Mr. Skin is hiring highly skilled software engineers
 

Since 1999, MrSkin.com is the web?s #1 go?to destination for the complete skinny on Hollywood starlets at their hottest and is visited by over 6.5 million unique visitors every month. With daily show business updates in addition to a database of more than 18,000 actress bios and more than 30,000 movie and TV show reviews, Mr. Skin delivers a one-of-a-kind celebrity entertainment experience from a male point-of-view. That?s what we mean by ?fast-forwarding to the good parts.?

We're looking for an entrepreneurial software engineer to help keep up with our explosive growth. Some of the challenges are highly algorithmic, such as coming up with ways to organize and categorize the information effectively so that users can efficiently find what they need; others are very technical, such as working to make a web application that is complex while still being very fast; and many of the challenges are in product design, such as constructing intuitive interfaces for users. Mr. Skin is located in the trendy Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago. We're highly profitable, have great advisors, and our team is made up of smart, motivated hard-working people who have an unwavering passion for what they do - both in and out of the office!

What we're looking for:

-B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science or equivalent
-Extraordinary software engineering talent
-Substantial experience developing web applications
-Extraordinary product, interaction, and visual design talent
-Curiosity and passion for crafting amazing experiences
-Excellent communication skills and ability to explain your design decisions
-Proficiency programming in a language you love (we don't discriminate!)
-Familiarity with MVC paradigms and frameworks (Rails, Django, CakePHP, etc)
-Familiarity with different databases and storage engines (SQL, NoSQL, etc)
-The number of years of professional experience you have isn't important to us.
-A love of celebrities and/or nudity is a huge plus!

In the short run, the most important thing is to improve our product and make our consumers love us, and so it is critical that you can immediately make big contributions. In addition to working with us in writing the software, the ideal candidate should be proficient outside the technical realm -- making good product decisions, designing user interfaces that are both pretty and functional, being an effective marketer and recruiter, and being capable of handling anything else that comes up. You should also be fearless and broad inside the technical realm, happy to tackle CSS and JavaScript as readily as you are to take on optimizing the performance of a backend service.

You will be required to make good decisions about important things without much oversight. You should be comfortable with autonomy and ownership of large areas of product and infrastructure. It's a plus if you have worked on projects in your spare time, such as programming games in middle school or high school. An ideal candidate will have the potential to grow into a strong leadership role over time -- in either a technical or management capacity.

If you're interested, tell us a little bit about yourself and amazing things you have built, share some code samples or github/bitbucket account, and toss in a resume. Please contact [email protected].

Also feel free to contact me on chat with any questions.

Looks like an excellent and rare opportunity for someone.

"-Proficiency programming in a language you love (we don't discriminate!)"

"An ideal candidate will have the potential to grow into a strong leadership role over time -- in either a technical or management capacity."

... You don't see that in many offerings such as this. This alone probably says a lot about about the offer. Basically that you're probably VERY GOOD people to work with. :thumbsup

i must add this to my portfolio :
-A love of celebrities and/or nudity is a huge plus!
hehe :D

Thanks for the bump and the compliments. We do take pride in a unique, creative, challenging and fun work environment and there is great opportunity for growth. I've been with the company for 10 years now if that tells you anything.

is your position in house only. if so where is the office?

It is indeed an in house position. We are located in Chicago in the Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhood. ICQ me for more details if you like. It's a great neighborhood in a great city!

some of the best programmers i know have never taken college courses for C.S .... I never understand why everyone wants that

What's the pay like? I know of course it depends, but what's the ballpark?

How do you figure they are the "best"? because they completed the work on time and it seems to work fine? That's probably good enough for 95% of the projects, but if you really want something well written, scalable, etc, you need someone who has a bit more training than "php for dummies" and a few years experience writing random scripts for people...

I've been friends with your lead administrator for years. If I wasn't otherwise involved elsewhere, I'd certainly consider applying.

Who are you referring to?

This is the most intelligent job post for a developer I've seen coming out of the adult industry :) Sounds like a fantastic opportunity for a solid developer who's on top of their game.

Replied via email.

The tech world changes so fast only the developers who pursue self education, continually, are worth anything. I've found that the self taught developers tend to fall into that category more than the more formally trained ones... I'm not saying this is always the case but I personally don't even have a high school diploma but I'm a published author on the LAMP stack (by Sybex) and I am proficient in Perl, Python, PHP, C++, C, Objective-C, Ruby, JS, AS, and more...

I've had the pleasure of working along side some fantastically brilliant people who never completed a college degree... the "father of jabber" they guy who created the XMPP protocol doesn't have a degree and Google seemed to collectively think he had the best thing going ;)

Looks like a great opportunity with a great company!!

Yes indeed. He's a big part of our fine staff. :thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

He's also a smart bastard. Said he wouldn't allow anyone who could do both dev and admin. :pimp

Good luck with the search, if I can think of anyone I know of who is willing to reloc (I don't generally work with non-mainstream programmers as a rule, anymore), I'll be sure to pass them over to you.

i will only hire a developer that knows unix enough to be an admin. sysadmins dont need to know any coding though :)

See, you're looking from the inverse of the same coin.

Admins fear coders who can do their job.
Coders fear admins who can point out their fuckups.

..but back to your regularly scheduled gfy..

Good admins love coders who can help with their job.
Good coders love admins who can help catch bugs before they go live :)
:2 cents:

Here is a link you can send out to non-gfy people who might be interested.

http://www.mrskin.com/jobs?_mska_rlst=1

Bump for a great gig.

Yeah, never understood that either. I remember years ago when I was hiring, would get someone fresh out of university from a 4 year computer science degree. After a couple months, I'd ask them, "so, did university help you out with this job?" Their response was always, "nope, not in the slightest." :)

As for the job application, do you maybe think you're looking for too much? From the job description, it sounds like you're looking for a developer, who's also a web designer, a project manager, an executive, and a marketer capable of recruiting, all rolled into one.

Good luck in your search.

Coder vs. Admin drama is good shit!

10 print "Hello"
20 goto 10
run

am i qualified?

Good luck, Mr. Skin, with hiring highly skilled software engineers that you need.

All qualified applicants will be considered. If are interested and you meet 9 out of 10 of the points under "what we're looking for" you should certainly apply.

I'm specifically speaking to the degree debate.

Thanks fatfoo...maybe we could hire you to be our mascot. "Mr. Foo-Skin" has a ring to it.

Not at all. There are great people out there and we want them.

Ok, I'm not trying to be rude here, as it's an honest question. If someone has all the qualifications you seek, why would they work for MrSkin versus starting their own company? If they meet all the qualifications, they'd definitely be capable of running their own show, instead of having a boss.

I guess that's a risk I'm willing to take with this job posting.

... and Bill Gates was a dropout. And Zuckererg quit after first year. Exceptions are good and all but try explaining big-oh runtime to someone spending a few days of your company's money to irrelevantly optimize their ok-running code.

Ironically, one of the best coders I know went to art school and never had CS education. But these are exceptions and are wayyyy far and in between. I know a -lot- more smart people who went to school for CS/math.

great opportunity for someone!!

Hi Sam, I sent you email about activation, I signed up for your program.

Done. Let me know if you need anything.

Bump for the workaholics.

Whats the going rate for a highly skilled software engineer?

It obviously depends on the individual, but I can guarantee you for the right person the offer will be very competitive. We aren't here to try to lowball talent. If you are interested and qualified you will find out.

I have tons of respect for you, but this is so far off the mark I can't believe you posted it. Some of the most brilliant, life changing work - and art - has been created by people with little or no post-secondary education.

Besides, why would a Ph.D WANT to work for a company that just rips nude scenes and sex scenes from movies they don't own the rights to? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Alyssa Milano signed an exclusive agreement with Mr. Skin.

Maybe they own the rights to every clip they post. They've got the money to do it. But no 2257 on the site confuses me.

Too bad it is only in Chicago. Sounds like an awesome job.

Among the programmers I have met and worked with I would have to say it is the opposite. The better ones do not have a degree in in CS. Of course I generally don't associate with incompetent people so I am probably not factoring in the tons of "PHP for dummies" types. So you may be right about the general population of programmers.

That being said, it's a shame there is not more emphasis on Computer Science (CS) among the non-college programmers. Many think that CS has nothing to do with programming but that simply is not the case. Maybe... if you consider installing Wordpress "programming". lol

I'm tired of hearing lame arguments over-emphasizing optimization in speed that sacrifices code readability and development speed from people who have never programmed in assembly, counted clock cycles, or don't know the difference between a logarithmic and exponential algorithm.

I am not a college graduate, and yet when talking to people who have a degree in CS it is frustrating and disappointing when they don't even understand basic CS concepts like Big-O notation and finite automata.

Also, one of the tests at a former company involved us putting an open-case computer in front of the job candidate and asking them to point to the hard drive. There were people with Master degrees in CS that couldn't do it.

In all honesty at your average university a BS in Computer Science is almost worthless. Many people will tell you that they already knew 90% of what was taught to them during their time at a university as an undergraduate before they set one foot in the classroom. For the most part we're talking very basic stuff. I remember some of the other students in my upper level undergraduate classes (including an AI course) being completely perplexed by basic things such as a DOS prompt (this was in the late 90's) or the Unix shell. Others yet were at the senior level and couldn't understand arrays.

I believe it.

Chicago is fucking cold...

this is true. chicago is not for everyone but neither is new york. chicago is a great city with a lot to offer. i'm a seasoned world traveler and i love a tropical climate, but i also need the energy and cultural diversity (food, music, theater, museums etc.) that chicago has and very few cities in the world can match.

Mr. Skin is far more than a website. We author and publish books, have radio and television deals (with more in the works), produce a successful radio prep service and are constantly pursuing new products to extend the Mr. Skin brand, hence the job posting.

Yes we pursue exceptional individuals and of course they are hard to find, but we've had success thus far and don't plan on compromising any time soon.

for some reason i still cant login. it redirects to login page after trying to login and submitting u/p.

Please try again. I think it should be active now.

but it's fucking cold... :Oh crap:Oh crap

My brother loves it out there, to bad he isn't a little further up the tech chain or I would recommend him for this... Time to train him up :thumbsup:thumbsup

Chicago is one of the great cities, give me Chicago over a vapid Phoenix or Tampa any time.

Four seasons - all beautiful and unique.

He's more than welcome to send over a resume. We may be hiring a more junior developer as well.