The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

http://firstround.com/article/The-inside-story-of-how-382-recruiters-pursued-an-imaginary-engineer

by jkopelman • 13 years ago

78 22 13 years ago

jmount• 13 years ago

Would this be as laugh-riot funny if somebody posted a fake job offering just to watch people squirm?

That's not a valid comparison. As I understand it, the Pete London persona didn't advertise himself as looking for work - recruiters effectively started spamming him.

If someone created an entire fake company, and then laughed at engineers who tried to contact them to find out if they were hiring or not, that would probably not be very funny.

mdanger• 13 years ago

Already been done, actually: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/get-a-job-the-craigslist-expe...

drakeandrews• 13 years ago

A bunch of people I grew up with created a website for a fake, unpaid media internship. It got several hundred applicants, including three people who tracked down one of the peoples phone number and called him, demanding an interview.

slurgfest• 13 years ago

Happens all the time, e.g. with postings for positions that are really intended to be filled internally, or with perpetual postings which do nothing but solicit people to go into a resume pool when there is no specific job.

It wouldn't be funny because it's not even surprising for job searchers to be jerked around, just normal

Fundlab• 13 years ago

I know a colleague who tried this not for the laughs but to compare and refine his resume

chrisbennet• 13 years ago

There is a book "The Ax" about a laid off paper engineer who posts a fake job ad in order to see who his competition is. Then he kills them in order to increase his chances of getting a job.

vellum• 13 years ago

Wherry's original blog post was better. She has a nice graph of where she sourced all of her Javascript dev recruits.

http://www.ewherry.com/2012/06/the-recruiter-honeypot/

enjalot• 13 years ago

I also found this blog post hard to read, random missing punctuation and grammar mistakes made it hard to follow. I don't see much new in this one.

purplelobster• 13 years ago

Or, how about instead of trying to find the bestest Javascript ninja, you take a promising engineer and, I don't know, teach them? Whatever you might think, web technologies are NOT very difficult to learn. Most start-ups work on pretty trivial problems. People in the start-up crowd seem to believe that the smartest people on the planet are building web start-ups. Think again.

marcuswestin• 13 years ago

We did plenty of that as well :)

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

The other great part of teaching someone is you can usually get decent talent at a lower cost, and they can learn your process and standards. I've been in a few places where devs come in and they feel like they own the place and everybody should get in line with how they code the process they feel is right.

warbee• 13 years ago

I studied Religious Studies in college, but have always loved coding (started with Basic, Pascal, C, into others) in my free time.

One of my favorite jobs early on was where the lead of the department took the time to teach the department perl. It helped frame some of the basics of web-app development for me, and ultimately helped to pave the way to exploring other technologies.

Having since moved to the bay area, I feel like this sentiment is shared, but hardly practiced. I've interviewed at a few startups, and can answer the typical fizz-buzz-baz problem. However, I feel like that potential is overlooked for someone that can hit the ground running. (Granted, there's probably a slew of other reasons for not getting an offer).

Overall, would love to be mentored and am pursuing such a relationship now with my current employer.

nir• 13 years ago

Well said. Seems like companies are starting believe their own job ads, searching for Ninjas and Rock Stars and obsessing about hiring processes.

We're not doing brain surgery, and we're not flying to the moon. The JS frameworks mentioned in the article can be learned on the job in a matter of weeks by any reasonably competent and motivated programmer, days by a good one.

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

This has always been the weird thing for me. I'm ex-facebook so when I get hired companies will often say "wow you know a bunch of facebook people, lets hire them" not realizing they are both insanely expensive and insanely in demand.

I've always said, why not instead of hiring engineers who work at Facebook or Google, maybe beat them at their own game and instead go for the same crop of people they are hiring? Brilliant college kids who are excited to work for you and can learn from your team and develop into the great engineer you want.

seanmcdirmid• 13 years ago

Wow you know a lot of CMU/MIT/stanford kids, lets hire them

Not that easy.

rayiner• 13 years ago

I don't think it's a matter of attitude, it's a matter of scale. Training entry-level people properly takes scale. You need procedures, systems, and institutional knowledge. You need to be able to "write off" time spent learning. Startups don't have, nor can they afford, any of these things. If you look at professions that train fresh graduates systematically (everything from finance to accounting to medicine) you'll note that there is an "assembly line" quality to the process.

What's lamentable is big, established engineering companies that don't train their people.

zem• 13 years ago

nope, i did this in a startup with three engineers and no budget to hire rockstars. i hired four entry-level engineers, selecting strongly for people who could learn quickly and readily adopt the best practices i wanted to train into them. it worked out very well indeed, at the cost of another two hours per day of my time for roughly six weeks. as part of the bargain, they were willing to put in extra hours learning ruby and posix apis in their own time to keep up with the training schedule.

tapatio• 13 years ago

"Do not do what I did". Sure. Whatever you say boss.

pnathan• 13 years ago

I wonder what kind of insights could be gained by configuring a few Linkedin profiles with these characteristics:

- C++ developer

- Ruby developer

- Java developer

- COBOL developer

Feed in similar backgrounds, experiences, ages, and see which one picks up the most interest, and what kind of interest.

It'd be a bit mean to the recruiters out there, but, hmm... :-)

wilfra• 13 years ago

The degree from Stanford and the job at Meebo were definitely what got the attention - not the skills listed.

Recruiters are heavily biased on what school you went to and which companies you have worked for.

swayvil• 13 years ago

How hard would it be to create an "imaginary engineer" generator?

I would like to have a million fake engineers out there.

I just want to see the industry burn.

The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

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