
Who has been running this classified ad for more than ten years? - radagaisus
http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2004/08/gee-i-wonder-if-this-will-attract-any.html
======
Yeah_Sure
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...](http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2004/08/gee-i-wonder-if-this-will-
attract-any.html#c7218485345738743166)

~~~
pcav2002
Very interesting and I wish to say thank you. Pat C. in Texas

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jml7c5
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.

------
stevenjohns
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](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?

~~~
desdiv
>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.

~~~
Ryel
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](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](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 :)

~~~
desdiv
I'm trying to link to arbitrary paragraphs i.e. paragraphs without DOM
selectors.

------
yesprocrast2
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.

~~~
sillysaurus3
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
After reading these other comments, I Googled David E. Shaw and found this:
[http://mathbabe.org/2012/04/05/it-sucks-to-be-
rich/](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.

~~~
benbreen
I commented earlier that I thought about applying to that classified job in
2007 - as it happens, in 2008 I briefly worked as the _personal assistant to a
personal assistant_ at D.E. Shaw. I was working alongside Harvard business
school types, but doing the most trivial things. I literally had to run across
midtown to deliver a six pack of Diet Dr. Pepper to one of Shaw's executives
at one point. Half the people I met there were humanities PhD dropouts. I
applied to humanities PhD programs while working there and sort of did the
reverse.

------
radagaisus
Here's an example, from the latest New York Review of Books:
[http://www.nybooks.com/classifieds/](http://www.nybooks.com/classifieds/)

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

------
creamyhorror
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](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.

------
jamhan
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.

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

------
byoung2
Maybe we'll never know...

[http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/166236](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/166236)

~~~
bbenzon
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.

------
bhartzer
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.

------
basicplus2
A return address for a spy ring?

------
vezzy-fnord
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.

