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

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ryguytilidie
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.

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seanmcdirmid
_Wow you know a lot of CMU/MIT/stanford kids, lets hire them_

Not that easy.

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vellum
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/>

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enjalot
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.

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pnathan
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... :-)

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wilfra
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.

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swayvil
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.

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

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pavel_lishin
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.

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

