I've debated about posting on this but I figure context is probably more helpful than not.

The person leaving this job is a close friend of mine. I agree that this is a very unusual job posting but I think it's a mistake to view it through the lens of typical startup or silicon-valley hiring. There are plenty of jobs in the industry which, on paper, look similar to this one. Low pay, lots of responsibilities, on call duties, poor work/life balance, etc. But PA isn't a normal company so a lot of the assumptions going into some of the conclusions people are drawing are erroneous.

PA is a family, which is something that a lot of startups pretend to but which is actually true in this case. The people there don't just eat lunch together they spend a lot of time in and out of the office with each other, and they tend to have pretty strong bonds of friendship with each other. The majority of people working at PA didn't interview to work there. PA tends to hire by osmosis when it can, because "cultural fit" is by far the most important factor. It's a very challenging prospect to try to hire someone into a very close nit group of friends, even more so when the job you're trying to hire for has fairly high skill requirements.

Personally I think that this job requires a fairly unusual candidate, but I think there's a good chance such a candidate exists. And I don't mean "unusual" in terms of being a "rockstar" or someone filled with self-hatred or low self-esteem.

So, let me correct (or confirm) some perceptions. This isn't a "death march" job like you'd expect in game dev or many startups. Yeah you may have to work late sometimes, and there may be weeks when you're chugging red bull, but a lot of that is up to you and how you do development, set expectations, and so on. This isn't healthcare.gov, it's mostly a bunch of content-heavy sites. You can certainly get into a crunch if you don't manage your time or your projects well but that's within your control, and you can certainly push back as much as is necessary. Unlike most startups you're not going to be expected to be in crunch mode all the time and you're not going to be expected to put in a set number of hours per week. If you do good work and prioritize well you'll be fine.

In terms of being on call, again it's not as though this is reddit or healthcare.gov or amazon.com, it's a handful of CMS deployments and a few other things. Things can, and will, go down, and the fact that you're pretty much the only person available to fix a lot of this stuff is definitely going to suck. But the sorts of problems you're going to run into aren't the same sorts of things you'll see at a typical startup. Maybe the load balancer for some site isn't working right or something, so you'll go file a support ticket w/ the VPS provider or fix it yourself as warranted. This isn't a job where you'll expect to have to get out of bed at 3am at least once a week to have to fix some bullshit code that someone else wrote. You have the opportunity to make the system work as smoothly as possible, and if you find yourself getting woken up by monitoring alerts too often that's probably due more to the choices you've made than anything else.

The reason why the job listing asks for people with a "crazy person level of attention to detail" is because you will be the entirety of the dev team (but there are designers, so you're not the whole universe). There's no QA team and not really any project management other than what you do. And accountability primarily comes from intrinsic motivation, not from someone looking over your shoulder.

As far as IT support and DBA, I don't think that's a very difficult requirement for a lot of devs to satisfy. It's not as though you have to do tech support for an office of mundanes, pretty much everyone at PA is tech savvy, the only thing you're there to do is be a resource to maybe solve some of the problems they can't, and to babysit the office infrastructure as necessary. If you feel comfortable setting up a managed switch (with the help of documentation) and building your own PC from parts you'll probably be fine.

The really bad news is that you're going to be taking a pay cut most likely. There just isn't the same opportunity to make as much money as you could in other parts of the industry. If you think you can negotiate a more competitive salary, then you can certainly try, I wouldn't rule it out. You'll still make okay money, if money isn't a big factor for you then it'll probably be fine, it should be enough to live wherever you want and have plenty of disposable income. But compared to what you could make in a profitable startup or at one of the big companies it's going to be a lot less.

The other bad news is that there's not much opportunity for growth or change. A lot of that is in your own hands but there are only so many things the company needs. If you have an ambition to learn haskell this isn't a good position for you. Similarly, there's no other dev. position to move into, you can't switch to another team working on different projects with different technology, you won't have the opportunity to become a lead or a manager, etc. The job can be what you make of it, but there's only so far it can realistically stretch, so you should consider that in terms of your long-term career goals. Of course, if you want to spend your free time working on some open source project, there's nothing stopping you.

Overall I'd reiterate that cultural fit is by far the most important part of this job. If you're excited about the possibility of working at PA then that's square one, if not then you should just ignore this job posting entirely. Beyond that, if you're competent and proficient at web dev and comfortable with getting your hands dirty with networking or hardware on rare occasions, and if you're the sort of person who wants to settle into a role where most of the time you'll be setting up content-heavy sites then this might be a good opportunity for you. It's certainly not a job for everyone, or even the vast majority of devs.