What would you like to see in remote developer job posts?

Since I'm kinda-sorta looking for a job now, here are the things I tend to look for on a first pass:

• Is this a job that's formally in the United States? That's important, because it triggers a bunch of legal issues that changes a lot for those of us who live here, like health insurance.
• How remote is the job? I've seen "remote until we decide everybody should come back to the office" and "remote, but you'll attend meetings in person twice a month," which aren't remote when the office is thousands of miles away.
• What does the company do? "We're in stealth-mode" is over-dramatic and makes it sound like the service is trivial enough to be replaced based on a job description.
• What's the ideal version of the job and what's the most likely scenario? I've been hired a few times (and offered a few other jobs), where the intent was for me to be on a specific future project but would be handling different work until then. Those future projects never happened, which is fine, because the jobs I took were good regardless, but that probably wouldn't work out for everybody. My favorite posting was from ProPublica, I think, where they had a developer position with a "what we imagine we're going to work on" section with all the cutting-edge tools they were planning to migrate the site to, followed by a "how this really works" section where they described the clumsy PHP architecture they were maintaining...
• How are workers expected to work? I've had jobs where the KPI is "butts in seats for more than forty hours," whether or not it's dressed up as flexibility, whereas I've had desk jobs where nobody cares where you are as long as you check in once or twice in a day and aren't falling behind on work. And, obviously, there are plenty of companies where the goal is to just sign your life away. I don't understand why companies are cagey about this, since hiring someone who won't work long hours for a team that works long hours is just going to make everybody unhappy until that person is no longer with the company.
• The timetable: A job that I probably would have loved (except for the commute) started checking my references after I gave up on them and had been at a different job for a few weeks. If I had known their process took months, I either wouldn't have bothered interviewing or would have held off on the other job, depending on my financial situation.

The usual salary and timezone type of information is important, too, but I assume those are basically a given.

• I don't know why companies don't promote their health benefits more (if they are good), like dependent coverage, etc. I go over this right away anyways usually and I consider it a part of compensation.
• Employee reviews, especially the negative ones, although I don't totally go on negative reviews, many times there are golden nuggets in there (besides the disgruntled part) that definitely guide me in decision making. On the upside, if most are good, that's a plus for the company.
• if the position is a new position or a rehire, this may give more insight into the company, but not necessarily.
• is it truly remote or pandemic remote?
• travel requirements and if they are plane travel or local/driving travel, I don't do plane travel right now so that would take the job off the list.

Important

• Location limitation (which countries they would consider) + Visa limits...
• Expected hour range for work / TZ..
• % of remote, is it really 100% remote?
• Expected office on-boarding (pre covid that was common to say you 1st have to onboard for X months...)
• Expected travel
• Is the entire company remote only, remote first, or just some positions/people are remote? is my entire team going to be remote?
• company name and/or site link...

Advantage

• Salary range is not a deal break but a deal maker, it will move me earlier in my interest cycle and would get me to apply before other positions.
• If there are other considerable pay benefits like RSU, ESPP, stocks or options basically
• Interview process, like is there an exercise taking X hours-days...

Nice to have:

• Company size in terms of # of eng.
• Team size (short term expected) in same work time range...

Salary range is a must, noone wants to waste time with recruiters, who have no idea what they re talking about (except sometimes for entertainment). More standardised information, so you can style: education, job description, experience, what products(s) you will be working on, preferred languages, etc. That would allow for filtering and easier to read advertisements.

PS: How will you prevent people from writing spam/junk jobposts?

Most important:

• Like rmamba said, acceptable time zones is very important.
• Salary range, and benifits.
• What tech I'll be working with.
• Position type(salaried, contract to hire, etc)

Nice to know:

• About company( size, culture, etc)
• How will the company help me?(work/life balance, education stipend, etc.)
• Expected level of autonomy.

Good Luck!

I can tell you what I'm looking for.

salary range
acceptable timezones to work in
are there regular standup meetings (I prefer to set my own time in the day to work)
description of the job
options to grow in the role, money for equipment, conferences, books ...
what's the rest of the team like
tech stack

holidays?
unpaid holidays an option?