

Would you answer this job ad? - zasz

<p><pre><code>     ROCKET FUEL INC HIRING ROCKET SCIENTISTS
 </code></pre>
Gang - I know you've already got jobs and you're exited about soon becoming some mountain view company's 16,502nd through 16,547th employees respectively.<p>I'm happy for you, I really am.  But dudes.  You used to be cool.  What happened?<p>The last time I recruited heavily at Stanford was 1997/98, when I got 7 of the top 7 students to join me as employees #18 thru 24 at E.piphany.  
See http://ai.stanford.edu/~gjohn/fountain98.gif.   I'm not kidding about the ranking, one guy in that photo had A+'s in 12 CS classes.<p>Two of the people in that photo went on to get CS PhD's at Stanford and MIT, two became professors, one even became a prof at Stanford, three are CEO's of their own companies, the rest went on to high-impact management roles, and they all enjoyed working on hard CS problems with fun co-workers while watching their net worth hit 8 figures.<p>So it may be worth checking out what I'm up to now, which is disrupting online advertising with advanced AI and CS.  We just hired our 7th employee today, so you can be #8.<p>We have some job descriptions posted for people who care about that stuff, but if you're smart and good at coding + databases, machine learning, or distributed systems please drop me a note with your resume including grades in Stanford CS classes + SAT/GRE.<p>------------<p>Some friends and I saw this ad recently and we laughed our asses off at how incredibly arrogant it seemed, but thinking back on the undeniable quality of the team that recruiter assembled, I'm wondering now if we were wrong. Thoughts? Is the ad unbearably arrogant or just funny&#62;
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hapless
This ad is full of red flags.

\- It denigrates other companies instead of talking up their own.

\- It talks up past projects of the recruiter, not his current work.

\- It talks about the caliber of individual employees, not their team or
culture.

\- It says SEVEN WORDS about the actual company/position.

I'm betting it all leads up to an epic lowball wage.

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dgabriel
I would never respond to an ad like that. It's more about what's wrong with
_me_ than what's right about the _company_. It's like one of those personal
ads that ask: where have all the decent men/women gone?????

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arien
To be honest, sounds like a salesman trying to sell me something as being
better than it actually is. And failing. But that's just me.

And BTW, is it just me or does that picture have some (bad) Photoshopping?

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rw
The ad isn't spell-checked. And, it is quite elitist - sure the Stanford
hackers are good, but are they the only good ones, and are they good in the
right ways (i.e. creative)?

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lacker
Who cares about the ad? You aren't going to be working with the recruiter.
Look at the company and the engineers running it.

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MaysonL
Take a look at rocketfuelinc.com and judge for yourself. Think it's got a
chance to be the next Google? I don't.

