Who has been running this classified ad for more than ten years?

http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2004/08/gee-i-wonder-if-this-will-attract-any.html

by radagaisus • 12 years ago

64 38 12 years ago

workingwithwords.blogspot.com

radagaisus• 12 years ago

Here's an example, from the latest New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/classifieds/

benbreen2• 12 years ago

I thought that ad looked familiar! I'm almost positive that I thought about applying to it when I graduated college in 2007.

byoung2• 12 years ago

Maybe we'll never know...

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/166236

bbenzon2• 12 years ago

I saw the ad in hardcopy in The New Republic sometime in the 1990s. I replied but got no response. Sometime five or six years ago I applied directly to D. E. Shaw and came up empty. I believe that that these days Shaw himself spends his time on research in tool building for computational molecular biology. Has another company for that.

basicplus2• 12 years ago

A return address for a spy ring?

Yeah_Sure2• 12 years ago

I think the answer is in the comments: "6/4/08 - Just saw this and googled it, of course. If I had to guess on hedge funds, this sounds like something D.E. Shaw might try for recruitment. They're big on the whole "just be brilliant" bit in order to recruit talent. Additionally, I noticed in their own recruitment posts on CL the respond-to e-mail address is Craig-Gen@career.deshaw.com while that one is gencraig@spsfind.com. Coincidence?"

Blog author's reply: "Aha! At long last, after nearly four years, I believe Jennifer may have finally cracked the mystery. This seems pretty plausible. I only wish her link carried me somewhere that I could thank her. Here's hoping you come back and take a bow, Jennifer. Thank you all for taking part in this bit of distributed intelligence exercise. I loved watching it all unfold. And of course, I'm not discounting the distinct possibility that it will continue to unfold in ways I couldn't have guessed."

http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2004/08/gee-i-wonder-if...

pcav2002• 12 years ago

Very interesting and I wish to say thank you. Pat C. in Texas

vezzy-fnord• 12 years ago

Well, given that it seems to be confined to the NYRB and has been consistently going for so long, could it perhaps be an in-joke of theirs?

EDIT: Well, I guess not. Looks like the resolution was far more anticlimactic.

jamhan• 12 years ago

Perhaps this is a slightly more sophisticated version of the "Make $10,000 a month working from home" scheme used to recruit mules for money laundering.

riffraff2• 12 years ago

_that_ is what those announcements are for? I always assumed they were scams of the "send us 100$ to start" kind.

stevenjohns• 12 years ago

CTRL + F "Tue. Nov. 24th 2009" on that page. Apparently someone got into the Gmail account of one of the emails used for that ad and found various references to http://deshaw.com, as well as the various other people mentioning D.E Shaw in the comments.

I guess that's the end of the mystery? Or am I missing something?

Yeah_Sure2• 12 years ago

Nope, that's the end of the mystery. That was pretty quick.

mahmud• 12 years ago

Someone hacked their email, and send them his resume? Isn't that a felony?

eru2• 12 years ago

Depends on your jurisdiction.

desdiv2• 12 years ago

CTRL + F "Tue. Nov. 24th 2009"

Off topic, but is there a linking service where the reader can be directed to an arbitrary location within the page? In this case we could just click on the link and it'll directly take us to that particular comment?

I'm just surprised that there's still no way for me to link someone to a particular paragraph within a Wikipedia article in the year 2014.

garrettlarson• 12 years ago

You can click the time of each comment to get a permalink: http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2004/08/gee-i-wonder-if...

Wikipedia articles have the same functionality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#Anchor

Ryel• 12 years ago

Let's say you're reading the Land Rover (automobile) Wikipage and you want to share the 'Timeline' section with someone.

Here is the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover

If you click this one below, you will be brought straight to the 'Timeline' section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover#Timeline

Just append your URL with the selector for a DOM Element with a unique ID. In this case, the 'Timeline' div has a unique ID of 'Timeline', so I've simply appended that to the URL.

Welcome to 2014 :)

patcon2• 12 years ago

I wouldn't recommend using it for anything that needs longevity, but this has been around for a free years:

http://marker.to/

I used to use a service called "yellow hilighter", but it died and all my links broke, so fair warning :)

Kiro• 12 years ago

I don't think that's technically possible.

sbierwagen• 12 years ago

You can link directly to the an element in a page if it has an id attribute: http://example.com/index.html#foobar will jump to the foobar element in index.html-- and foobar can be anything, a paragraph, a div, an image, etc.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

palimpsests• 12 years ago

There is :-)

https://hypothes.is/

jml7c5• 12 years ago

For anyone else who was confused by this submission:

-The second part of the blog post ('Coming Across This Line [...] no better than its woods." Indeed... ') appears to have nothing to do with the first part (the quoted classified ad) and can be ignored.

-The blog post's comments section chronicles various sightings of this ad over the years. Unfortunately, the site only shows the time the comment was posted, not the date. The first comment is from around 10 years ago.

yesprocrast22• 12 years ago

The answer is obvious and simple to anyone who has worked for "one of Wall Street's most successful entrepreneurs."

These assholes churn through assistants like you wouldn't believe. Most quit, in spite of the high pay, out of basic self-respect. The others are fired during a tantrum.

Most of these jagoffs have a few pending wrongful termination lawsuits at any given time. Just ask them, they'll probably brag about it.

gwern• 12 years ago

You'd think that if the turnover was so bad that they had to have the ad literally 10 years running, at least one of the burnt assistants would've explained what's going on.

yesprocrast22• 12 years ago

I'm sure many would talk privately, but not publicly. Not if they're hoping to get paid from their lawsuit or if they got paid to sign something. Or if they want to work for another firm, and have to worry about false rumors being spread.

They also know first hand how litigious and vindictive these guys get. My friend nearly killed himself as a result of being repeatedly dragged through the courts. He was forced to burn his life savings on lawyers, after his two asshole employers predictably turned on each other. And he was just a witness in the cases, a pawn, subject to torture by two of Wall Street's most successful entrepreneurs. They blew millions on lawyers and ruined lives, just to fuck with each other.

sillysaurus3• 12 years ago

As someone who has no idea what the working environment is like, I'd love to hear some stories. What's day-to-day life like in that sort of job? I guess I'm just curious what the owners do to make it so unbearable to work there. And why they don't care.

ohquu• 12 years ago

After reading these other comments, I Googled David E. Shaw and found this: http://mathbabe.org/2012/04/05/it-sucks-to-be-rich/. (WARNING: Not sure of the validity of these stories, but they're interesting.)

First example: David hires a Ph.D. in English literature (he has a thing for “geniuses”, even in the mail room) to test mattresses for him. So that person’s job is to sleep on 15 different mattresses, for 8 nights each, and draw up a report to tell him the pros and cons of each mattress. This is to avoid him having an uncomfy night’s sleep. That’s what the risk was that we were avoiding with that.
Second example: David wants to be sure his trip to California goes smoothly, so he hires a Ph.D. in Something to take the exact same trip – same car service to the NY airport, same flight (same seat on plane!), same car service upon arrival, same hotel, exactly a week before his trip (due to understood seasonality issues of air travel) – to make sure there are no snags, and to draw up the report that presumable explains how much leg room there was in his plane.

As an aside, their research group encouraged me to apply for a position shortly before I graduated college. The application asked for things like SAT/ACT scores and (number of) lines of code written in various languages. I thought my application looked pretty good, but I guess my ACT score was too low for them to consider me (even potentially!) brilliant. I still feel kind of bitter about that.

fleitz• 12 years ago

It's super high risk, super high reward, super high pressure, basically the tech industry except the people don't pretend not to be douches. Hedge funds are the same as startups, 5 guys with 5 billion dollars who opened business two weeks ago.

Like the don't hire an asshole rule would be hire only assholes, and once in a while they'd hire someone who wasn't.

That said if you don't mind working with douches at least you'll be working with douches who aren't trying to pretend their running a 'family' as a company, which is refreshing when you're used to hearing about how the founders aren't really in it for the money but really want to 'change the world'. Financiers want to change the world too, namely, turn it into change and put that change in their pockets.

I worked on the outskirts of the finance industry, it was still pretty insane, but nothing like the guys actually in it.

lazyant• 12 years ago

sounds like "The devil wears Prada" book/movie

bhartzer• 12 years ago

Well, if you go to spsfind.com, it 301 redirects to sps-app.com, which seems to be a social positioning app, in Hebrew. Doesn't seem to be related to D.E. Shaw, though.

creamyhorror• 12 years ago

At 3:35 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

For me, the experience was just as weird and intriguing as the ad itself. First off was the reception area. The cathedral ceilings throw scale completely off, dwarfing the visitor... http://tiny.cc/ne5pew It does convey a sense of power and high-tech savvy, but it also seemed dated. A young, very polished woman took my jacket. I looked her up later and she'd been a child actress in at least one film that I'd seen. Everyone was very nice in kind of a cult-y way. I was led to an office in the middle of a floor full of empty workspaces. The guy who interviewed me was a lawyer and said he still worked part-time on the side, and that that was an accepted part of the culture. Mr. Shaw had basically unlimited money thanks to the success of his hedge fund, but he did not have unlimited time. To create more time, they were staffing up for personal assistants who could handle everything from getting Knicks tickets to making dental appointments. We both figured out it wasn't a match early on, so we had a nice conversation instead. And somewhere in that building I guess my resume still sits...

edit: The thread started by yesprocrast2 covers the topic further. I guess working among geniuses for one of Wall Street's winners isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Who has been running this classified ad for more than ten years?

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