Have you heard the saying, "In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one eyed man is King"?

This month my attention was drawn to the following job advertisement spotted by a colleague on the very very good US job site Dice. http://www.dice.com . If you're looking for an IT related job in the US then Dice is where to start.

It doesn't take a genius to work out who is offering the job. Checkout the text...

Unfortunately, this job advertisement goes a long way to indicate many of the woes in the software industry.

Here again is the job definition, I have highlighted a few key points in red ...

Your responsibilities will be to design, implement,
and deliver the best possible GUI for the product. As
part of the design, you will determine the
requirements and define specifications for new
functionality and underlying components. While
working with our highly experienced team, you will
define the future of the product.

And here is the skill set which the employer deems essential to fullfil the requirement to "design GUI", "determine requirements", "define specifications" and "define the future of the product".

Required:

o Excellent Java/C/C++ development and debugging
experience
o GUI development experience in Windows or Motif
o Strong written and verbal communications skills
o Highly motivated to work in a small team environment

Hmmmm. So let us examine the correlation between these two.

• Excellent development and debugging experience - I can't actually see where that would help with "determine the requirements" for example, actually debugging skills would appear to be irrelevant in this instance
• GUI Development experience in Windows or Motif - OK fair enough, we have a requirement to "design GUI". It stands to reason that a developer may just have some ability in GUI Design. In fact most of the good ones I ever met are actually programmers. However, for every good developer who has a flair for UI Design, there must be 10 who frankly don't have a clue
• Strong written and verbal communication skills - this I will grant you is essential for the required job spec. but isn't it true of almost any job in the industry?
• Highly motivated to work in a small team environment - actually this sounds like HR padding. It doesn't really seem essential to the ability to say "define the future of the product"! The secondary requirement to have a strong understanding of process which usually implies "big" team would tend to suggest that this was straight from the HR manual

So where does that leave us?

It would very much appear that the ideal candidate is that one-eyed man who can see just a little further than his otherwise blind colleagues.

In this case, one of the largest and most influential software companies in the world is going about hiring people for product management and product analysts and design positions who have no formal experience or training in these areas. I wouldn't like to single out any one specific vendor for criticism, but isn't it just so obvious when you look at most of the product produced by the big players in the industry, that good design, proper requirements gathering and analysis just aren't done properly or at all?

It is way past time that the big players in the software industry woke up and realised that hiring people with coding and debugging ability is not enough. Necessary as coders are to the production of software, if the industry is to fullfil it's potential and start to make the user experience with high technology better for the ordinary individual, then it is necessary to hire people with professional interest, experience, training or education in product management, product definition, requirements analysis, design and usability.