Parallel universe

I’ve spoken before about the habit of tech companies turning English into Jaberwocky in job postings. It’s partly because they think that the cool kids with the skills they’re looking for are basically magpies, attracted by anything (and only a thing) that’s shiny and different. And it’s partly because the people who write this stuff (or copy it from competitors) are completely ignorant of the language.

By way of example, here’s a recent posting for a product manager position from Foursquare. They’re the wonderful folks who built apps that allow your friends to flood your social media with notifications every time they turn a corner or enter some place of business. That being the case, you know they want to attract top talent, so here are their requirements for the PM role:

It’s the parallelize that eats my lunch. It’s actually a computing term, to do with a program that runs functions simultaneously. It’s something machines do. Humans, on the other hand, multitask. (As it happens, recent research indicates that when we do multitask, we do none of them very well. But employers don’t care about that; they just want someone who looks like they’re basically intelligent octopi with no tentacle unoccupied.)

What’s interesting to me is the detail that follows the offending word. Eventually they get to the do-everything-at-once part. But under the rubric of “parallelize” the first prompt is “must be a self-motivated team player able to work in a small, fast-paced environment without much oversight.” That’s nothing to do with running parallel activities; what they want is someone who sees what needs to be done and does it without regard to whether it’s in his/her job description and without asking for validation for making the decision. But they don’t seem to know how to make that sound hip.

As for the requirement that the candidate write succinctly, I’m not sure Foursquare would recognize that if it leapt up and bit them on the nose.