Wanted: the Perfect IT Superhuman. Salary: About the Same as an Ordinary Office Worker
Years ago, an engineering job posting by a major company became a hot topic online.
I could not help laughing when I read the requirements.
The candidate was expected to be proficient in front-end technologies such as React and Vue.js, with broad back-end development experience in PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, and more. Naturally, they also needed to know cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure, as well as physical servers and networks. A Cisco certification would be a plus.
On top of that, the job required experience in requirements definition and project management, along with business-level English.
In short, it was a job posting that seemed to say, “We listed every skill we could think of in the IT industry.”
And the advertised annual salary was reportedly about the same as that of an ordinary office worker.
How many times would a person have to start life over to acquire all those skills?
Naturally, the internet had a field day with it.
Perhaps the company realized how bad it looked, because the offending job posting was deleted.
Unfortunately for the company, archived copies had already been made.
The original posting disappeared, but copies remained online. It became a meme symbolizing absurd IT job requirements and was mocked repeatedly.
The recruitment may have ended, but the company’s hiring campaign continues forever on the internet.
In Baseball Terms, They Wanted Shohei Ohtani to Play Every Position
A baseball analogy makes the absurdity of this job posting easier to understand.
Imagine a player who can throw a 160-kilometer-per-hour fastball as a pitcher, hit home runs in large numbers, catch, and cover both the infield and outfield.
He also has managerial experience and can negotiate with foreign players in English.
That is the kind of player they were trying to recruit.
Even Shohei Ohtani does not play every position.
Yet this company demanded that one person do exactly that.
And the salary was equivalent to that of an ordinary employee.
They demanded Major League ability while trying to hire on an amateur baseball team’s budget.
Of course people laughed.
Why Do Job Postings Like This Exist?
The reason is simple.
The person who created the posting did not understand IT work.
They probably went around the company asking stakeholders, “What skills do we need?”
The development team said, “We need Java and Python.”
The infrastructure team said, “It would be good to have someone who understands AWS too.”
The network team said, “A Cisco certification would be reassuring.”
Management said, “We want someone who can lead the project.”
The international business division added, “English is essential too.”
The HR representative then dutifully wrote every one of these requests into the job description.
No one had said anything false.
The problem was that they were trying to make one person perform jobs that were each handled by different people.
This was not recruiting. It was an attempt to compress the IT department’s organizational chart into one person’s résumé.
People Who Do Not Understand Technology Are Evaluating Engineers
This is where non-technology companies run into trouble when hiring engineers.
To an HR representative, Java, Python, and AWS may look like nothing more than names on a list of skills.
That leads them to assume that the person who knows the most names must be the best engineer.
Real engineering, however, is not that simple.
Two candidates may both claim AWS experience, but someone who has made a few changes to an existing environment is completely different from someone who has designed a large-scale system and handled production failures.
In some situations, a person capable of designing a complex system in one programming language will be more useful than someone who can list ten languages.
But someone who does not understand technology cannot judge that difference.
As a result, the list of technology names in the job posting keeps growing.
The salary does not.
Unlimited skill requirements. Compensation fixed by the internal salary scale.
That is a wonderfully Japanese corporate form of rationality.
First, Hire Someone Who Can Evaluate Engineers
So what should a company do?
The answer is simple.
First, secure someone capable of evaluating technical ability.
It could be a CTO, the head of a technical department, or an external technical adviser.
Have that person determine what the company is actually trying to build, which technologies it needs, and how many people the work requires.
The company does not need a superhuman who can handle React, Java, Python, AWS, Cisco, and English.
It needs the ability to identify the necessary work and assign it to the right people.
With that ability, the company can avoid publishing an absurd job description and being ridiculed online.
There is, however, one problem.
To hire an excellent person who can evaluate engineers, the company must be capable of evaluating that person’s ability.
In other words, the difficulty begins with hiring the very first person.
What Do They Actually Want?
The less a company understands IT, the more it wants an “engineer who can do everything.”
Because it does not know what it needs, it searches for someone who can do everything just in case.
And preferably, it wants to hire that person cheaply.
I understand the feeling.
If I could hire an outstanding housekeeper who could cook, clean, do the laundry, and even file my taxes for ¥30,000 a month—about $200—I would gladly do so.
But if I advertised a job under those conditions, it would be perfectly natural for no one to apply.
For some reason, however, companies seriously attempt exactly this when the job involves IT.
What they truly need is not a perfect superhuman. They first need someone who can tell them how unreasonable their demands are.
Unfortunately, they probably cannot hire that person at the salary permitted by their internal pay scale either.