> you're going to be taking a pay cut most likely.
> not much opportunity for growth or change
Are you delusional?
As a rule nobody works there because of the money, and there are many examples of how PA makes decisions which lower their revenue (they could easily raise PAX ticket prices by 3-4x, for example, which would bring in over a million dollars in extra revenue per year per employee). It might be that asking a dev to forgo the sort of pay levels they'd expect from working elsewhere might be too much to ask of anybody, but time will tell I guess.
Every company is pretty much a family. For all workable definitions of a family.
>>And they are a content and events company not a software startup.
Which means nearly any person who is good at software who isn't in immediate need of money should abandon them.
>>They need coders but for them it's a cost center, not a profit source like at software companies.
If your work doesn't add even that much value to the company, I'm not sure(unless you are really desperate for a job) why should even want to work for such a place.
>>You can make a decent living at PA, definitely, but don't expect the sort of wages you'd make from a software company.
Again, why would any one want to work there after knowing this.
>>Even when PA is in a period of expansion and growth that growth is nothing compared to what is typical at a tech startup.
So even in the best situation for the company, you still get screwed.
>>As a rule nobody works there because of the money,
Sorry but I totally refuse to believe in this. In fact this is a serious red flag. In most common cases, this is the most common story circulated so that employees can be paid less to make the founder little more richer.
Once you sell the story that money is evil, and workaholism till death as a holy virtue. You can now continue to demand as much work you want low prices and people have to just comply. On top of that you are selling the "We are family" story, which is in reality why you must sacrifice your life to make the head of the family richer.
A lot of people do a lot of things for reasons other than money. Almost all technical books, for example, do not make very much money for their authors. Certainly not enough to justify the work they put into them. But thankfully a lot of folks still think it's a worthwhile thing to do.
I'm sure non-monetary concerns are a significant factor in everyone's job choices. Otherwise why aren't we all spammers or grifters, or selling bullshit "audiophile" equipment at crazy markups? Are there any companies you wouldn't work for even if they paid you much more than the competition? Logically the reverse must also be true, that you will work somewhere for below average because you enjoy working there.
Yes, in most common cases what you say may be true, a lot of typical employers are exploitative. But PA isn't a typical case. PA very much is family. At a normal company it would be very unusual for everyone at a company to attend a coworker's wedding, but that's absolutely the way PA is. And not because of some bullshit corporate culture but just because that's how they've been and they've struggled to maintain that level of closeness even as they've grown.
So when, under the rubric of "general office IT," I'm asked to purge malware or replenish toner, I can reply with a lmgtfy link and a jocular reminder that I'm way too busy to give a shit about their irrelevant self-inflicted problems, right?
In fact, if you mentioned this in the interview it could help you get the job. They're not looking for someone to replenish toner.
Edit: to whomever downvoted me, this is not a joke, I'm being 100% serious here. If it seems unbelievable then go watch some episodes of PA TV or something, that's just how it is there.
It only makes sense to ask a rockstar do-it-all to do it when you already got 40 hours from him, aren't paying OT, don't give a shit about his mental health, and are wringing as many hours as possible out of him to reduce the effective hourly rate.
This is the thinking of a scumbag cheapskate turd. No one who is paying a fair price for talent like this would waste it on vague low-level chores.
The person leaving this job is a close friend of mine. I agree that this is a very unusual job posting but I think it's a mistake to view it through the lens of typical startup or silicon-valley hiring. There are plenty of jobs in the industry which, on paper, look similar to this one. Low pay, lots of responsibilities, on call duties, poor work/life balance, etc. But PA isn't a normal company so a lot of the assumptions going into some of the conclusions people are drawing are erroneous.
PA is a family, which is something that a lot of startups pretend to but which is actually true in this case. The people there don't just eat lunch together they spend a lot of time in and out of the office with each other, and they tend to have pretty strong bonds of friendship with each other. The majority of people working at PA didn't interview to work there. PA tends to hire by osmosis when it can, because "cultural fit" is by far the most important factor. It's a very challenging prospect to try to hire someone into a very close nit group of friends, even more so when the job you're trying to hire for has fairly high skill requirements.
Personally I think that this job requires a fairly unusual candidate, but I think there's a good chance such a candidate exists. And I don't mean "unusual" in terms of being a "rockstar" or someone filled with self-hatred or low self-esteem.
So, let me correct (or confirm) some perceptions. This isn't a "death march" job like you'd expect in game dev or many startups. Yeah you may have to work late sometimes, and there may be weeks when you're chugging red bull, but a lot of that is up to you and how you do development, set expectations, and so on. This isn't healthcare.gov, it's mostly a bunch of content-heavy sites. You can certainly get into a crunch if you don't manage your time or your projects well but that's within your control, and you can certainly push back as much as is necessary. Unlike most startups you're not going to be expected to be in crunch mode all the time and you're not going to be expected to put in a set number of hours per week. If you do good work and prioritize well you'll be fine.
In terms of being on call, again it's not as though this is reddit or healthcare.gov or amazon.com, it's a handful of CMS deployments and a few other things. Things can, and will, go down, and the fact that you're pretty much the only person available to fix a lot of this stuff is definitely going to suck. But the sorts of problems you're going to run into aren't the same sorts of things you'll see at a typical startup. Maybe the load balancer for some site isn't working right or something, so you'll go file a support ticket w/ the VPS provider or fix it yourself as warranted. This isn't a job where you'll expect to have to get out of bed at 3am at least once a week to have to fix some bullshit code that someone else wrote. You have the opportunity to make the system work as smoothly as possible, and if you find yourself getting woken up by monitoring alerts too often that's probably due more to the choices you've made than anything else.
The reason why the job listing asks for people with a "crazy person level of attention to detail" is because you will be the entirety of the dev team (but there are designers, so you're not the whole universe). There's no QA team and not really any project management other than what you do. And accountability primarily comes from intrinsic motivation, not from someone looking over your shoulder.
As far as IT support and DBA, I don't think that's a very difficult requirement for a lot of devs to satisfy. It's not as though you have to do tech support for an office of mundanes, pretty much everyone at PA is tech savvy, the only thing you're there to do is be a resource to maybe solve some of the problems they can't, and to babysit the office infrastructure as necessary. If you feel comfortable setting up a managed switch (with the help of documentation) and building your own PC from parts you'll probably be fine.
The really bad news is that you're going to be taking a pay cut most likely. There just isn't the same opportunity to make as much money as you could in other parts of the industry. If you think you can negotiate a more competitive salary, then you can certainly try, I wouldn't rule it out. You'll still make okay money, if money isn't a big factor for you then it'll probably be fine, it should be enough to live wherever you want and have plenty of disposable income. But compared to what you could make in a profitable startup or at one of the big companies it's going to be a lot less.
The other bad news is that there's not much opportunity for growth or change. A lot of that is in your own hands but there are only so many things the company needs. If you have an ambition to learn haskell this isn't a good position for you. Similarly, there's no other dev. position to move into, you can't switch to another team working on different projects with different technology, you won't have the opportunity to become a lead or a manager, etc. The job can be what you make of it, but there's only so far it can realistically stretch, so you should consider that in terms of your long-term career goals. Of course, if you want to spend your free time working on some open source project, there's nothing stopping you.
Overall I'd reiterate that cultural fit is by far the most important part of this job. If you're excited about the possibility of working at PA then that's square one, if not then you should just ignore this job posting entirely. Beyond that, if you're competent and proficient at web dev and comfortable with getting your hands dirty with networking or hardware on rare occasions, and if you're the sort of person who wants to settle into a role where most of the time you'll be setting up content-heavy sites then this might be a good opportunity for you. It's certainly not a job for everyone, or even the vast majority of devs.