Sony offers hacker a job. Hacker turns them down because of geoHot

http://www.inquisitr.com/101239/sony-offers-hacker-a-job-hacker-turns-them-down-because-of-geohot/

by whenimgone • 15 years ago

280 61 15 years ago

jarin• 15 years ago

That's not really a job offer, but props to Koushik for standing up for his principles.

Exactly, this is a mistake made by almost everyone who has reported it! Large companies have their recruiters send emails like this out all the time.

michaelcampbell• 15 years ago

I get emails like this occasionally. Not from Sony, but other large firms in the industry that I've been in for many years. It's all quite routine.

daimyoyo• 15 years ago

Good. After the geohot disaster, I sold my PS3 and all the games I had, my vaio laptop, and my flatscreen TV. I refuse to patronize a company that abuses it's customers like that. Apple may have a reputation for disliking people who hack their products but they realized if they pursue legal action against them, they'd alienate the core base of developers they rely on for the Apps they make such a big deal about.

edge174• 15 years ago

As someone that has been involved it in hacking apple products and making some pocket change from it in a past life, I hardly think apple has a reputation for disliking these people. If anything, apple looks at what people come up with 'off the ranch' and pulls it into their own stuff if they like it. Apple may have this 'reputation,' but it's purely because the press wants to have it painted this way. I'm no fanboy or anything, I've had a business crushed at their hands; as an engineer and a business guy, I find their decisions to be relatively rational and I was well aware of what was coming well before it was delivered.

People like to point to the guy on top as big and evil. Rightnow it's Apple, 12-15 years ago it was Microsoft. Tomorrow it could be Google.

skbohra1232• 15 years ago

But it certainly sounds like as if you are an Apple fanboy. Apple do hate hacking on their products, restrictions of using itunes for anything Apple is something I just can't bear with, along with restrictions like using OS/X for developing iphone/ipod apps.

recoiledsnake2• 15 years ago

What about things like this? http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/26/apple-bans-android-ma...

quadhome• 15 years ago

I had a similar response to Blizzard over bnetd[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

rapind2• 15 years ago

And wasn't battle.net a Kali ripoff in the first place?

skbohra1232• 15 years ago

One considerable difference between Apple and Sony Hackers is, Apple makes money from App Developers while Sony doesn't.

bmelton• 15 years ago

False. They may not make money in the same way, but they definitely make money off of app developers. The PS3 SDK costs something like $10,000. They also charge royalties against each game sold.

wedesoft• 15 years ago

What about the Hymn project? http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2496

What about Psystar?

tzs• 15 years ago

With Hymn, I suspect Apple only had two options: (1) go after them, or (2) get out of the music distribution business. At the time, the people who owned the music Apple distributed required Apple to use DRM. I'd be shocked if the license they gave Apple did not include a requirement that Apple do everything it could reasonably do technically and legally to try to keep the DRM effective.

As for Psystar, what about them? Apple has not gone after the hackers who figure out how to run OS X on non-Mac hardware. They've not gone after the numerous web sites that tell you how to do it. They've not gone after the book you can readily buy at B&N or Amazon on building a hackintosh. They've mostly looked the other way (hell, they have even been known to include in OS X updates bug fixes for problems that only manifested themselves on non-Apple hardware). It sure doesn't look like Apple has much of a problem with people hacking.

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

Good on him, but surely there's a better source than this? Lack of any real information aside, this article was painful to read. A twitter link to the picture would have conveyed just as much information without the stumbling, awkward prose.

etaty• 15 years ago

Perhaps he should try to change the company from inside !

angus77• 15 years ago

More likely the company would change him from inside.

thesystemis2• 15 years ago

This article "Sony's way on Hackers, Innovaters and Makers" from Make magazine blog (which is down now, but I'll link to the cache) is a good run down of the various ways, before and up to the geohot lawsuit, sony has been attacking hackers and experimenters: http://bit.ly/dVmhC8

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Actual link is http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/02/sonys-war-on-makers...

thesystemis2• 15 years ago

ah yeah -- it just was down this morning, so linked to the cache. thanks.

maayank2• 15 years ago

It's not as if they offered him a concrete offer to create the next hot DRM component, just a generic offer for a generic software engineer role. If he would have gone down that path they would have had multiple interviews, mutual checking for possible team fits, etc... This is as generic as it gets, maybe one level above the generic LinkedIn message. Sure, it can result in a concrete offer down the road, but it's not as if a head hunter tried to get the hacker "by whatever fiscal means necessary".

This is like people "sticking it to the man" by yelling at the cable company representative - helps no one.

dr_• 15 years ago

It's still unusual for a company the size of Sony to reach out to someone like that.

What's more is that it's now on Hacker News - so it's bigger news than Sony probably ever intended it to be.

recoiledsnake2• 15 years ago

>It's still unusual for a company the size of Sony to reach out to someone like that.

Uhh, almost all big companies reach out like that. In fact, bigger companies are more likely to need such talent reach out like that because of their brand than random small companies.

gaius• 15 years ago

No, it's not unusual at all. They employ people full time to do it! And it's not new either, before blogs recruiters contacted people who had a big presence on Usenet or mailing lists.

It is only unusual for someone to confuse it for an actual "job offer".

dkersten• 15 years ago

Not really. I've got emails like that from Microsoft and a ton of other large companies. A guy from Symantec even rang me, said he found me on linkedin, despite my linkedin profile stating not to call me by phone (I don't have my number in my profile, but you can easily find it from linked material). Neither the emails, nor the phone calls mean anything. He still owuld have had to send a CV/resume and maybe get asked for an interview or two before he ever got a job. This isn't unusual at all, its very common.

rlpb• 15 years ago

She probably read the email and thought: "Hacker? He's a hacker? We can't hire hackers! Good thing he told me straight away, he just saved us all a lot of time!"

We know what he means, but other people take the word hacker to mean something else.

If Sony came to this site and saw this article, they'd probably think the same thing too. If the email was sent to try and get them to change their ways, it probably won't have worked at all, since they might not even understand the meaning of the message.

chaosprophet• 15 years ago

No, but it makes a pretty good story for the media, which will probably result in lots of more negative PR for Sony, which in turn will be something that Sony would worry about.

gphil2• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, the rest of the world has the same issues understanding the term "hacker." I think this will just fall into obscurity.

vanessa• 15 years ago

Sony: "Oh, no! Not a hacker! They're the ones that know when we sneak DRM into our products and rat us out to our customers!"

The hacker solidarity here is awesome, but I agree let's not overestimate Sony's recruitment team.

georgecmu• 15 years ago

It’s not very often that when someone is offered a plum job with a company like Sony that they turn it down

Yeah, I get job offers like that a couple times a week. Guess what, I turn them down too. And it's not hard at all, because they are not offers of a plum job, they are an invitation to apply for a position.

dustingetz• 15 years ago

if the person being courted would likely get the position if they applied, your conclusion doesn't follow

ajays• 15 years ago

There is nothing in the letter to indicate that. I get such "would you like to explore" letters twice a week too; and I turn them down also.

It is the recruiters' job to cast a wide net and reel in as many candidates as they can.

random42• 15 years ago

... and we usually do not take a screenshot of the email after replying "Thanks, but no thanks" by email either.

It is just a cheap-shot to ride on the geoHot wave to get 15 mins of fame.

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Spoken by someone who is not familiar with koush or his works. That's too bad.

btipling• 15 years ago

I laughed at the 0 minutes in the screenshot. He wrote the email and was immediately so proud of his reply that he just had to take a screen shot right away and send it to some bloggers. Great, thanks for contributing.

swaits3• 15 years ago

Exactly. This whole thing got blown WAY out of proportion.

presidentender• 15 years ago

I got such an email from Google. I even responded. I didn't hear back. Fortunately, my response cost me little time, and the invitation itself is still good for my ego.

pdenya• 15 years ago

Who does say there isn't solidarity among hackers? Is that a thing? I've always thought of my fellow hackers as a supportive group.

mbrubeck• 15 years ago

I worked with Koush last year at Kiha Software (an Android software startup in Seattle). Currently, he is working on his own one-person startup http://www.deployfu.com/ which could be described as "Heroku for .NET (and other platforms)."

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

I had similar experience long long time ago -- told the recruiter that I would not interview with Philip Morris and got back a blank stare. Nothing dramatic really came out of it, but it sure made me feel good.

PS. Oh, and Sony was not offering this gent a job, it was a simple "feeler". Google sends out these in droves, it does not mean they are sure job offers.

koush• 15 years ago

This is the @koush referenced in the article. To repost what I said on reddit last week:

"To clear up any confusion, I was not offered a job, just an interview, which I declined out of principle. For those saying "I'm going to regret being principled", etc. Probably not. Android App sales have been more than good to me. Good, enterprising, devs should never find themselves short of opportunities."

I wasn't trying to "ride on the geohot wave to get 15 mins of fame". Without beating my drum too much, I've already achieved a moderate degree of it within the Android community. http://twitter.com/#!/koush

I had been tweeting about geohot's happenings for the past few months, and then I got that recruiter email. So I responded, and took a screenshot because the whole thing was a pretty ironic, and tweeted it. Then ~16000 followers made it go viral: http://twitter.com/#!/koush/status/46345951819993088

kefs• 15 years ago

Koush.. I just wanted to thank you. 1) for not taking SCEA up on their offer, but more importantly, 2) for Clockwork Recovery. You are pretty much one of the only reasons we all have these great rooted Android phones. Thank you.

swaits3• 15 years ago

I work at SCEA, occasionally with Sarah on recruiting issues. Just want to put it out there that she's a genuinely nice person, and an ethical recruiter. Our internal recruiters reach out to folks like this every day. I guess she just got a bit unlucky on this one by running into someone looking for his 15 minutes.

Also, "reaching out" is a far cry from a "job offer"! You still need to be phone screened and extensively interviewed in-person before you have any sort of shot at an offer. Gotta make sure the candidate actually knows his or her stuff, and that they're not going to act like a complete asshole.

faragon• 15 years ago

Well, how did Sony in your opinion acted when stopped me to play new games while keeping the possibility of running Linux in my property? I can not find the word, but your "complete asshole" expression could work as an approximation also for that case.

swaits3• 15 years ago

With some work, I think I figured out what you are trying to ask. I have no comment on the OtherOS issue.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

A job was not offered. Title and OA are incorrect. An opening dialogue attempt was made by a recruiter.

georgecmu's comment is good too. Those sorts of emails from recruiters are closer to the random snail mail you get from credit card companies saying "Contratulations! You're pre-approved!" -- just fill out this form with all your PII and we might really approve you. Maybe. It's a little better filtered than that, but not too much.

ctide• 15 years ago

I don't understand how this gets 200+ points. Has a vast majority of people not received these blanket recruiter emails before?

RobertKohr• 15 years ago

For those who say that this will never reach the ears of anyone that matter in Sony, it isn't their ears that matter. This has brought to light something that provides negative publicity to sony in the hacker community, and will make recruiting more difficult for them.

Basically, whether they know it or not, they are effectively being punished for their actions. The failure to recruit a few talented candidates that will read about this will harm their long term business success.

Sony offers hacker a job. Hacker turns them down because of geoHot

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