Reading snippets quoted from and comments about this redacted job posting, I wish I could see what it was originally—it sounds like a real hoot.
[UPDATE: Found the full text, posting below.]
[UPDATE 2 (8/20/04): Put the text below in blockquote since it might otherwise not be obvious that this wasn’t me talking.]
<blockquote>We are a web development firm seeking a freelance Cold Fusion/SQL programmer for multiple projects and one in particular RIGHT NOW. It’s a VERY tough project requiring an exceptional individual who can jump in and finish it up. (If you can also work in PHP/MySQL — and of course, you do a good job on this one – we will have multiple other projects for you when this one is finished. If you only know Cold Fusion, we will have some ongoing work for you.)
We will ONLY work with programmers in the USA. We are not interested in firms that represent programmers. We only wish to hear from individual programmers who will be writing our code. If you are not a programmer yourself, please DO NOT RESPOND. If you do not have at least 35 hours of availability per week, please do not respond. All responses that do not fit the above criteria will be deleted immediately. Canned responses that do not address our concerns will also be deleted without response. Please don’t send one! We have one immediate project which needs to be completed. It requires a dedicated individual with approximately 40 hours of work availability per week for the next 2-3 weeks. We will disclose more specific details of the project after hearing from you and having you sign an NDA. We have many more projects behind this one.
If you’re interested, please read EVERYTHING below. This is not a joke (but it may well make you laugh or cry).
Please ONLY respond if you:
1. Have RECENT experience with Cold Fusion & SQL Server (NOTE: 3 years ago is NOT recent).
2. Are available to work at least 35 hours per week RIGHT NOW (NOTE: 20-25 is not equal to 35).
3. Are willing and able to speak on the telephone during business hours, return calls, and you’re able to communicate well in English. You must also have a telephone number at which we can reach you and not by appointment only. If you object at all to speaking on the phone, please do NOT respond. If you tell us later that you don’t like to talk on the phone or prefer email, you’ll be immediately taken off the job.
4. Are the type of person who calls the project manager if you don’t understand something in the spec. Making assumptions and doing things your way is NOT acceptable.
5. Understand that a deadline is a deadline and must be met. Missing any deadline without our prior approval means that the project will be reassigned.
6. Are familiar with working on sites hosted on web servers of hosting companies AND understand what FTP is. If you’re a programmer and you don’t know what FTP is, we really don’t want to hear from you. Also, if you don’t know where to find files on a web server, you don’t have the experience we’re looking for. Files are not always in the root!
7. Have a developmental server and computer set up that you can use to work on and the necessary tools to complete the job. You must be ready to start work. NOTE: If you do not have these tools and are willing to work onsite here where we do have the tools, you may still respond.
8. Are willing to work initially for a short time with no money upfront realizing that you will only be paid some money when we see some work done. (We are willing to pay incrementally when we see an area of the project completed and we’ve tested it to ensure it works. In certain instances, we’re willing to allow you to show us work on your server if you are nervous about payment. While we can’t pay for any entire element while we’re viewing it on your server (unless you give us FTP and database access), we’ll be glad to make a partial payment once we see that portion working properly and then pay the balance when you move it to our server. We’ve been burned too many times. We realize you may also have been burned but we do want an ongoing relationship with you. We’re a business and we’ll sign a contract with you ensuring payment.) If you write code that doesn’t work properly, we can’t pay for it. You are welcome to take it with you as it’s of no use to us and we don’t want it.
PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND IF:
1. Any military body you were in erased any part of your memory which now prevents you from remembering the spec (even if you just read it 2 seconds ago) or when the deadline falls.
2. You are egotistical, rude, argumentative and/or aggressive – particularly to women. Please go do that somewhere else.
3. You are a nervous wreck on the verge of a breakdown because: (a) your marriage is on the verge of falling apart and you’re emotionally unstable as a result; (b) your child(ren) scream(s) 23.9 hours a day which makes it too hard for you to work; (c) your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t like you freelancing and/or demands that you take care of the baby for 12 hours a day and you think you can do our work before 6 a.m. and after 11 p.m. and still stay awake and conscious and not give us complete and utter junk – you can’t; or (d) any other reason not mentioned. If you need constant handholding and compassion from us in order to avoid having a complete nervous breakdown which you’re always on the verge of, we can’t help you, sorry. We can’t be your marriage counselor, psychotherapist or your confidante. If you need any of the above, please find them elsewhere.
4. More than 2 projects at a time puts you over the edge with stress about getting them done; whereas less than 2 projects at a time also puts you over the edge with financial worries. We have many projects and we need a person who can multi-task. If you can’t, don’t respond.
5. You’re the type of person who uses profanity or inappropriate material in naming your variables or in your testing. “Got really drunk last night” is not appropriate in a business environment. Naming variables after sexual organs is also not appropriate.
6. You believe in abandoning projects BEFORE they are finished or missing deadlines you set for those projects. (Even if you are the greatest programmer on earth, we’re not paying you if the job isn’t finished and finished ON TIME. It’s worth nothing to us otherwise.) If you frequently use excuses for missing deadlines, PLEASE do not respond. We are really not interested in hearing that you need another 2 weeks to complete our 2 week project because: your mother died three times in a year (unless you really do have three mothers – and next time we hear that, we’ll ask for proof!); your unexpected house closing prevents you from working (the closing is NEVER THAT unexpected, we’ve bought houses); you have to go to a wedding at the last minute in another state; you suddenly have to move out of the area; you have unexpected friends from out of town that you need to socialize with; you forgot the deadline and thought you said 20 weeks for the project instead of 2 weeks; you did too many drugs in the 70s/80s/90s and can’t think straight anymore; you thought the deadline was just made up to make you work harder; you had ‘top secret’ classification in the military and they erased your memory when you got out and you can’t remember everything you used to be able to; you hired your buddy to do part of the work and he let you down and didn’t do it; you found out you’re losing another job and feel depressed about it so you can’t work;
your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t like you working so much and needs to hold your hand while you watch TV for four hours a day so you can’t meet the deadline; your pet tarantula died and you’re too depressed to work; you’re hung over; your sister’s mother’s aunt’s niece’s daughter got picked up by the cops and you need to disappear for 2 weeks; your internet connection died but you’re still able to send ridiculously long emails explaining what happened – you’re just not able to do any work for the next week; you can’t connect to the database anymore because the hosting company upgraded to a different version and you don’t want to download the trial version upgrade because big brother could be watching you; your laptop crashed and even though you have 6 other machines on hand, you’d prefer to rebuild your laptop for the next month than to do the work that we’re paying you for; you forgot that your friends were going to have 3 beach picnics and 4 parties when you said you’d do the work and you completely forgot your aunt’s 61st birthday, your best buddy’s kegger and your husband/wife’s family reunion picnic, and you’d prefer to attend those than get the work done.) etc., etc., etc.
We’ve already heard all the most outrageous excuses and we’re REALLY NOT interested in hearing any others.
6. You are a prima donna programmer who thinks that you can do the work your own way, deviating from the specs, and that we should find it acceptable. We won’t. There is ONLY one spec: OURS. Not the one that exists in your head. Not the one you think it should be. Just the spec you were sent. If you don’t want to work on that spec as we’ve written it, then tell us that upfront. But don’t deliver something else. That’s not what you were hired for. It may be absolutely brilliant, but it isn’t what the customer asked for so it’s useless to us and we cannot pay you for it. If you don’t understand something in the specs provided to you, don’t ever ASSUME. Call. If you think something is stupid, CALL. If we say do it anyway, do it. We know the client. We’ve been over all the “stupid” things with the client.
7. You are not able to comment and document the work you complete.
8. You believe in bidding on a job for one price and then decide later on that you want more money to finish the work that you bid on in the first place or you think that doing the job is one price, actually making the work live, is another??? PLEASE NOTE: If the specs change, we expect you to want more money. If they don’t change, we WON’T pay you more to do the work you bid on. If you underbid the job because you didn’t read the specs, whose fault is that? It’s not ours.
9. You do not understand that in order to bid on a job that requires modifying work that already exists, you need to FIRST take a run through the front end of that project and review any existing code. It is not acceptable to later on say that you didn’t realize there were other pages that this needed to work with because you didn’t go through all 3 pages of the project before you bid!!! Nor is it acceptable to say you missed the deadline because it took you longer than expected to review the existing code or there was a learning curve with the existing code. Reviewing the existing code before you bid, solves this problem. I don’t care if you were a DBA for 100 years, no one is so brilliant that they don’t need to review the existing code!
10. If we have a tense moment or we say that we don’t like the way you did some work and that it’s not absolutely perfect and you’re not the greatest programmer God ever put upon the earth and/or, we don’t constantly stroke your ego and reassure you that you’re wonderful every 5 minutes, you go off and sulk like a baby and when we try to call you to discuss it, you let the answering machine get it, listen to our message and then respond seconds later with a nasty mean email. Be a grown up, pick up the phone and talk about it.
11. You’re incapable of doing preliminary testing. If an element of a project contains a link to add an item, a link to modify an item and a link to delete an item, then all 3 of those should work BEFORE you say it’s done. If there is an image to be uploaded in one of those links, test it. Don’t say later that it works as long as the image isn’t modified! That’s one of the features of the project! It’s not done until it works!
12. You don’t understand that a deadline is a deadline. You set the deadline. If you miss it and tell us on the day the work is due, the work is useless to us. No excuse covers that. NONE. If the spec consists of 5 areas and you deliver 3 of those by the deadline, the work is NOT complete by the deadline. Making excuses about how well you’ve done the 3 areas and that you were going to complete the other 2 areas within the next few days is not good enough. You set the deadline. Deliver the work on or before the deadline. ALL the work, not some of it.
Sadly, ALL of the above situations and examples have happened with other developers we’ve subcontracted work to during the last 6.5 years. We’re looking for someone who is serious and wants to make some money working with us. We’ve got so much work that we’re turning away projects right now because we don’t have the right people working with us. We don’t want to treat you like a kid and certainly don’t want to be your mother or father. Are you a grown up? Can you communicate normally and talk on the phone? Do you want to make some money in return for work? Can you meet deadlines you set? If you are solid and reliable, with verifiable references (your best buddy from high school, your cousin or your girlfriend are not acceptable references), and are looking to form an ongoing relationship with a web development firm and make serious money working for us over a long period of time, we’d like to speak with you. We will provide more details as soon as we speak with you.
Otherwise, if this isn’t right for you, we totally understand and wish you all the luck in the world.
If you’re interested, please email: jobs@evolvedsites.com and include your telephone number so that we may contact you. We promise to respond personally to each and every person who submits a serious response, whether chosen or not.
Thank you very much for reading. Please do not send rude responses. We’ve already had enough of those.</blockquote>