LinkedIn has continued to send me job alerts. Constantly. Looking at job postings has always been a mixture of emotions for me, ranging from curiosity to repulsion. Something struck me the other day while looking at these job postings and it made me wonder:
Are we critically missing the mark when it comes to job postings in the technology industry?
So over the next several posts, I’m going to take a job posting that LinkedIn sent me and comment on its parts. At the end of the series, I’m going to rewrite it.
Note: Some parts will be obfuscated to remove specifics that identify the company.
Location: {Removed. A suburb of a big city.}
Senior C# .Net Back-End Services Developer
Do you want a fast-paced and exciting work environment? Grab a coffee, let’s chat.
So we’re three lines in. Location is becoming less important than timezone as we shift to the realities of remote work, but some people do still want to go into the office. No worries here. The third line is where we already run into some trouble. I’ve seen “fast-paced and exciting” on almost every single job posting and I don’t think we convey what we mean anymore by putting that on here.
Do I want to work somewhere fast-paced? Not if that means frantic. I want to work with a company that has a sustainable pace that is productive and not busy.
If things are exciting it can be good, bad, or both
Excitement means a peak of emotional and physical demands, and it’s not sustainable. You can’t be fast-paced and excited all the time and expect to be productive. Busy, maybe. But not productive.
Let’s take a lesson in how demolition teams approach a job
Several years ago I was working at an office complex that was removing shale with demolition charges and the demolition team was on break. I stopped to chat on my way walking back from lunch and remarked that they must have an “exciting” job. I mean, they get to blow stuff up for a living, right?!
“No way!” they said. “When we set this off it should be pretty underwhelming. If it’s exciting, RUN!”
The philosophy of a demolition team should be applied to our office environment.
“But they work with explosives!” you might say. Yes, and they can hurt someone if things get “exciting”. Likely a bunch of rocks go flying into a car parking lot and a lot of windshields have to be replaced. The rear window of my mother’s station wagon was taken out because of this. Hundreds of car windows were smashed. It was really bad!
Do you know what’s also bad?
A security breach with millions of credit cards exposed due to someone missing something because they had been going full-out for a year in a “fast-paced and exciting environment”. They’re burnt out. In fact, that does more financial damage than taking out hundreds of car windows with a demolition charge gone awry.
For those curious
the demolition team let us watch the explosion from a safe distance. The entire area being blasted was covered in a giant blanket made from old car tires. You felt the explosion in your feet, and the blanket had a wave ripple through it. A little dust was raised up. That was it. It wasn’t even that loud.
There’s a lesson here
If your work environment is constantly fast-paced and exciting, then it’s probably scrambling because something is wrong. Work should be productive and fulfilling. That fulfillment is what will excite me.
But exciting because of deadlines and heroics to make those deadlines?
No. That’s just exhausting.
2020 is exhausting enough, thank you.
Photo Credit: Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash