Looking for true geek blood

http://vsagarv.posterous.com/looking-for-true-geek-blood

by Praveens • 15 years ago

14 27 15 years ago

vsagarv.posterous.com

jarin• 15 years ago

Hmm breakfast with Linus would be cool, but you can talk to him online too. Also, this has a very heavy male bias.

codedivine• 15 years ago

The question is in rather poor taste.

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

Only if the answer that first jumps at you is in poor taste. Think about it.

StavrosK4• 15 years ago

An appointment with Linus is cheaper than "a lot more" with Jolie and Fox together, so I'll go with the latter.

Except it's stupid.

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

Awesome choice :)

BTW, that's the 2nd best choice one can make. Think.

And, I forgot to mention that breakfast with Linus is a charity event with a cover charge of 100 USD. Would you still wakeup early and run for it?

StavrosK4• 15 years ago

I wouldn't in the first place, I'd go with the women. It costs 100 USD for lunch with Linus, but good luck getting a threesome with the girls.

Besides, yes, sexist.

holman• 15 years ago

I hope they find the heterosexual male they're looking for.

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

There was this (wo)man who slapped her/his psychiatrist during an ink-blot test.

Until you brought it up, we never thought of our candidates' sexual orientations. We do test for adequate blood circulation to the brain, though.

StavrosK4• 15 years ago

I think that only females and homosexual males would be able to answer the question "correctly", so this might be reverse-sexist :P

microtonal• 15 years ago

How about none of the above?

Anyway, to put it bluntly: I wouldn't want to work for a company with such a sexist attitude. Diversity is good.

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

Daniel, how diverse does this team look? http://www.altheasystems.com/about.html

We have not tested/interviewed you. So, the question of your working for us is hypothetical, at best.

acanals• 15 years ago

not sure if trolling or just.......

jgrahamc2• 15 years ago

I was going to flag this but actually I'm upvoting so that people can see how bloody awful this is.

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

If you can point out which part of the post is bloody and which part is awful, I will send a new manuscript in triplicate, for your proof reading and editing, Sir.

I didn't know there existed humour-vaccums in the HN space time continuum. I prescribe one page of Wodehouse with your morning coffee and two strips of Dilbert before bed.

jgrahamc2• 15 years ago

In this case bloody was an adjective on awful, so we'll just go with awful. I think the posting does your company and your country a disservice.

Firstly, it makes your company look like it's run by people who are sexist because you decide to explicitly bring up two actresses and having sex with them in a job posting. This makes me wonder what the working environment would be like. In the posting you might have got away with "Would you rather spend time with Angelina Jolie or Linus Torvalds?" but you went with asking whether I'd rather have a threesome sexual encounter with those two actresses.

Secondly, the posting doesn't do much to tell me why your company is interesting. You mention some characteristics of the application in the part you term SEO but you don't mention specifics such as datastorage platform or programming language.

Thirdly, since you are in India and I don't have much experience of India a job posting like this on the front page of Hacker News makes me wonder whether this sort of sexist imagery is normal in India and that doesn't attract me to the place.

Lastly, this isn't a question of humour. Whenever sexist, racist, homophobic imagery is used in the computer industry a common retort from the people who use it is that the people 'offended' need to get a sense of humour. How funny would it be to you if I posted a job posting that made it clear that I was biased against Indians?

tomh-• 15 years ago

I think its good for prospective employees to know that instead of dating Angelina Jolie and Megan Fox at the same time, they will be eating 5 varieties of pizza's while coding in the evenings. At least they are honest :)

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

Thanks! I was wondering if it was just me all alone, amongst a crowd of inappropriately politically correct.

You are single handedly pulling up the average HQ of this thread :^) I owe you a pizza.

Singletoned• 15 years ago

This could actually be an attempt to increase their diversity. They could be hoping that all the heterosexual males choose the first option, and that way they will get more women and gay men applying.

I don't think it's going to work though.

(Also I imagine Linus is extra grumpy at 7am).

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

And what is your opinion on the technical part of the post?

tristanstraub• 15 years ago

I'm sure the answer is 'neither'. After hearing the "cvs/ugly and stupid" comments from torvalds (sorry dude, but those comments paint a picture), and that hollywood is a world of its own, the only way to win is not to play.

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

Neither is a super busy geek's answer. I'll take it :)

I was a long time cvs user. Could hack it to do what I wanted. Switched to git ~2yrs ago; not so easy to bend but its complexity is one of its main attraction for me.

bilalhusain• 15 years ago

reminds me of http://careers.directi.com/display/CAR/Front+End+Engineer (who should apply section)

Sort of complementing stunts from the other side[1] of hiring scene

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Is_Nothing_%28video_...

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

Thanks for the one of the few sane comments on this thread. I'll buy you some coffee, if you walk the streets of Bangalore.

vsagarv12• 15 years ago

The post is mine. Didn't know it was posted here by my friend. Thanks to him, real hackers who care about the trade are already mailing me about the engineering part of that post. Both men and women. The following part of the comment is for the sensitive rest.

Hey guys,

(I hope, in modern urban culture, 'guys' is a sexually neutral term; Else, I will have to address the some of the sensitive readers as Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms ...; Let me know)

Sincere apologies are in order:

* To all men and some women whom my post offended because I didn't mention their favourite starlet

* To all women and some men whom my post offended because I didn't mention Brad Pitt and David Hasselhoff

* And to all others who are not Scott Adams' readers

Some of the best computer science engineers I have worked with are women. And I don't hire based on the brand of their nail polish.

You are welcome. The pleasure is mine.

Looking for true geek blood

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