Newspaper job ad expects applicants to type absurd percent-encoded URL
Description
A grayscale photo of a newspaper classifieds page shows one narrow column entirely consumed by an enormous URL. The header reads “Wednesday, March 6, 2013” followed by bold text “Please visit:”. Beneath it, hundreds of characters - full of “%2C”, “%3E”, “%7B”, etc. - form a percent-encoded query string that stretches from the top to the bottom margin before ending with the line “to begin the application process.” Surrounding ads are ordinary one-sentence blurbs, making the wall-of-text link look ridiculous. Technically, the image highlights a spectacular UX failure: the job poster dumped every GET parameter into a printable link, ignored URL-shortening, and created a practically impossible user journey - an anti-pattern in web development and digital recruiting
Comments
11Comment deleted
Any firm that prints a 3-kilobyte percent-encoded GET string in the classifieds is basically saying, “Survive this manual 414 challenge and you’re our new Senior Human cURL.”
Finally, a job posting that's honest about requiring 271% effort - though usually they hide that expectation until after you've accepted the offer and discovered you're also the DBA, DevOps engineer, and coffee machine debugger
This is what happens when someone on the newspaper staff discovers 'View Source' for the first time and thinks copying the entire URL-encoded query string is how you 'download' a job posting. Somewhere, a government web developer is still wondering why their carefully crafted ColdFusion redirect parameters ended up immortalized in newsprint as a monument to the eternal struggle between web and print workflows. The real tragedy? This probably passed through three rounds of editorial review, and nobody noticed because it 'had computer stuff in it' so it must be right
Printing a ColdFusion WDDX query string in a newspaper is treating applicants as a distributed, lossy URL shortener with 0% SLA and infinite rage retries
Faxing resumes: the original async queue with infinite retry hell and no idempotency
Government job ad prints a 1KB WDDX-encoded ColdFusion URL in a newspaper; first screening: if you can hand-type the query string before the session expires, you can maintain the monolith
😂😂 Comment deleted
the hyphenated line wrap means the URL wouldn't work even if typed out exactly as printed Comment deleted
This is... sad Comment deleted
Happened to me irl Comment deleted
the Persian || arabic power Comment deleted