Job Description Review by Developers – QA Engineer

QA Engineer – Desktop Virtualization (Seattle)

In this series, I invite someone to review a real job description with matching or related technical background. 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.

My expertise and interests

• Mobile development
• Startup environment
• Multi-media
• Monetization techniques

My past experience includes

• QA engineering team building
• Windows development
• Mac application development
• 7 years at MS Windows group

What type of jobs are you looking for today? How is it different from your last job?

I am looking for positions as such Engineering Manager or Product Manager. I want to work in a smaller environment because of the variety of work, opportunity to learn, and ability to switch roles (such as from engineering to product management). What is very important to me is super low barrier to communication and learning. By this I mean I can easily interact with other roles on the team and within the company.

How do you go about conducting your job search?

I use Craigslist. Three of my previous jobs were found via Craigslist. This time I interviewed for a position at Amazon because of their Craigslist posting. I didn’t look elsewhere.

Why do you like using Craigslist?

I feel company websites are too narrow. I want to see the overall job market and the variety on Craigslist can give me a better idea. Craigslist is most convenient for me and it has enough positions that I’m interested in, so I don’t feel the need to use job boards or LinkedIn.

The reason I don’t use job board or LinkedIn is because

1. Creating accounts at different job boards is a hassle
2. I’m concerned about privacy and security issues (i.e. my search/view history might be shown).

How do you find job postings online?

I don’t use any keyword search. I go to Craigslist to scan for interesting items. Even though I’m looking for engineering manager level positions, I will look at jobs at companies that are doing interesting work. Then I will go to that company’s own career site to find out more.

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

Okay, let’s go to Craigslist. The top job posting happens to be a QA role, which matches my background.

(After about 20 seconds scanning this job description) Here are the three things that stand out for me:

1. Virtual Machine Engine: It’s an interesting technology to me.
2. Virtualization and Coding Theory: Once again, I’m interested in the technology.
3. Company info: It’s good to know the company is profitable, have lots of users and the type of users the company has.

Everything else is just standard stuff and is pretty boring.

Please rate this job description.

My overall rating: Average or below average – nothing too exciting.

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