The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

#21

Post by slurgfest » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 2:46 AM UTC

jmount wrote: post #2

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

Happens all the time, e.g. with postings for positions that are really intended to be filled internally, or with perpetual postings which do nothing but solicit people to go into a resume pool when there is no specific job.

It wouldn't be funny because it's not even surprising for job searchers to be jerked around, just normal

Re: The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

#22

Post by seanmcdirmid » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 2:51 AM UTC

ryguytilidie wrote: post #14

purplelobster wrote: post #6

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.

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? Brill…

Wow you know a lot of CMU/MIT/stanford kids, lets hire them

Not that easy.

Re: The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

#23

Post by swayvil » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 2:52 AM UTC

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.

Re: The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

#24

Post by Fundlab » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 3:15 AM UTC

jmount wrote: post #2

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

I know a colleague who tried this not for the laughs but to compare and refine his resume

Re: The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

#25

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 3:21 AM UTC

ryguytilidie wrote: post #14

purplelobster wrote: post #6

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.

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? Brill…

[deleted]

Re: The inside story of how 382 recruiters pursued an imaginary engineer

#26

Post by chrisbennet » Fri, Mar 08, 2013, 1:23 PM UTC

jmount wrote: post #2

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

There is a book "The Ax" about a laid off paper engineer who posts a fake job ad in order to see who his competition is. Then he kills them in order to increase his chances of getting a job.