I see a huge lot of offers where the employers think they are very clear on what they want, but not nearly as much on what they offer.

Entrepreneurs

For a developer to even bother contacting you regarding your offer, you probably need some proofreading to:

• put yourself in the others’ shoes
• add how your teams and decisions work
• add a salary range (we KNOW it’s negociable)
• add your Joel Test maturity level

And add whatever makes you better than others. If you don’t have such points, you have other things to worry about than hiring.

You will likely have to remove mentions

• are you sure you need or even want what you listed?
• that inadvertently discriminate or alienate huge parts of the population.
• why the schoolyears? Lousy engineers exist, as do amazing autodidacts
• anything that others use, either abusive or non-discriminatory

Lastly, why some precise technologies? Good engineers can learn. For Rails jobs, I would rather hire an expert on Python or Java MVC than an expert on non-web Ruby.

Hires

You’re going for a job interview. Yes, you’ve probably been trained to be on the begging side, to just be happy to have a job.

But you are going to spend more of your waking hours at work than with your family, friends or significant others.

It can’t hurt to research or grill the prospective company with questions. And if you can’t find any of your own (really?) there are some ready for you, written on the excellent Joel Spolksy and aptly named: the Joel Test.