Looking for a Mac OS X developer

Alwin — Tue, 03 May 2011 09:20:33 +0000

At Collectorz.com, we’re working on a new Mac edition of our Comic Collector software, and on major upgrades of the existing Mac editions of Movie, Book and Music Collector.

There are all huge projects and we need more help. So we are currently looking for an extra Mac OS X developer.
Are you experienced in Mac OS X programming, OR a smart programmer interested in Mac development? Then read on…

About Collectorz.com

Collectorz.com® is a series of collection database programs for cataloging user’s home collection of music, movies, books, comics and video games. The key feature of the programs is the automatic downloading of media information (data and cover art) from our own online media databases.
Collectorz.com software is available in 3 flavours: Windows, Mac OS X and online/web-based. Next to that, we offer mobile companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.
Collectorz.com currently has 14 employees and we’re located in Amsterdam (WG Plein 384).

The job

You will join the “all-things-Apple” development team, to work on the Mac OS X editions of the Collectorz.com software. The goal is to finally bring our current Mac editions of Movie, Book and Music Collector to the same level as their Windows counterparts, in terms of features, usability and stability. Next to that, you will work on the new Mac edition of Comic Collector.

You will work together with the other Collectorz.com programmers, to keep the Mac editions in line with the Windows editions, and to connect them with the CLZ iPhone apps, iPad apps, Android apps and the online “Connect” editions.

Requirements

University level, technical education
Experience and affinity with Object Oriented programming
Experience with Mac OS X programming (Objective C, Cocoa, etc…) is a pre, but not a requirement. (Smart OO programmers should be able to learn any programming language or API in no time).
Affinity with Apple products and operating systems. Apple fan-boys preferred.
Affinity with music, movies, books, comics and/or video games. Collector-geeks preferred.
Living in or close to Amsterdam.
No suits allowed.

Interested?

Send your cover letter and CV to jobz at collectorz dot com.

Collectorz.com is hiring

Alwin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:27:42 +0000

At Collectorz.com, we have multiple people doing customer support. Most of the first and second line support is handled by AJ and he’s doing a great job.
But we recently found out that AJ is even better at creating cool promotional videos for our software. Check out the vids he did for Movie Collector here.

We decided that AJ should spend more time creating videos and that we should start looking for an extra customer support employee.

However, Sytske and I are quite busy at the moment. We didn’t feel like going through heaps of applications and spending hours talking with applicants. So we made up some “hoops” that applicants would have to jump through. Nothing complicated, just to make sure they were able to read and follow some simple instructions. We also included a real customer question for them to answer.

Here’s a quote from our job description on Monsterboard (posted July 1st):

Interested?
Upload your cover letter and updated CV (both in English) to Google Docs, in one document. Use “[Your Name] Wants The Job” as the document title.
Then share it with jobz at collectorz dot com.

Make sure to answer the following customer question in your cover letter:

“I have already added 1,723 DVDs to Movie Collector. Now I want to set the Purchase Store field of all entries to “Amazon”. I am not looking forward to editing each and every movie, one by one. Is there a quicker way?”

Here’s the results after six days: :

We received 18 applications
Fifteen of those were either sent by just hitting the Apply Directly button at Monsterboard or emailed to our jobz email address. None of those answered the support question. (Some of them didn’t even bother to write a cover letter)
Only five applicants used Google Docs to share their application doc with us.
Four of those had named their document right (“Johnny wants the job”)
These four all answered the customer question, but only two had understood the reason for this assigment and had actually written a full response email, including a nice introduction:

“Dear Mr. Hoogerdijk,
Thank you for your e-mail today. I understand that you would like to modify the purchase store field for your DVD collection.”

and a friendly ending:

“If this does not answer your question, or you would like more detailed instructions, please let me know.
Best regards”