Can someone explain why people hate this reply so much? This is a perfect subreddit describing this very scenario, and my submission there is now #2, indeed making this relevant r/nottheonion material. Is this just generic reddit hate or what?
Guy's probably here on a tourist visa and won't be able to convert even if he receives an offer.
He needs to be starting a company. Philippe Kahn started Borland while he was illegal alien. He got to a $500 million run rate without venture capital! It was only when Borland was going public that he was able to obtain a green card!
By 'tourist visa' you mean ESTA, right. Lithuanians are eligible for this.
While on the ESTA you can conduct 'business meetings'. I've (tried) to raise VC, interview at YC and conduct job interviews on the ESTA and it's been fine. At least the border patrol people didn't seem to mind.
ESTA allows you to stay up to 3 months, no change of status allowed. B1/B2 allows a maximum of 6 months, with the possibility to change status without leaving the country.
Straight from border control's mouth: you can't look for work on a B2. I got razzed about this a couple of times when entering the US as a foreign national.
If it's an H1B they would have to apply, submit on Apr 1st next year, see if he gets the VISA through our lottery system, and start around October if he gets it. It might be faster if the company has an international office and he can work from there.
What is to stop anybody with the price of a plane ticket from flooding into Silicon Valley? In practice this is one area where immigration is stricter than you might think.
I've got a Canadian friend who was keynoting a conference and couldn't get admittance to the US because he was getting a free hotel room in exchange for speaking.
As bdcravens said, Borland was acquired in 2009. The full story is a bit more complex.
Borland was founded in 1983. It bought Ashton-Tate, Analityca, and Wizard Systems in the 1980s. It spun off JPI, too.
Then in the 1990s products (mostly office products competing with Microsoft offerings) were sold off to Corel, Novell, and KSoft while buying Open Development Corporation and Visigenic. The move was on to refocus the company on development tools rather than office applications. They changed their name to Inprise.
In the oughts, they tried to merge with Corel but that failed as no good fit between the two could be found. They changed their name back to Borland. They bought Legadero, Gauntlet Systems, StarBase, and TogetherSoft then spun off CodeGear into its own wholly-owned subsidiary. The also moved to Austin, Texas.
CodeGear was sold to Embarcadero Technologies and later Borland itself was sold to Micro Focus International (yes, of Micro Focus Cobol) for around a dollar and a half per share (around $75,000,000). and operates as a subsidiary of that company under the Borland name.
It's been said that if you do anything relating to software well enough long enough, you eventually get bought by Attachmate, IBM, or Micro Focus. Well, Attachmate (yes, the company that bought Novell and NetIQ) was also purchased by Micro Focus, as was SUSE. HPE Software is apparently up next (for a reported $8,800,000,000) after being spun off by Hewlett-Packard into HPE and HPE then spinning off the software side into HPE Software. I guess Borland did well enough to be in that crowd. Now you can get your Cobol, Pascal, other languages, terminal emulators, security and management tools, code auditing software, and a whole bunch more from the branches of one big company. They do consulting on all of it too.
Oh, and as part of that last deal mentioned, HPE's preferred Linux is now SUSE. So Borland is part of one of the largest software companies in the world, with about 4,000 employees developing for and supporting multiple product segments across multiple platforms including their own.
Wow, thanks for the summary of Borland's history! I've never heard of either Attachmate or Micro Focus before today, and I thought I knew a bit about the software world.
This is fairly brilliant for a marketing guy. What it comes down to, is he got the attention of the people he was trying to reach. In the end, it's like the guys that do very targeted advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook for similar goals. If you can reach the selective audience you are trying to for the job, in creative ways, odds are you can reach that company's audience as well.
I don't think so. People let delivery guys in so they can deliver something. They don't let delivery guys in and then leave them wholly unsupervised to do whatever the hell they want.
Having personally witnessed a delivery guy walking out with a half-dozen or so engineering laptops (I realised this seconds too late, after walking into the office area), tucked into his messenger bag, it's been known to happen. Lax security was a confounding issue.
Why not? The only thing preventing you from doing this is your self-formed limited beliefs in what you can or cannot do. You could literally decide to just do this and start doing this tomorrow.
Don't sell yourself short, everyone else is already doing that for you.
It kind of makes me think of the Dumb Starbucks episode of Nathan for You (parody law).
> Spectators and media commentators questioned the stunt's authenticity, viewing it variously as performance art, a statement on consumerism, a viral marketing achievement or the work of street artist Banksy.
You're missing the forest for the trees. You can replace "brave enough to do this" with "brave enough to play at that open mic night" or "brave enough to talk to that cute girl in class".
In all cases, the reason that the OP doesn't believe he can do this has to do solely with his false limiting self beliefs about his abilities.
Not really. At worst you get arrested for trespassing and Postmates sues you. But the unlikelyness of both seems sky high to me. It's not like impersonating a police officer.
I agree that the odds of any one place giving him trouble are low, but he hit up 40 different places.
If just one of them decided to call the cops, he'd be arrested, and that might end up with him being banned from re-entering the US. If each place only has a 1% chance of calling it in, we're talking about cumulative odds around 1 in 3.
File this under "more evidence that hiring is broken". It's just so silly that companies set up elaborate HR departments and job postings and internal recruiters that collect resumes, and then when you look at how they actually hire it's through popularity/celebrity, friends of friends, and stunts like this.
I don't disagree with your statement that "hiring is broken", but the evidence you use to come to that conclusion is not particularly convincing. It's essentially, "There are multiple hiring channels."
What the resume-in-pizza-boxes channel offers over, say, the resumes-in-email channel, is a lot fewer resumes. You've got some intention signalling in the RIPB version (it's expensive in terms of time and other committments), but low informational signalling otherwise as to overt qualifications, outside some general concepts (hustle, motivation, time availability / opportunity costs, charisma, confidence, or simply having heard of the trick somewhere).
There are a bunch of selection hueristics whose primary benefit is they eliminate a large component of the choice process. You'd do fairly well in simply randomly sampling from amongst the submissions, or applying some very rudimentary filters to eliminate the most obviously bad choices.
This is why mechanisms such as racial, gender, age, and cultural bias are so common. They're easy to apply, aren't entirely wrong (relatively homogeneous groups tend to operate better than nonhomogeneous ones, though there are many arguments about resilience and creativity/diversity), and hugely reduce the decisionmaking costs of the selector.
Unfortunately, knowledge / infotech / creative work hinges hugely on intangibles which are quite difficult to effectively communicate, especially to someone (say, an HR flunky) not intimately familiar with the field.
Toss in a ton of employer biases and control incentives (e.g., anti-poaching, anti-union, and similar concerns) and the situation starts getting messy quickly. Sure, there might be some alterative opportunities created as a result, but these tend to have far less commercial/financial potential and viability.
> mechanisms such as racial, gender, age, and cultural bias are so common. They're easy to apply, aren't entirely wrong (relatively homogeneous groups tend to operate better than nonhomogeneous ones, though there are many arguments about resilience and creativity/diversity)
I'll accept cultural homogeneity having worked in different cultures myself. But if you're seriously suggesting that racial, gender and age groupings are correlated with performance and subconsciously okay, you're going to have to provide a very convincing argument.
First: I don't think that such biases are OK, for numerous reasons.
On an intellectual basis, I can acknowledge, though, that high-affinity classifiers -- ones with a strong, clear, and generally readily determined distinguishing capacity -- are frequently used. Language, speech, religion, gender, dress, custom, and more. People are inherently clannish. You'll see this not only in tech hiring, but in ethnic conflicts: Iraq, schoolyards around the world, Nanking & Korea in WWII, Syria, prison populations, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Tunesia, the various ape species actors in the Planet of the Apes cafeteria, Columbia, Yemen, England vs. Ireland, England vs. Scotland, Flemish vs. Walloon, Basque vs. Spanish, various subreddits, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Israel-Palestine, and many, many more.
A principle problem of any seggregation regime is that it tends to require oppressive, often violent, occasionally genocidal enforcement to be sustained. Which is a key reason to seek integrated rather than segregated societies.
However that integration is going to have to be sustained against an apparently very-deeply ingrained resistance to doing so. And simply demanding conformance is likely to be at best only partially successful. The record of the US in that effort, well over 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, and over 150 years after the Civil War and just shy 150 years after the 14th amendment, illustrates this.
I'm not claiming homogeneous societies are better or preferable. I'm strongly suggesting they're easier to establish and sustain, and that they tend to self-organise as such.
Distilling the essence of your argument, how is it any different to, for instance, heteronormative gender roles a la women for childbirth and domestic rearing? Are societies "easier to establish and sustain" in this binary configuration purely because they "tend to self-organise as such" for millenia?
I mean you may claim no one can force this heterogenous utopia but it is most certainly the future.
> There are a bunch of selection hueristics whose primary benefit is they eliminate a large component of the choice process. You'd do fairly well in simply randomly sampling from amongst the submissions, or applying some very rudimentary filters to eliminate the most obviously bad choices.
I'm reminded of the hiring manager that randomly tosses into the shredder 90% of incoming resumes. "I don't want to hire someone who's unlucky!"
If that 90% is selected randomly, it's at least not a biasing selection.
I'd suggest a below-bar elimination check (e.g., spelling, gross formatting), and an high-level check in case, say, Ted Ts'o happens to be applying. Take the bulk of largely undifferentiated but not obviously bad resumes, shuffle them, and select randomly from them. Pick your sample, apply your assessments, and proceed.
The low-cost primary selection, and the unbiased secondary selection, leave the expensive selection process (resume screen, phone screen, interviews, background / portfolio assessment, etc.) with a tractable number of candidates to deal with.
Someone willing to try this is clearly highly motivated in their job search. Which is one of several axis of qualifications you'd wan to consider. Depending on the position sought (I've not RTFAd), the gumption could be a positive indicator for, say, marketing or leadership (charisma, initiative, risk-tolerance, confidence) though quite likely flat or negative for programming / knowledge-work (humility can matter a lot there).
The economics of information, signalling, signalling costs, proxies for information, quality assessment, etc., are a fascinating and IMO under-studied area. In another tab I'm going through the American Economic Association's annual Papers & Presentations issues looking for topics covered. There are a few on information (early 1970s) that I've found yet. But overall, horribly broken.
It's a bit like the Xerox-generation effect -- if you take an image and photocopy it repeatedly, you'll get an increasingly high-contrast image (a similar effect comes from playing with contrast settings in a photo editor such as the GIMP). But what's lost is the subtlty and nuance. For images which present well in high-contrast (say, the Eiffel Tower against the sky), this isn't terrible. Monet's Rouen Cathedral, Facade (Morning effect) not so much.
The children's game of "telephone" (in which a message is passed by voice from person to person around a circle) is similar.
I'm starting to wonder what examples there are of error-correcting high-quality, high-relevance information transmission systems within biology and elsewhere.
My start in marketing was as a professional actor - where you spend 98% of your time doing marketing. If you do that well, you get to go to an audition. If you do that well, you get to go do your real job and get paid. (Eventually I moved into the tech world.)
Funny thing - this technique is as old as Hollywood. I've heard of tons of similar stories over the years. Heck, Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) got his role when the producer saw his headshot in a pizza box.
Using publicity stunts and showing up at people's offices with food are both classic job seeking tactics. But sneaking into people's offices dressed as a delivery person is a terrible idea. Some people might be receptive to it, but a lot of other people are going to feel unsafe and like their physical space has been violated.
I've used various schemes around the world, but this has the best selection of cars and is the fastest growing. They now have over 500 cars, which given the size of Lithuania is crazy. Their emails have a real personal feel which is no doubt down to Lukas work!
I actually met Lukas a few days ago, very nice guy. I was in San Francisco for Salesforce's Dreamforce conference and was staying at a shared AirBnB where he was my roommate for the week.
One night there was a party hosted by Salesforce that I thought Lukas was planning on attending so when I noticed it seemed like he was turning in soon I asked him what changed his mind; he told me he had an interview in the morning with ABC. Not knowing his situation I assumed it was for his startup so I told him congratulations and asked what kind of work his company did. He saw I was confused by his answer that he was actually looking for a job so he just showed me a clip from Good Morning America that talked about the story and said it was probably easier to understand if I just watched the video.
I have a feeling I'll be seeing him again next year--leading a session on marketing at the conference.
This is a brilliant insight into how little I understand the world.
If I was applying to the same company I'd be VERY upset this guy gets an interview.
If I was the person he got delivered the donuts I'd curse him out of the office and tell him to apply like everybody else.
What makes him special or give him the right to basically break the rules and disrespect everyone who tries their best to get through the recruiting door? What would happen if everyone acted the same and started stalking execs and managers trying to "serve" them whimsical resumés?
Clearly I'm the one who's strange since everyone else thinks it's great... maybe it's a cultural thing?
Like I told a previous poster, I think you are perceiving rules where there aren't any. Just because there is a dating web site doesn't mean that is the only way to ask someone on a date.
First, he was applying for a marketing position. A position that demands creativity and the ability to stand out and be noticed...so, essentially he proved himself with this gimmick. In other words, this wasnt just a gimmick but rather a demonstration of his skills.
It just like an engineer getting interviewed after finding a bug in your code.
On a more critical note, applying for a job is a zero sum game. Only one person gets hired. If you are more concerned with rules and respecting other applications by not standing out, you are just playing the game poorly. Your job as an applicant is to a)get noticed and b)beat out everyone else for the job.
All this is to say that if followong the rules are so important in your organization, this guy is a bad fit. If it requires scrappiness, creativity, and "hacker" mentality, it is a perfect fit.
Do you really equate sleeping with HR to getting noticed by delivering donuts to executives?
I want to point you to Paul Graham's essay about what they look for in Founders. Specifically, "They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
Yeah, so the thing about stuff like this is that it is inherently classist. There are 2 things at play here:
- knowing what rules are permissible to break highly depends on your upbringing and social status. In other words, "the rules that don't matter" for Paul Graham are the rules that don't matter for a rich old white dude.
- it's much easier to break the rules when you know that there will be no consequences because of your wealth/social status . Kids whose parents paid for a Stanford education will "delight in breaking rules" much more than the hard working kid from immigrant parents desperate to fit in in a world where no one looks like her.
This is exactly the kind of privileged rhetoric that people who push for more diversity and sensitivity in Silicon Valley and tech are trying to highlight/stave off.
I think you are making some pretty broad assumptions about a whole bunch of things.
First, this very article is about an immigrant, with no status, money or connections, creating opportunity for himself.
Obviously, I am gonna be somewhat biased by my own upbringing, so I can't be truly objective (other than knowing that I grew up in a vastly different upbringing that the folks you describe, yet still feel there are some rules that should be broken and others that shouldn't be crossed.
My only two points I would make are:
1. YC Funds a pretty diverse crowd from all over the world if I understand correctly (I have no direct knowledge.)
2. Founding a successful startup isn't for everyone, and maybe it favors some over others due to life circumstances, but that doesn't change the reality that to innovate and succeed, you might need that "naughty" mentality, regardless of whether it came from a place of privilege or not.
Finally, In my experience, persistence is by far a more important trait for success than almost anything else, and the most driven, focused, persistent people are often the ones that fought against all odds to break free from their underprivileged circumstances, much like the immigrant you described. I am not sure they feel a need to play by arbitrary rules or not, but even if they do, they often rise above through sheer force of will...and often that persistence, and will power brings them to do things that open doors by ignoring propriety and breaking down barriers and limitations that live in their head more than anywhere else.
I might be biased about all sorts of privilege and might be blind to the class bias you refer to, I do not know...but my gut and experience tell me that individuals and their personal decisions matter much more than their class and circumstances. (Not discounting those other factors, just discounting the role they actually play in reality relative their own choices and of course colored by my own bias.)
I've worked with thousands of teenagers from underserved/underprivileged communities at this point, in 3 different countries, teaching them how to code, but also interview and fit in within larger tech companies.
When they are exposed to an environment they have never been in before - for example the tech industry/startup world - many of them are overwhelmed, confused, and feel like they have to tread very carefully because they don't want to lose the opportunity to make $100k a year as an engineer when the other option is retail/service jobs. In those cases, they do their best to follow the rules and be on their best behavior, and are not going to take any risks of being naughty.
This is not at odds with being driven, focused, persistent etc. It's about being from a completely different social environment and not wanting to fuck up because you're the first person in your family who might break out of the minimum wage chain.
Honestly, that boils down to how you frame and perceive (and teach)risk more than anything else.
If they perceive stability in a $100k job and perceive startups as risking that opportunity, they will be afraid...it has nothing to do with where they came from.
Edit: Also, if you really think about it...those kids are already breaking the rules by learning to code and not accepting their upbringing as determining their fate. They are breaking all sorts of cultural rules.
When you're the first in your family to go to college, and that for your entire life your reality was mom and older brother working multiple jobs to feed 3 generations under the same roof and yet you still went hungry at the end of the month and regularly got the power cut, well yes you don't perceive taking risks the same way as Paul Graham does.
If you want to come to our workshops and talk to these young adults about how to frame and perceive risk, please do get in touch.
Paul Graham said he started viaweb because he didn't want to be poor anymore. I guess poor can be relative.
I dont know PG personally and I don't know the young adults you teach, so I can only speak in generalities, but the scenario you painted can just as easily mint a determined person who takes all sorts of risks because, "What do they have to lose?!"
I guess what I'm trying to say is that only a fraction of people are entrepreneurs and those people usually have certain ways to view the world that the majority of people don't...So, when you observe this fear in your prodigies, maybe that fear is about proportionate to the general population and while the specific fear might be different, the willingness to view the world in away that allows risk taking in entreprenuership might have nothing to do with specific backgrounds but rather specific personalities and perspectives.
>Do you really equate sleeping with HR to getting noticed by delivering donuts to executives?
No, there is a huge difference.
But why does the line lay at donuts? Who decides which rules matter? How about cash instead of donuts? How about fake references? Is that brilliant or wrong?
There are quite a few successful people who are far more than just naughty, I believe one is successful enough to be running for president. The slightly naughty have far less room to criticize outrageous behavior if their line is ever shifting and coincidentally always just beyond their own acts.
Any human system requires good intent and fair play to function. Any such system can be gamed by a small number of players. Those players will usually come out ahead with little harm to that system. If the number gets large then then any system will begin to break down. So is the goal to keep the number of rule breakers small and make sure we are always in that group?
And if the hiring process is broken, fix it. Encouraging ludicrous ad hoc random non-sense is the exact opposite of fixing anything.
What is being suggested is that there are some unwritten ever changing rules know only to the initiated that are the real rules. The official published rules are for "the other" and frankly only exist exactly to keep out the uninitiated.
All i'll say is that in this case, where he was applying for a marketing position, he wasnt breaking rules, he was proving his qualifications for the job.
The broader discussion is outside my realm of expertise.
> How about cash instead of donuts? How about fake references?
Paid advertising. Guerilla marketing. Fake reviews and scores. Cardboards bigger than contents. Yep, that's exactly what marketing section does. Why would you think that would disqualify a person to work there?
The line you drew is utterly arbitrary and could just as easily include sleeping with staff and justify that as great salesmanship.
What about hacking a company server to put his resume on the top of the queue? Offering the data in exchange for a "position"? Blackmailing with it?
Because he just got into dozens of company offices using nothing but a tee shirt. He could easily have carried a flash drive alongside the resume in those donuts.
Each person who cheats draws the line just beyond their own behavior. To prevent chaos the hard line lies were the authorities enforce it. And such blunt instruments damage the systems they protect almost as negatively as the violators they catch.
But the argument about cheating has been going on since the Olduvai Gorge and this conversation is going to have exactly the same effect as every other one.
The only difference at this time is that cheating has been bizarrely fetishized into being a good thing. And the biggest picture is merely chasing the latest web fad so zealously that a community has been transformed into one so obsessed with wealth that its member happily step over homeless on the way to lunch everyday. And so much as commenting on this situation is consider politically extreme even transgressive.
Thanks for your comment you make a good point in that he is applying for a marketing job and his attitude can be perceived as a great example of guerrilla marketing.
However I think you're treading a thin line by focusing solely on the desired outcome of one individual. If everyone thought like that'd it'd be a race towards some pretty unethical and/or immoral behaviours.
This "what matters is that we got ours" mentality can lead to a lot of resentment.
> However I think you're treading a thin line by focusing solely on the desired outcome of one individual
When you apply for a position, are you doing it for the "greater good" or will you have a desired outcome for one individual- that is yourself?
There are so many different ways to skip the hiring pipeline that are widely accepted: would you consider recommendations from current employees or acqhiring as unfair?
>If everyone thought like that'd it'd be a race towards some pretty unethical and/or immoral behaviours.
Strategies like this have been around for decades, yet somehow most people are NOT willing to put in the extra work to execute on it.
Donny Deutsch did something similar, "Donny pitched a TV account, Tri-State Pontiac dealers. (Just to get into the pitch, Donny sent car parts to the home of the Pontiac rep. He sent a fender with a note that read, “We’ll cover your rear end.” http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/n_8669/
8 Years ago I was trying to get an interview at Neo@Ogilvy as a search marketer. I sent my resume several times with no results. I spent the extra time to really think about what would make me stand out and I designed my resume to look like a search results page and got a call from them within 10 hours of applying. This was because the key to advertising design is imagery that supports the message. It demonstrated my appreciation of the nuances of effective advertising.
Direct mail marketers have been promoting Lumpy Mail or 3D Mail as a way to make sure your mailer gets noticed, opened, and read. (i.e. putting bulky thinks in the mail so It can't be put on the bottom of a junk mail pile.)
These are not really even hacks, it is one of the rules of the game. If you go the extra mile demonstrating you care enough to stand out, you earned the attention you get.
I don't think these tactics are a slippery slope at all. It's no different than Sam Altman flying across the country to meet a company (that didnt want to meet with him) that was about to sign with a competitor, or PokerShare.com training a Chimp to play poker and bring it on tour.
There is a world of difference between being clever and being unethical.
Thanks for your response, between your comments and someone's previous answer it's clear how I disregarded how a Marketing professional would view this.
I find your résumé example acceptable and easy to understand, by what you did, I as a recruiter looking for someone with graph design skills would get a better understanding of your skills.
The direct mail and poker playing monkey examples I find poor - for me they get classified as the "who screams louder" type tactics they don't add anything of value, they just benefit the individual who wants an outcome of their target.
Someone else here said something about how "Analytical types" find comfort in rules and I have definitely been described as an analytical even though I'm very comfortable breaking certain rules (bureaucracy mostly) I'm uncomfortable feeling like a "cheater", in other words: I want to deserve.
Also coming from a 3rd world country where a lot of benefits, specially in government, are achieved through bribery and nepotism I'm probably overly sensitive about it.
I think this particular candidate was comfortable breaking the usual hiring process as he felt that was bureaucratic.
I don't think the cost of a box of donuts amounts to bribery in Silicon Valley, and he's not a friend or family member so it's not nepotism.
What he did was get noticed, even though it's a bit of a gimmick. Do you remember the Million Dollar Homepage? That worked because it was a novel idea. Nobody made it big on a copycat site. Similarly, this fellow stood out and that got him interviews. However if lots of people start trying this same method it'll fail quickly as a means to get interviews.
I do think sending a portfolio of work is much better than just a resume. This guy made himself part of his portfolio, which for a marketing position is a great thing but which won't scale to every candidate showing up with donuts for every position. Thankfully programmers can send code and graphic designers can send images.
Not really a cultural thing, as every culture has some form of this (see for instance the conversation here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535415). I'd say probably more of a personality thing. A lot of analytical types tend to find comfort in rules, and feel a great sense of injustice when people break them in order to have unequal footing. I'm with you on this - if someone pulled this stunt on me, I'd thank them for the donuts and then tell them to put their resume on the pile like everyone else.
That being said, it's sadly not how the real world works.
Yes, I think you are perceiving "rules" where their aren't any. Applying for a job is similar to dating in many ways. Metaphorically speaking, this guy chose ask a girl out by singing under her window instead of "applying" through the dating site.
It's not that he has extra rights or privilege, it's that he _made extra effort_. He took the initiative and went the extra mile. Applying online is easy, perhaps he did that as well, but showing up in person is really recognizable and obviously took him extra time and work.
Now, on the flipside, he could be seen as absolutely wasting a busy person's time by not going through the proper channels, thereby destroying his chance of getting the job. That's the risk of being bold, but they also say, nothing risked, nothing gained.
Your lesson to help you better understand the world lies in the answer to that question.
What makes him special is knowing how to break the rules in ways that don't have too many negative repercussions. It's not easy, but if you can do it, it puts you ahead of the people who play by the rules.
Have you ever applied to very large desirable companies / competetive positions? In most cases the system is completely broken.
Here are a few genuine personal anecdotes:
Friend applies to Amazon via website. Finally gets reply 6 months down the line. Seriously - who has 6 months to wait around for a job. In that time he had 6 months to get actual experience and have an even better resume.
Different friend gets summer internship at top legal firm, on leaving/ "you're hired" party, drunk HR manager admits they were very busy so the entire team decided to base internship interviews on the first sentence of the cover letter.
While at working at bigcorp see numerous roles, including positions in senior management go unadvertised to people who are recommended for the position.
More generally, there are a great deal of places that will bin your application if you didn't go to an Ivy, so how is someone from another country to even get a chance?
So is this unfair on the other applicants? Probably. But mainly, the system is unfair on applicants.
There are but two rules. #1 Anything possible, you can do. #2 Anything impossible you can try to do, but it will fail because it is impossible.
Oh, and just a small note. Any action you take (including inaction) has side effects. Take a think of what they are (positive or negative) and balance them up to decide your course of action.
The world has but two rules dude. Any others are the ones you've imposed upon yourself.
I'd hire this person just to improve his life for a while. Hiring him will probably help him more than someone else.
If you can hire or promote or help someone, then do so.
Recently had to choose to promote either a single mom (stable home) 11 yrs in the job or a part-time just graduated woman renting a house for free in exchange for child care. Both were equally qualified. Which would be helped more? The part time student. Once promoted into FT position she gets benefits. Easy choice. Plus, the company stresses helping employees as #1 priority.
Even if this guy does not work out and he is termed after 90 days, he is better off trying and I improved his lot.
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He needs to be starting a company. Philippe Kahn started Borland while he was illegal alien. He got to a $500 million run rate without venture capital! It was only when Borland was going public that he was able to obtain a green card!
http://articles.latimes.com/print/1992-02-23/business/fi-511...
A year or two some music artist got banned for 10 years because he was on the wrong visa and was doing business in the US.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160823205204/http://gawker.com...
http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/2157/can-you-searc...
While on the ESTA you can conduct 'business meetings'. I've (tried) to raise VC, interview at YC and conduct job interviews on the ESTA and it's been fine. At least the border patrol people didn't seem to mind.
But you're right that the guy im the article is from Lithuania, so he might be using an ESTA.
I mean, it's not a must that a company would offer sponsorship, but if they didn't I think there'd be no use in an offer.
Good story about the Borland guy though.
I've got a Canadian friend who was keynoting a conference and couldn't get admittance to the US because he was getting a free hotel room in exchange for speaking.
Borland was founded in 1983. It bought Ashton-Tate, Analityca, and Wizard Systems in the 1980s. It spun off JPI, too.
Then in the 1990s products (mostly office products competing with Microsoft offerings) were sold off to Corel, Novell, and KSoft while buying Open Development Corporation and Visigenic. The move was on to refocus the company on development tools rather than office applications. They changed their name to Inprise.
In the oughts, they tried to merge with Corel but that failed as no good fit between the two could be found. They changed their name back to Borland. They bought Legadero, Gauntlet Systems, StarBase, and TogetherSoft then spun off CodeGear into its own wholly-owned subsidiary. The also moved to Austin, Texas.
CodeGear was sold to Embarcadero Technologies and later Borland itself was sold to Micro Focus International (yes, of Micro Focus Cobol) for around a dollar and a half per share (around $75,000,000). and operates as a subsidiary of that company under the Borland name.
It's been said that if you do anything relating to software well enough long enough, you eventually get bought by Attachmate, IBM, or Micro Focus. Well, Attachmate (yes, the company that bought Novell and NetIQ) was also purchased by Micro Focus, as was SUSE. HPE Software is apparently up next (for a reported $8,800,000,000) after being spun off by Hewlett-Packard into HPE and HPE then spinning off the software side into HPE Software. I guess Borland did well enough to be in that crowd. Now you can get your Cobol, Pascal, other languages, terminal emulators, security and management tools, code auditing software, and a whole bunch more from the branches of one big company. They do consulting on all of it too.
https://borland.com/en-GB/Home https://www.microfocus.com/about/press-room/article/2016/mic... http://www.computerworld.com/article/3117709/cloud-computing...
Oh, and as part of that last deal mentioned, HPE's preferred Linux is now SUSE. So Borland is part of one of the largest software companies in the world, with about 4,000 employees developing for and supporting multiple product segments across multiple platforms including their own.
> Here for just a few weeks, he knew it wouldn't be easy.
Also: that guy had brass balls.
Don't sell yourself short, everyone else is already doing that for you.
> Spectators and media commentators questioned the stunt's authenticity, viewing it variously as performance art, a statement on consumerism, a viral marketing achievement or the work of street artist Banksy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks
In all cases, the reason that the OP doesn't believe he can do this has to do solely with his false limiting self beliefs about his abilities.
Seems like the potential downside to doing this is a lot higher than the examples you gave.
If just one of them decided to call the cops, he'd be arrested, and that might end up with him being banned from re-entering the US. If each place only has a 1% chance of calling it in, we're talking about cumulative odds around 1 in 3.
That seems like a pretty bad worst case.
It's not about underestimation of ability, it's about not wanting to take a risk or flout established social norms.
What the resume-in-pizza-boxes channel offers over, say, the resumes-in-email channel, is a lot fewer resumes. You've got some intention signalling in the RIPB version (it's expensive in terms of time and other committments), but low informational signalling otherwise as to overt qualifications, outside some general concepts (hustle, motivation, time availability / opportunity costs, charisma, confidence, or simply having heard of the trick somewhere).
There are a bunch of selection hueristics whose primary benefit is they eliminate a large component of the choice process. You'd do fairly well in simply randomly sampling from amongst the submissions, or applying some very rudimentary filters to eliminate the most obviously bad choices.
This is why mechanisms such as racial, gender, age, and cultural bias are so common. They're easy to apply, aren't entirely wrong (relatively homogeneous groups tend to operate better than nonhomogeneous ones, though there are many arguments about resilience and creativity/diversity), and hugely reduce the decisionmaking costs of the selector.
Unfortunately, knowledge / infotech / creative work hinges hugely on intangibles which are quite difficult to effectively communicate, especially to someone (say, an HR flunky) not intimately familiar with the field.
Toss in a ton of employer biases and control incentives (e.g., anti-poaching, anti-union, and similar concerns) and the situation starts getting messy quickly. Sure, there might be some alterative opportunities created as a result, but these tend to have far less commercial/financial potential and viability.
I'll accept cultural homogeneity having worked in different cultures myself. But if you're seriously suggesting that racial, gender and age groupings are correlated with performance and subconsciously okay, you're going to have to provide a very convincing argument.
On an intellectual basis, I can acknowledge, though, that high-affinity classifiers -- ones with a strong, clear, and generally readily determined distinguishing capacity -- are frequently used. Language, speech, religion, gender, dress, custom, and more. People are inherently clannish. You'll see this not only in tech hiring, but in ethnic conflicts: Iraq, schoolyards around the world, Nanking & Korea in WWII, Syria, prison populations, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Tunesia, the various ape species actors in the Planet of the Apes cafeteria, Columbia, Yemen, England vs. Ireland, England vs. Scotland, Flemish vs. Walloon, Basque vs. Spanish, various subreddits, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Israel-Palestine, and many, many more.
A principle problem of any seggregation regime is that it tends to require oppressive, often violent, occasionally genocidal enforcement to be sustained. Which is a key reason to seek integrated rather than segregated societies.
However that integration is going to have to be sustained against an apparently very-deeply ingrained resistance to doing so. And simply demanding conformance is likely to be at best only partially successful. The record of the US in that effort, well over 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, and over 150 years after the Civil War and just shy 150 years after the 14th amendment, illustrates this.
I'm not claiming homogeneous societies are better or preferable. I'm strongly suggesting they're easier to establish and sustain, and that they tend to self-organise as such.
I mean you may claim no one can force this heterogenous utopia but it is most certainly the future.
Or as decisionmaking: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dating%20choice&sort=byPopular...
I'm reminded of the hiring manager that randomly tosses into the shredder 90% of incoming resumes. "I don't want to hire someone who's unlucky!"
I'd suggest a below-bar elimination check (e.g., spelling, gross formatting), and an high-level check in case, say, Ted Ts'o happens to be applying. Take the bulk of largely undifferentiated but not obviously bad resumes, shuffle them, and select randomly from them. Pick your sample, apply your assessments, and proceed.
The low-cost primary selection, and the unbiased secondary selection, leave the expensive selection process (resume screen, phone screen, interviews, background / portfolio assessment, etc.) with a tractable number of candidates to deal with.
Aeon's "How to Choose" is an excellent article on the use of randomness: https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...
Someone willing to try this is clearly highly motivated in their job search. Which is one of several axis of qualifications you'd wan to consider. Depending on the position sought (I've not RTFAd), the gumption could be a positive indicator for, say, marketing or leadership (charisma, initiative, risk-tolerance, confidence) though quite likely flat or negative for programming / knowledge-work (humility can matter a lot there).
The economics of information, signalling, signalling costs, proxies for information, quality assessment, etc., are a fascinating and IMO under-studied area. In another tab I'm going through the American Economic Association's annual Papers & Presentations issues looking for topics covered. There are a few on information (early 1970s) that I've found yet. But overall, horribly broken.
It's a bit like the Xerox-generation effect -- if you take an image and photocopy it repeatedly, you'll get an increasingly high-contrast image (a similar effect comes from playing with contrast settings in a photo editor such as the GIMP). But what's lost is the subtlty and nuance. For images which present well in high-contrast (say, the Eiffel Tower against the sky), this isn't terrible. Monet's Rouen Cathedral, Facade (Morning effect) not so much.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_-_Rou...
The children's game of "telephone" (in which a message is passed by voice from person to person around a circle) is similar.
I'm starting to wonder what examples there are of error-correcting high-quality, high-relevance information transmission systems within biology and elsewhere.
Funny thing - this technique is as old as Hollywood. I've heard of tons of similar stories over the years. Heck, Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) got his role when the producer saw his headshot in a pizza box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Furst#As_actor
http://www.citybee.lt/en/
I've used various schemes around the world, but this has the best selection of cars and is the fastest growing. They now have over 500 cars, which given the size of Lithuania is crazy. Their emails have a real personal feel which is no doubt down to Lukas work!
One night there was a party hosted by Salesforce that I thought Lukas was planning on attending so when I noticed it seemed like he was turning in soon I asked him what changed his mind; he told me he had an interview in the morning with ABC. Not knowing his situation I assumed it was for his startup so I told him congratulations and asked what kind of work his company did. He saw I was confused by his answer that he was actually looking for a job so he just showed me a clip from Good Morning America that talked about the story and said it was probably easier to understand if I just watched the video.
I have a feeling I'll be seeing him again next year--leading a session on marketing at the conference.
If I was applying to the same company I'd be VERY upset this guy gets an interview.
If I was the person he got delivered the donuts I'd curse him out of the office and tell him to apply like everybody else.
What makes him special or give him the right to basically break the rules and disrespect everyone who tries their best to get through the recruiting door? What would happen if everyone acted the same and started stalking execs and managers trying to "serve" them whimsical resumés?
Clearly I'm the one who's strange since everyone else thinks it's great... maybe it's a cultural thing?
For me, I think this is a difference between "engineering" and "marketing".
For Marketing, this sort of thing is seen as a good characteristic. For engineering, no so much.
It just like an engineer getting interviewed after finding a bug in your code.
On a more critical note, applying for a job is a zero sum game. Only one person gets hired. If you are more concerned with rules and respecting other applications by not standing out, you are just playing the game poorly. Your job as an applicant is to a)get noticed and b)beat out everyone else for the job.
All this is to say that if followong the rules are so important in your organization, this guy is a bad fit. If it requires scrappiness, creativity, and "hacker" mentality, it is a perfect fit.
In this case, as a marketer, it was brilliant!
So say sleeping with people from HR is ok?
Either we have social norms, fairness and an (attempt at) a rational system or we don't.
And btw, the behavior you reward is the one you get. So expect a hell of a lot of donuts over the next year.
Do you really equate sleeping with HR to getting noticed by delivering donuts to executives?
I want to point you to Paul Graham's essay about what they look for in Founders. Specifically, "They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."
http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html 4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
- knowing what rules are permissible to break highly depends on your upbringing and social status. In other words, "the rules that don't matter" for Paul Graham are the rules that don't matter for a rich old white dude.
- it's much easier to break the rules when you know that there will be no consequences because of your wealth/social status . Kids whose parents paid for a Stanford education will "delight in breaking rules" much more than the hard working kid from immigrant parents desperate to fit in in a world where no one looks like her.
This is exactly the kind of privileged rhetoric that people who push for more diversity and sensitivity in Silicon Valley and tech are trying to highlight/stave off.
First, this very article is about an immigrant, with no status, money or connections, creating opportunity for himself.
Obviously, I am gonna be somewhat biased by my own upbringing, so I can't be truly objective (other than knowing that I grew up in a vastly different upbringing that the folks you describe, yet still feel there are some rules that should be broken and others that shouldn't be crossed.
My only two points I would make are:
1. YC Funds a pretty diverse crowd from all over the world if I understand correctly (I have no direct knowledge.)
2. Founding a successful startup isn't for everyone, and maybe it favors some over others due to life circumstances, but that doesn't change the reality that to innovate and succeed, you might need that "naughty" mentality, regardless of whether it came from a place of privilege or not.
Finally, In my experience, persistence is by far a more important trait for success than almost anything else, and the most driven, focused, persistent people are often the ones that fought against all odds to break free from their underprivileged circumstances, much like the immigrant you described. I am not sure they feel a need to play by arbitrary rules or not, but even if they do, they often rise above through sheer force of will...and often that persistence, and will power brings them to do things that open doors by ignoring propriety and breaking down barriers and limitations that live in their head more than anywhere else.
I might be biased about all sorts of privilege and might be blind to the class bias you refer to, I do not know...but my gut and experience tell me that individuals and their personal decisions matter much more than their class and circumstances. (Not discounting those other factors, just discounting the role they actually play in reality relative their own choices and of course colored by my own bias.)
When they are exposed to an environment they have never been in before - for example the tech industry/startup world - many of them are overwhelmed, confused, and feel like they have to tread very carefully because they don't want to lose the opportunity to make $100k a year as an engineer when the other option is retail/service jobs. In those cases, they do their best to follow the rules and be on their best behavior, and are not going to take any risks of being naughty.
This is not at odds with being driven, focused, persistent etc. It's about being from a completely different social environment and not wanting to fuck up because you're the first person in your family who might break out of the minimum wage chain.
That's the stuff I care about optimizing for.
If they perceive stability in a $100k job and perceive startups as risking that opportunity, they will be afraid...it has nothing to do with where they came from.
Edit: Also, if you really think about it...those kids are already breaking the rules by learning to code and not accepting their upbringing as determining their fate. They are breaking all sorts of cultural rules.
If you want to come to our workshops and talk to these young adults about how to frame and perceive risk, please do get in touch.
I dont know PG personally and I don't know the young adults you teach, so I can only speak in generalities, but the scenario you painted can just as easily mint a determined person who takes all sorts of risks because, "What do they have to lose?!"
I guess what I'm trying to say is that only a fraction of people are entrepreneurs and those people usually have certain ways to view the world that the majority of people don't...So, when you observe this fear in your prodigies, maybe that fear is about proportionate to the general population and while the specific fear might be different, the willingness to view the world in away that allows risk taking in entreprenuership might have nothing to do with specific backgrounds but rather specific personalities and perspectives.
Probably had to break a lot of rules to fit in/find their place in a new society
No, there is a huge difference.
But why does the line lay at donuts? Who decides which rules matter? How about cash instead of donuts? How about fake references? Is that brilliant or wrong?
There are quite a few successful people who are far more than just naughty, I believe one is successful enough to be running for president. The slightly naughty have far less room to criticize outrageous behavior if their line is ever shifting and coincidentally always just beyond their own acts.
Any human system requires good intent and fair play to function. Any such system can be gamed by a small number of players. Those players will usually come out ahead with little harm to that system. If the number gets large then then any system will begin to break down. So is the goal to keep the number of rule breakers small and make sure we are always in that group?
And if the hiring process is broken, fix it. Encouraging ludicrous ad hoc random non-sense is the exact opposite of fixing anything.
What is being suggested is that there are some unwritten ever changing rules know only to the initiated that are the real rules. The official published rules are for "the other" and frankly only exist exactly to keep out the uninitiated.
The broader discussion is outside my realm of expertise.
Paid advertising. Guerilla marketing. Fake reviews and scores. Cardboards bigger than contents. Yep, that's exactly what marketing section does. Why would you think that would disqualify a person to work there?
What about hacking a company server to put his resume on the top of the queue? Offering the data in exchange for a "position"? Blackmailing with it?
Because he just got into dozens of company offices using nothing but a tee shirt. He could easily have carried a flash drive alongside the resume in those donuts.
Each person who cheats draws the line just beyond their own behavior. To prevent chaos the hard line lies were the authorities enforce it. And such blunt instruments damage the systems they protect almost as negatively as the violators they catch.
But the argument about cheating has been going on since the Olduvai Gorge and this conversation is going to have exactly the same effect as every other one.
The only difference at this time is that cheating has been bizarrely fetishized into being a good thing. And the biggest picture is merely chasing the latest web fad so zealously that a community has been transformed into one so obsessed with wealth that its member happily step over homeless on the way to lunch everyday. And so much as commenting on this situation is consider politically extreme even transgressive.
However I think you're treading a thin line by focusing solely on the desired outcome of one individual. If everyone thought like that'd it'd be a race towards some pretty unethical and/or immoral behaviours.
This "what matters is that we got ours" mentality can lead to a lot of resentment.
But again thank you for your response.
When you apply for a position, are you doing it for the "greater good" or will you have a desired outcome for one individual- that is yourself?
There are so many different ways to skip the hiring pipeline that are widely accepted: would you consider recommendations from current employees or acqhiring as unfair?
Strategies like this have been around for decades, yet somehow most people are NOT willing to put in the extra work to execute on it.
Donny Deutsch did something similar, "Donny pitched a TV account, Tri-State Pontiac dealers. (Just to get into the pitch, Donny sent car parts to the home of the Pontiac rep. He sent a fender with a note that read, “We’ll cover your rear end.” http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/n_8669/
There was that fellow who ran linkedin ads to get investors attention to get into Angelpad http://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000
8 Years ago I was trying to get an interview at Neo@Ogilvy as a search marketer. I sent my resume several times with no results. I spent the extra time to really think about what would make me stand out and I designed my resume to look like a search results page and got a call from them within 10 hours of applying. This was because the key to advertising design is imagery that supports the message. It demonstrated my appreciation of the nuances of effective advertising.
Direct mail marketers have been promoting Lumpy Mail or 3D Mail as a way to make sure your mailer gets noticed, opened, and read. (i.e. putting bulky thinks in the mail so It can't be put on the bottom of a junk mail pile.)
These are not really even hacks, it is one of the rules of the game. If you go the extra mile demonstrating you care enough to stand out, you earned the attention you get.
I don't think these tactics are a slippery slope at all. It's no different than Sam Altman flying across the country to meet a company (that didnt want to meet with him) that was about to sign with a competitor, or PokerShare.com training a Chimp to play poker and bring it on tour.
There is a world of difference between being clever and being unethical.
Edit: Grammar
I find your résumé example acceptable and easy to understand, by what you did, I as a recruiter looking for someone with graph design skills would get a better understanding of your skills.
The direct mail and poker playing monkey examples I find poor - for me they get classified as the "who screams louder" type tactics they don't add anything of value, they just benefit the individual who wants an outcome of their target.
Someone else here said something about how "Analytical types" find comfort in rules and I have definitely been described as an analytical even though I'm very comfortable breaking certain rules (bureaucracy mostly) I'm uncomfortable feeling like a "cheater", in other words: I want to deserve.
Also coming from a 3rd world country where a lot of benefits, specially in government, are achieved through bribery and nepotism I'm probably overly sensitive about it.
Jesus! Enough about me though!
I don't think the cost of a box of donuts amounts to bribery in Silicon Valley, and he's not a friend or family member so it's not nepotism.
What he did was get noticed, even though it's a bit of a gimmick. Do you remember the Million Dollar Homepage? That worked because it was a novel idea. Nobody made it big on a copycat site. Similarly, this fellow stood out and that got him interviews. However if lots of people start trying this same method it'll fail quickly as a means to get interviews.
I do think sending a portfolio of work is much better than just a resume. This guy made himself part of his portfolio, which for a marketing position is a great thing but which won't scale to every candidate showing up with donuts for every position. Thankfully programmers can send code and graphic designers can send images.
That being said, it's sadly not how the real world works.
It's not that he has extra rights or privilege, it's that he _made extra effort_. He took the initiative and went the extra mile. Applying online is easy, perhaps he did that as well, but showing up in person is really recognizable and obviously took him extra time and work.
Now, on the flipside, he could be seen as absolutely wasting a busy person's time by not going through the proper channels, thereby destroying his chance of getting the job. That's the risk of being bold, but they also say, nothing risked, nothing gained.
Your lesson to help you better understand the world lies in the answer to that question.
What makes him special is knowing how to break the rules in ways that don't have too many negative repercussions. It's not easy, but if you can do it, it puts you ahead of the people who play by the rules.
Here are a few genuine personal anecdotes:
Friend applies to Amazon via website. Finally gets reply 6 months down the line. Seriously - who has 6 months to wait around for a job. In that time he had 6 months to get actual experience and have an even better resume.
Different friend gets summer internship at top legal firm, on leaving/ "you're hired" party, drunk HR manager admits they were very busy so the entire team decided to base internship interviews on the first sentence of the cover letter.
While at working at bigcorp see numerous roles, including positions in senior management go unadvertised to people who are recommended for the position.
More generally, there are a great deal of places that will bin your application if you didn't go to an Ivy, so how is someone from another country to even get a chance?
So is this unfair on the other applicants? Probably. But mainly, the system is unfair on applicants.
There are but two rules. #1 Anything possible, you can do. #2 Anything impossible you can try to do, but it will fail because it is impossible.
Oh, and just a small note. Any action you take (including inaction) has side effects. Take a think of what they are (positive or negative) and balance them up to decide your course of action.
The world has but two rules dude. Any others are the ones you've imposed upon yourself.
If you can hire or promote or help someone, then do so.
Recently had to choose to promote either a single mom (stable home) 11 yrs in the job or a part-time just graduated woman renting a house for free in exchange for child care. Both were equally qualified. Which would be helped more? The part time student. Once promoted into FT position she gets benefits. Easy choice. Plus, the company stresses helping employees as #1 priority.
Even if this guy does not work out and he is termed after 90 days, he is better off trying and I improved his lot.