Software Factory Archive

The job listing appeared on a Tuesday. It was posted to the StrongDM careers page, crossposted to LinkedIn, and shared in the factory's community Discord by someone who had been refreshing the careers page daily for three months.

The title was "Software Factory Engineer." The description was unlike any job posting anyone had ever seen.

Under "Required Skills," there were three bullet points. The first was "the ability to describe what you want clearly." The second was "comfort with ambiguity, iteration, and being wrong." The third was "willingness to unlearn habits from traditional software development."

There were no programming languages listed. No frameworks. No "5+ years of experience with" anything. No mention of Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, or any specific technology stack. The posting did not contain the words "full-stack," "backend," "frontend," or "DevOps."

Under "What You'll Do," the posting said: "You will write specifications in natural language. You will design scenarios that describe correct behavior. You will evaluate whether agents are producing software that satisfies users. You will not write code."

The internet had opinions.

Hacker News gave it 847 points in six hours. The top comment was "This is either the future of software engineering or the most elaborate performance art piece in hiring history." The second comment was "Why not both?" The thread ran to 412 replies.

Jay monitored the discussion with the grim fascination of someone watching a nature documentary about his own species. "They're arguing about whether this is a real job," he reported.

"It's a real job," Justin said.

"I know it's a real job. I have the real job. I'm telling you what the internet thinks."

Navan was reading the applications as they came in. The careers inbox had received forty applications in the first hour. He was sorting them into categories. "Most of them are traditional software engineers who included their GitHub profiles and lists of languages they know," he said. "They're answering the question we didn't ask."

"What about the ones who answered the question we did ask?" Justin said.

Navan pulled up three applications. The first was from a former technical writer who had pivoted to product management. She described her approach to specification writing with a clarity that made Navan sit up straight. The second was from a QA engineer who had spent a decade writing behavioral test scenarios and understood, deeply, the difference between describing what software should do and prescribing how it should do it. The third was from a physicist who had never worked in software but wrote a cover letter that described the factory methodology using the language of dynamical systems.

"These three," Navan said.

Justin read all three applications in silence. "Interview all of them."

"The physicist has no software background at all," Jay pointed out.

"The job posting has no software requirements at all," Justin replied. "That was deliberate."

Deliberate naivete. Discard the assumptions. Hire for the actual skill. The actual skill was describing what you want clearly, and that had never been a programming language.