- Do you optimize the fun out of every game you play?
- Do you experience physical pain when you see people do things sub-optimally?
- Do you thrive in a high-stress environment filled with political infighting, bureaucracy, and corporate nonsense?
If so, then we are the place for you, except you might hate how nice of a company we have - filled with happy, generally competent people that don’t put up with jerks. Frankly, it makes me sick how nice everyone is.
We are remote full time, have very flexible hours, people are judged by their output, not by how much they suck up to the boss, and turnover is super low because the company believes that happy employees = happy customers = happy bank account. Simply disgusting, if you ask me.
--Is this a real job ad?--
Yup! Amazingly enough, we actually paid money to post this on a bunch of different job sites. And it’s not even a pyramid scheme! Plus, get this: the owner just started paying our 50ish employees with money instead of Pizza Hut coupons - we’re big time, people.
Our careers page is actually worth checking out to learn more about how insane we are (sidenote: it won a web design award in 1993 - we’re a pretty big deal):
And check out our reviews on Google, Glassdoor, or Indeed to see that it’s not just the founder’s mother who says we’re cool.
--What do you guys do?--
We do a lot of different things these days including selling awesome consumer products
(These are just a small sampling, FYI)
- Bad Parking Cards (amz.run/5Eya)
- Beverage Barricades (amz.run/6kip)
- Child Chucker (amz.run/9EUz)
Running this Amazon Pay-Per-Click agency: PPCFarm.com (we’re really, really good at PPC)
And we will soon be launching a SaaS product for inventory management.
We are doing our best to grow rapidly every year, and it’s our intention to continue that for as long as possible, which means we need good people to help us keep up with the growth.
--What is your company like?--
1. Full Time Remote/Flexible Hours. You will be working from home in your pajamas, on your schedule. And we don’t care if you work 10 hour days 4 days a week or 6 hours a day and catch up over the weekend. So long as you get a lot of work done, we’re happy campers.
2. Complete Work/Life Balance. If you’re routinely working more than 45ish hours, you’re gonna get a friendly talking-to. We want you to be operating at 100% capacity, which means that you need to rest.
3. You Can Be Yourself. You don’t have to put on a fake, professional face. You can just be yourself. You can talk smack to the CEO, and no one will think anything of it.
4. Major Opportunities for Career Growth. We are not trying to just be a small business. We plan to be doing $100 million annually in the next few years. We promote quickly once we identify talent. It doesn’t matter what your credentials are – it matters what you get done.
5. Strongly Anti-BS. Anybody in the company can (and is expected to) tell the CEO when he is wrong. There are no bureaucratic or BS rules getting in the way of getting work done.
6. No Micro-Management. Once you’re trained and have demonstrated you know your stuff, we are pretty hands-off. In fact, if you need external management to stay on-task and motivated, we probably aren’t the place for you.
7. Supportive Environment. We don’t operate via intense stress or unreasonable top-down deadlines. Everyone wants you to be successful – internal politics are at a minimum here.
8. No Toxic People Allowed. We try very hard to screen out mean people before they get in, but in case they slip through, we fire them quickly. Imagine never having to interact with toxic people at work - how nice would that be?
9. We’ll Invest in Your Training. We want you and everyone to get better constantly. You’ll be learning new things all the time, and are strongly encouraged to invest time every day to learn new things, improve your system/work process, and just generally try to make your life easier.
10. 4-6+ Weeks Vacation. We 100% want you to recharge, so having plenty of time off is absolutely worth it.
11. Self-Funded So We Can Do What’s Right for Us. We don’t have to answer to anyone but ourselves, so we can make the right decision for the long-term health of the company vs trying to get big too fast or cut corners to appease some selfish investor.
--What are your company’s values?--
See here: www.jlstradingco.com/careers/
Yes, those are legitimately our values. The careers page is definitely worth checking out - it’s not just normal corporate BS. We promise you’ll learn a lot about us.
--OK, so I’ve read like 8 dang pages about you guys. Will you tell me what the actual job is?--
No.
--Wait... What?--
OK fine. Super short version:
Making our Google Sheets-based ERP less sh***y.
We have a ridiculously extensive Google Sheets system for managing many, many, many things in the company. Like, you have no idea.
It actually works pretty well all things considered, but there are things that could be better, which we need your help to solve.
For example, we have a ton of data, and storing tons of data in Google Sheets is approximately the worst. Having more BigQuery connections would be great so we can store more data and access it easily.
Or there are legacy processes that require someone to copy/paste things, when it would be trivial to write some Apps Script to do it.
There are some processes that we use UiPath to automate, particularly for our Pay-Per-Click advertising management system, where we have to interact with Amazon a lot (but perhaps you can figure out how to interact with the API for us…).
Your job will be to improve the efficiency of existing tools and then become one of our tool builders to make everyone’s work even better. We are constantly doing new things, so you will have no shortage of things to build.
--Do I need experience?--
We do expect you to have experience with automation. You don’t need to have done this for decades, but it’s also not an entry-level role.
If you aren’t 100% an expert in one of the things we work in, that is likely OK as long as you are capable of learning.
As with all development, in my humble opinion, the ability to use a language is a distant second to just being a good problem solver and learner, so as long as you are smart AF (with development experience), you can likely qualify for this job.
--Do I need a college degree?--
You just need to be awesome.
--Are there any geographic restrictions?--
As long as you are in a country that doesn’t have active sanctions from the US government, we are interested. Our founder isn’t known for respecting the government much, but they have all the guns, so…
--What is your “tech” stack?--
I feel a little embarrassed to call this a tech stack but:
- Google Sheets
- Apps Script
- BigQuery
- UiPath
- AutoHotKey
We are pot-committed at this point to these solutions (plus they are already excellent for us), so we are very unlikely to switch, but it is possible that we could add tools into the mix to enhance things.
--Why don’t you just build software?--
We do have a software team building things (mainly to become publicly facing as SaaS products), but we will never stop using Google Sheets because we train basically everyone in Google Sheets, so:
1. The iteration and deployment speed is literally 100-1000x faster than software
2. Anyone can build their own tooling
3. Anyone can maintain the tooling
--This sounds pretty good, though I’m still skeptical that this isn’t a pyramid scheme.--
You sound just like our tax auditor!
--That doesn’t resolve any of my fears, but what do I need to do to apply?--
Please submit your information electronically.
We promise to respond within 5-10 business days even if our answer is No.
There will be multiple steps in this process, FYI, including a long written application, interviews with potentially a few different people, and paid work test(s). Hiring the right people is really hard and very expensive if we do it poorly, so we have to front-load the process. I'm sorry about that and thank you for sticking with us.
Once you’re in our pipeline though, I would anticipate giving you a final answer within a few weeks, depending on how it goes. We definitely don’t want to string you along, and as long as you do what we ask, we promise to tell you “yes” or “no”, and to not just ghost you (like everybody I match with on Tinder).
Thank you for your time and interest, and I hope we can work together soon!
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JLS Trading Co. provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, JLS Trading Co. complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
JLS Trading Co. expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of JLS Trading Co.’s employees to perform their job duties may result in discipline up to and including discharge
