Marco.org

Is this real? Please let this be a joke.

This is everything wrong with tech-startup culture, unreasonable expectations, and workaholism in one job posting, by a company with a massive audience that probably contains a very high percentage of young software developers.

They would like someone with a computer science degree and at least three years of professional experience in developing web apps top-to-bottom on the full PHP/MySQL stack and Java, Python, or Ruby development¹ and high-traffic server and database administration and supporting their other employees’ local office IT needs.

They’re going to require you to be a workaholic, not having any work-life balance, which they flippantly celebrate and glorify.

They don’t specify a salary, but they’re very clear that it’s going to be very low — they’d rather spend a fraction of the difference making the office nice.

I did almost this exact job for Tumblr’s first four years. I required, and was given, a great salary plus stock, a nice office environment, and a healthy work-life balance. The difference is that I didn’t have much experience going in — I learned most of the scaling side as we went. An advanced web developer who also wants to be a sysadmin and already has experience managing high-traffic infrastructure is very rare and far more valuable.

Penny Arcade wants one of those so they can pay them a low salary and burn them out. The candidate is expected to be happy and honored at the privilege of this terrible deal.

Their unreasonable, immature expectations are a damaging message to send to their huge audience of young software developers. Yes, there are other employers this bad (and worse) in the industry, but you don’t have to work for them. There are a lot of better options, especially if you satisfy even half of Penny Arcade’s requirements — and a healthy work-life balance is a basic requirement, like your paycheck, that you shouldn’t tolerate losing for any employer.