Which is great, until every job application reads as the exact same mix of positive adjectives and power words and you learn to skip the first 1-2 paragraphs of every one.

Only if you limit yourself to a particular kind of company, I think? I've worked as a dev for decades, but not for proper, actual tech companies... mostly a mixture of small biz and nonprofits. No two orgs were alike, even though my job at each one was very similar.

I didn't say the jobs were alike, I said the job listings were alike.

Not the ones I've applied to. If a company can't even tell you about itself without hyperbole, why bother?

Because they might pay lots of money and the coworkers can be nice and talented (they didn't write the job ad) among other things

> That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself.

If only I had $1 for each time I saw a company showing off foosball tables, game consoles in the hallway, picnics, team get-togethers, people laughing and being cheerful.... And in the end it's the same cubic hellhole where people are no better than anonymous cogs in the machine.

If the company describes itself as "cool" because they have pool tables, that's a great thing. It's signal that thats what "cool" is to them. Sounds like a job description that talked about not working in a cubicle hellhole would resonate with you more.

> If the company describes itself as "cool" because they have pool tables, that's a great thing. It's signal that thats what "cool" is to them.

No, not really. It just means that HR had a PR budget to sell themselves as cool, and they bought a game as a prop.

My point is that this blend of signaling is pure bait-and-switch. The mods operandi is that they sell this false idea that they are all about fun and games but in the end it's just a low-paying cubicle hellhole with crunch time as the baseline.

Well, yes, they think they're saying something which reveals a lot more to you and you know to avoid this company. I also like to ask myself - who would be attracted by such a job posting and would I want to work with them?

And actually playing foosball/games are frowned upon Fakecool, all a part of the signalling that companies do to attract talent.

I interpret parent's point in a context where your company has a page where it describes its values, how it sees its impact etc.

Companies with strong values usually have them publicly exposed somewhere, for instance for Cookpad: https://www.cookpadteam.com/careers

If you already have a page about how cool you are, it doesn't need to be repeated in every posting, and candidates for who it matters the most will have more information than shortened descriptions to avoid walls of texts in the job posting itself.

I don't see much interesting or unusual on that Cookpad page.

"You face up to reality, knowing that you can change it" -- things like that can be said about almost any job. And the rest of the things on the page too I think.

What would the opposite to facing up to reality be?

"Here, we don't accept reality. And if something is bad, it has to stay so."

They write:

"There’s a big difference between saying that you’re making good in the world and actually doing it. "

They're a recipe sharing site.

(Nevertheless, seems like maybe a nice place to work at)