Comic relief

I applied to a job posting for a (software) product management consulting company last week. As near as I can tell, their product managers swoop in on clients, develop requirements documents and hand off to developers to build and install.

Rinse and repeat.

I like consulting and I really enjoy collecting, writing and prioritizing requirements, because it involves developing a deep understanding the business problem and the people who use the system, and then advocating on their behalf. So I thought this was worth a shot.

As part of this company’s “talent acquisition” system, I have to complete a short questionnaire that includes such issues as:

·         What do you love about requirements? Why?

·         Have you worked with use cases?

·         What is the point of using use cases?

I was a little disconcerted when one of their questions began, “On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is the best”, and another started, “On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is the best”. You’d have thought that a group of people who want detail-oriented employees would have settled on one convention. In a single document. Five questions apart.

Plus, they sent a document for me to complete, instead of directing me to an online system, which seems weird for a company specializing in software requirements. Why would they use what’s essentially a manual input device?

But as I was squinting to read the questions, I realized that the questions and answer spaces are set in 10-point Comic Sans.

They just lost about 30 points on the competitive scale of 1-100, with 100 being best.