work experience with one or the other ...

Java, JavaScript, ASP,

Wait, what are you developing with?

VB, ActiveX,

WTF? VB? Am I doing web apps here?

C, C++, C#,

WHAT LANGUAGE ARE YOU USING!?

HTML, XML, CGI, CSS

Oh, Jesus. You're just listing buzzwords. I thought you were serious.

No one knows all of these languages, and if someone says they do, they don't really know these languages. To really know a language, you have to use it for a long time and no one could have used every single one of these for any significant amount of time. Why don't you tell me what you're developing in. The person who wrote this list is not on the development team, I'll tell you that right now.

-MySQL, Open Base, Microsoft SQL Server

They don't know what SQL server they're using either.

-Apache, ISS, SSL

Or web server ...

-MacOS 8.6/9.x, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003

Or operating system?

Look, the job posting is supposed to tell me what you're looking for in an employee. What you have done is play a childish game where you be as vague as possible in order to keep the applicant on their toes. News flash: No real developer will play these game with you. We're not going to waste our time with someone who has no idea what they're doing.

It's obvious from looking at the sites you've done that you're using PHP. It's also obvious that you run Apache on HP Unix (an operating system you didn't even mention in your listing). Why the games? Why not just get straight to it, talk directly to the candidate you're looking for and cut the BS?

You want a real job posting? Here's a real job posting. Go read Fight the Bull too. Study. Learn. Come back when you're ready.

Let's hope the posting is just an April Fool's joke.