How to translate job posts

What UX job posts say vs what they mean.

(Company names withheld to protect the innocent, plus some of these would have about 100 company names behind them.)

We have transparent communication.
All our applicants want to work somewhere that management won’t lie to them so we’ve started saying we have this.
We care about work/life balance.
All our applicants ask about this so we try not to tell them that we’re going to start them with only two weeks’ vacation at a senior level job.
We give you a long weekend once a month / once a quarter and we think that even though we have full control over the date, that extra set of days off is plenty of flexibility in your work/life balance.
The company is now looking to onboard their first ever Senior Product Designer.
Our VCs told us our product looks and behaves like shit. We’re looking for someone to blame.
You will own the end-to-end design across multiple products.
We’d like to work you to death.
We’re looking for the brain of an engineer with the heart of a UX practitioner.
We think engineers are antisocial assholes and UX practitioners are bleeding-heart ignoramuses.
This is a high-energy fast-paced environment with new challenges every day.
We’re understaffed, disorganized, and proud of it.
We are the first consumer fintech product whose creators are aligned with its users.
We’ve never heard of Jack Bogle.
We’re similarly unaware of the other 20+ fintech companies with the same claim in their job descriptions.
We offer free lunches.
Please oh please come back to the office so we can justify the money for this building lease.
We are transforming the financial services industry using Blockchain, crypto, NFTs, etc.
Please help us with our Ponzi scheme.
You must be familiar with Lean Design.
Our C-level folks never got past the word Lean. While proper Lean Design means testing hypotheses, we use Lean Design to mean “you won’t be given time to do either front-end or back-end research on the results. Forget most of those other UX steps too.”
You will drive the product copy.
Content Designer? What’s that?
We are looking for a senior product designer with 1 year experience.
We refuse to hire an entry-level person. They have cooties.

Author: Anne Gibson

Anne Gibson is a UX Designer and general troublemaker outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She's an editor and writer at The Interconnected. She is also published at A List Apart and The Pastry Box, and publishes short fiction when she's not persuading the terriers to stop wrecking things.