Job Description Review by Developers – iOS Mobile App Developer

iOS Developer (Seattle)

In this series, I invite a qualified engineer/developer with matching or related technical background to review a real job description. In these reviews, you’ll learn the unfiltered feedback and thoughts from the technical people who are the target readers of these job descriptions. Please note: each review reflects only the opinion of the specific reviewer.

Please give us your career summary.

I’m a software engineer with 6 years of experience – 3 years at startups and 3 at a big company. Technology summary:

• web development – Ruby on Rails
• mobile development – iOS development
• distributed systems
• C++

If you were to get a new job today, what would it be?

I am very interested in and would look for the following types of roles:

• Product development – from concept to implementation
• Software devevelopment – the actual implementation / coding

How would you go about conducting your job search?

1. Ask my mentors, friends, and personal contacts first
2. Change my LinkedIn profile to show that I’m available so that recruiters will reach out
3. Reach out to recruiters that I’ve worked with / met before
4. Conduct an online job search, especially funded startups

When you do an online search, how would you do it?

I have a list of startups that I came across before and am interested in.  StackOverflow is good for knowing which local startups are hiring and doing interesting stuff. I also look at GeekWire’s job board for starutp jobs. I would look at Craigslist, but I haven’t had good luck there – too much spam there.

Basically, I would start with job boards that have high percentage of jobs I’m interestd in (i.e. startup jobs). It was interesting to see Amazon jobs on StackOverflow. I would use StackOverflow to discover big companies as well.

I don’t use keywords to search. I just browse.

Let’s find a job description. Please tell me what comes to your mind.

Okay, here’s one that was sent to me by a recruiter – an iOS mobile app development contract position.

I don’t want to read this part (About Us and About Our Culture) at this point. They shouldn’t put this at the beginning. I will only look at this later if I am interested about this position.

To develop a mobile app for this well-known luxury retailer is exciting because the number of potential users can be huge. However, the offshore-onshore combo is a turn-off for me because I have been in that situation before and it didn’t work well. Also, the requirement to be on-site is not attractive to me. As a contractor, I’d prefer to work remotely.

Something that is not clear to me is what other native API integration means.

In general, this part (About the client and assignment) of the job description is what I would read very carefully.

I only scan the Required Skills part. Mostly I only look at the top 3 items. For example, the 4th item, the Cocoa requirement, should be moved to the 2nd position.

The UI design requirement (the 2nd item) should be moved to a lower position if it’s not a hard requirement. Being the 2nd item on the list, it signals to me this job is more front-end and design-focused than the typical iOS development role.

I like seeing Test-Driven Development here because it’s a rare, but important, skill to have.

I pretty much ignore the whole Personal Skills part because it’s all just stardard stuff. Every single job descriptioin says the same thing.

Please rate this job description.

My overall rating: Average

Interest-level heat map of this job description for this engineer: (Yellow – interesting. Grey – not interesting.)