

Hunter S. Thompson's brutally honest Canadian job request - rbxbx
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Hunter+Thompson+brutally+honest+Canadian+request/3606508/story.html

======
jmspring
I think the letter is a great example of how I would like to see resume
submissions / job requests written. It gets to the point pretty directly in
"this is how I think I can help" and "here is the type of environment I am/am
not interested in".

Instead, a lot of time these days is wasted in "here is my resume", phone back
and forth with some HR person, phone with the hiring person, if in person,
then you may or may not get a good feel for the work environment.

If only it were possible for both sides to be frank about "this is what we do"
and "this is what we want".

~~~
thaumaturgy
Of course it's possible -- people just don't do it, and I don't know why.

I recently needed to bring someone on to take over the basics on a bunch of my
web projects, because I'm overcommitted, as usual, and trying not to be. I
tried a local resource first, and then I went to Craigslist, which has worked
out well for me in the past.

My ad was simple and direct; it spelled out what we were about, what we were
looking for, and what we could offer, and then it had instructions: if someone
wanted the job, they needed to solve an easy puzzle, _not_ send a resume, and
instead send about a paragraph talking about their skills and experience.

It worked out great.

As far as I'm concerned, resumes are next-to-worthless. I don't really care
who you've worked for or what you've done for them. I'm not going to call them
and see if they say good things about you. I just want to know if you can
figure things out and communicate well. During the interview, I'll sort out
whether or not you actually know what you're doing.

~~~
cubicle67
Did you get many applications from people who hadn't read your instructions?

~~~
thaumaturgy
We did, and since one of the unwritten job requirements was "able to follow
clear instructions", it worked well as a filter.

Also, we posted the ad using one particular email address (a working, but
incorrect one), but to apply to the correct address they had to solve an easy
puzzle which consisted of looking at the page source for the ad, seeing that
our logo image was being loaded from ourdomain.com/job/logo.jpg, and going to
ourdomain.com/job for the correct email address to apply to.

I didn't want anything too difficult or annoying, but on the other hand, I
knew anyone that could figure that out and follow the directions would work
out fine for us.

~~~
DJN
Any chance of seeing a copy of the ad?

------
dmix
Hunter seemed to be heavily inspired by Hemingway at this point in his career.

When Hemingway started out, he worked for the Toronto Star (another Canadian
newspaper). He wrote his first novel during this time: The Sun Also Rises,
about expatriates living in Paris.

Hunter decided to apply to a Canadian newspaper after admittingly not being
familiar with it. Then not long after he wrote his first novel - The Rum Diary
- which was heavily inspired by Hemingway's first, about expatriates living in
Puerto Rico.

~~~
gregory80
hmm, I'm not really sure he was inspired by Hemingway in any meaningful way.
Perhaps purely by coincidence is that true, with Hemingway winning the nobel
prize a few years before this letter was mailed, and thompson actively copied
heminway's work, as well as several other novels, in order to learn more about
writing style, though he never published any plagiarized work.

Hemingway was a traditional, fiction, novelist and focused on his characters.
Thompson defied (edit: was defined, oops) 100s of years of traditional writing
(both novel and newspaper) by inventing so called 'gonzo' journalism. The man
openly included his own personal life directly into all of this work,
including this letter. He also, never worked in canada.

While I hold both men in high regard, the only parallels between these two men
are the facts they both were journalists and authors (and drunks), since
that's true for almost every published journalist, it's a thin comparison at
best.

~~~
rbxbx
Don't forget the fact that they both took their own lives with a shotgun to
the head.

Also, if you consult HST's wikipedia entry, you'll notice Hemingway come up
several times (and in fairly significant ways).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson>

~~~
Psyonic
Best source I can find say's he used a .45 caliber pistol, you know otherwise?
[http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/rela...](http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article3602025.ece)

No disagreement on the similarity between those two, however.

------
apu
2 other awesome letters he wrote:

[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/07/your-work-was-
inadequat...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/07/your-work-was-inadequate-
and.html)

[http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/okay-you-lazy-
bitch.htm...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/okay-you-lazy-bitch.html)

------
jacquesm
Hilarious, now, the one thing I can't get out of my head is the question if he
got the job or not?

~~~
niyazpk
There is no sign in his Wikipedia page that he worked for the Sun. So probably
not.

~~~
ursablanco
The Sun has a long history of establishment suck-holing and sucking-in-general
that continues into the foreseeable future. There's not a chance that Thompson
worked there.

------
gambhir
I did part of my MA on Thompson and even reviewed a collection of letters for
Canada's National Post newspaper years ago ([http://www.mail-
archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg57692.h...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg57692.html)). I don't know if people will
read anything but Vegas in 100 years, but his style and humour made him a
standout in his time. He was influenced by Hemingway but he also typed out The
Great Gatsby to try pick up on the style. Another strong stylistic influence
was Revelations. A great letter that brought it all back.

------
spiffworks
I have always hated writing bullshit cover letters. Now I just write short,
honest introductions. As an aside, should I make a plain text version of my
resume and put it in the body of the email itself? Or is a pdf attachment
enough? I figure the overhead of having to download and open the pdf could be
overcome by putting the resume in the body itself. Thoughts?

~~~
cubicle67
Last resume I wrote was in html (not on a site, I'd just attach a html file).
It served two purposes; gave people a chance to see what my html crafting was
like, and allowed me to include a number of links to previous sites, projects
etc

I've always included a pdf version, and I don't think I've ever submitted a
resume in .doc format

~~~
semanticist
90% of CVs are in .doc format, at least the ones going through recruitment
agencies in the EU. From what I've seen the numbers for the US should be
similar, but I don't think my experience there constitutes a large enough
sample.

(Day job is at a company providing CV parsing to recruiters.)

------
Mrdev4
My Favorite
[http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/graffiti/crook....](http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/graffiti/crook.htm)

------
pacemkr
I don't know anything about Thompson as a person, so I'll refrain from
judging. I'm only glad that I'm finally able to put a term to what I despise
most about journalism in our country (U.S.), evidently the term is "Gonzo
journalism."

"Gonzo journalism tends to favor style over accuracy and often uses personal
experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being
covered." --Wikipedia

I don't care about what the journalist thinks or feels. I'm an adult and I can
form my own opinion, based on my values. Give me the facts! Just please give
me the damn facts, I beg you! I don't need the anchor to "show attitude" and
give me "what if" scenarios to wiggle my imagination while bending the facts
in the process.

Currently, this technique is king among the major news networks in the U.S. It
makes them completely incapable of reporting the news in its natural form:
facts. It is unethical and amoral for journalists to swing public opinion with
eloquent narrative that favors "style over accuracy."

~~~
jonasvp
I've always been a big admirer of Hunter S. Thompson's style. His point was
that there is no way you can separate the author from the story so you might
as well go in whole-hog.

No author can give all the facts and "just the facts". They can't help but
shape and spin a story by selecting what they deem important, leaving out the
rest. Their choice of words determines how the reader views the subject.

I'd rather know what the person that wrote an article thought and felt - it's
another important fact.

~~~
pacemkr
This is probably true, the fact that you can't completely separate the author
from the story. Where I disagree is going in "whole-hog." I consider it
fundamental for a journalist to make her best effort to keep her opinion out
of the story. To me, that's the definition of the format. News is not supposed
to be about the person telling it.

If I am to believe what people said here (and I have no reason not to),
Thompson adhered to a higher standard in his writing. As I said originally, I
wasn't trying to say anything about him as a person or a writer. I just don't
see high standards amongst our major networks. For issues that are important
to me, they simply fail to report the basic facts when they're reporting their
opinion.

------
awt
I remember once telling an HR person at M$FT when interviewing for an
internship ( 12 years ago ) that "I don't like to be micromanaged." I've since
learned to be less forthright in my job interviews.

~~~
dasht
In other words, you do (it turns out) like being micromanaged. :-)

~~~
awt
Not really. But I don't think that most people interviewing a candidate would
be pleased to hear something like that brought up by an interviewee. Perhaps
you would, but I think most people would get the impression that someone who
brought that up in an interview would be difficult to work with, even if their
management style did not include "micro-managing."

~~~
mseebach
There's a fine line between being honest about what you like and don't like,
and then voicing an expectation that a certain workplace has certain negative
properties.

In other words, there's probably a million other thing you also don't like,
why are you bringing up micromanagement?

