Dalkey Archive responds to that job advertisement. Don't You Bookish People Understand Satire?

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  Irish Times. com - Laurence Mackin

  By now, most people will have seen the job advertisement/internship posting that Dalkey Archive Press put up some days ago. It has met with outrage online, with Salon.com asking if it is the “worst job posting ever?”
  
  This is unsurprising. Among many other requirements, DAP asked for candidates who “want to work at Dalkey Archive Press doing whatever is required of them to make the Press succeed; do not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.)”.
  Furthermore, among a long list of “grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period” were “being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work”. Helpfully, it advised: “DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above.”
  What many people may have missed on first reading (myself included) was the satirical edge in the post, something that perhaps we’re not used to in the current age of sterile online recruitment. Here, John O’Brien, the American director of Dalkey Archive Press and the man responsible for the advertisement, offers some context. It comes from a recent email exchange I had with O’Brien, and is reproduced here with his permission. He began the exchange by pointing out that the advertisement was written in a manner he viewed as appropriate with Irish literature: that of Swift, Joyce Beckett and, perhaps most pertinently, Flann O’Brien.
  “The advertisement was a modest proposal. Serious and not-serious at one and the same time. I’ve been swamped with emails (I wish they’d stop: I’ve work to do), and with job applications. I certainly have been called an ‘asshole’ before, but not as many times within a 24-hour period.
  “Strangely, no one (except the applicants) seem to have noticed that jobs are being offered: when does this happen with internships? In brief, I take internships very seriously, and take on only people I think might be a future employee. Since coming to Ireland, I’ve seen so many applications to Dalkey in which CVs list upwards of six internships, which tend to smack of ‘we looked, we evaluated, and didn’t think the person was good enough to keep’. And my 25 years of experience with interns has been very mixed: the most common problem being that they aren’t prepared, don’t know what to expect, hope that a job might be at the end of the rainbow, and yet don’t have a clue as to what an employer is looking for. Employers wind up frustrated that they put in so much time, and the interns wonder why a job wasn’t forthcoming.
  
  Full piece at Irish Times via Douglas McLennan