I second bahbar.

Try this:

If you answer yes to the following, you and I need to talk.

Are you a combat hardened TDD coder?

Do you know the ins-and-outs of concurrency, reflection, generics, and closures?

Do you have thorough understanding of web frameworks; ASP.NET, AJAX, and JQuery a plus?

Have you used a Continuous Integration process to develop software?

As I said, if yes to the above let’s talk.

I agree with bahbar as well. Lots of good developers are modest and don’t think they are that great (or at least not as great as you are asking them to be). You are inviting an egotistical know it all to interview, who likely thinks he knows everything. While it is hard as an engineer to pull away from the details, it might be best to just list you would like X years of C# and .NET experience. Once you’ve whittled down your applicants and phone screened, then you can determine which one is the C# wiz.

Unfortunately, unless they are moving to a new town or their company is going under or really upsetting them, the really good guys are paid well and aren’t browsing job ads.

Promoting how cool your company is to work for and how cool your products are in the local press and via social media is probably going to be more productive than a catchy job posting. If you find a catchy job posting that draws in the best talent, even if they are marginally happy where they are now, don’t tell anyone your secret!

Here’s another thought: One of your ads once said something along the lines of “tell us about your best hack.” Have your own guys answer that, and post their answers somewhere.

I see it as a filtering function, rather than an attractant. I would think it would play well during a phone screen, where it’s oral, so no effort involved.

Ideally, you want to already be both known and attractive before you even post the opening. Case in point, Fog Creek. I don’t know if Joel bothers posting for his own openings, ‘cuz the people he wants probably aren’t reading job ads, but they read his blog. They know who Fog Creek is. They watched shanselman’s video tour of the office a couple of weeks ago and know what the place looks like.

You need to promote yourself even when you aren’t hiring, so that people will notice when you are. And if you’re in a position of obscurity, you need to make it easy for people to overcome that. Your web site’s not helping you out there. It’s totally customer focused.

You know honestly, this job ad really speaks to me. It even wants to make me move. I know exactly what you are talking about and I even “feel” what you are trying to get out of it. I am everything this job ad speaks about myself, except I don’t know a ton about threading or lambda’s because I haven’t had enough time with them. I especially love the “And while you’ve put out some pretty advanced, complex code, you’ve come to the realization that good code is simple code” as I can tell that someone has thought of the whole “code is art” thing, because even though it is complex it’s broken down in such a way that it’s simple, and just pretty.

Weirdly, however, I don’t feel like I’m being arrogant because a lot of these traits that you speak about, no one else seems to agree with it. I can’t understand why, but I eventually over a long period of time get buy in from others, it just takes them 6 months to a year before they get it. I don’t push too hard and I know I’m not always right, but I never see the same burning desire to find what is the “best way” (which seems to always be constantly changing) to do something in a lot of other people.

The other thing I have really had to turn down the volume on is the enthusiasm. See, I love coding, and making things people love to use, and when I see light bulbs go off over people’s heads it just gets me jazzed. Show me a sick UI that people “just make sense” and I’m excited. Show me a new way to refactor something to make it easier to change or test and I’m a happy guy. Other people just seem to be doing their day to day tasks, and I’m again not faulting them, but there are sometimes when a healthy argument on why we should have unit tests for at least some functionality on a legacy application would be a good thing. Other times it’s press time and I get that, and we clear out of the way to get things done but mostly that seems to be the way things done. But give me a reason like “it worked before, just do it the same way” when it would take an extra 1 minute (not kidding) to do it the right way, and I’m left scratching my head. I’d rather stay the extra 5 minutes per day to do it right…

I suppose I don’t want to ramble so I’ll leave it at that. I think if anything if someone see’s what you’re getting at with this ad you’re going to get what heck of a developer, so I really like it. For me it really sticks out way above the other “Must have 5 years experience with C#” bull crap you get everywhere else.