A Cover Letter To Penny Arcade | Hacker News Reader

A Cover Letter To Penny Arcade

adventuringcompany.com

175 pointstfh39 comments

Now that is how you get noticed by a potential employer.

Even if they don't hire him, someone else is bound to snag that guy up...

yeah, i really hope they do. awesome.

It doesn't look like he made it into the top 3. http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/pa-the-series/112/

I was thinking that you'd still need to get a potential employer to click through (unless the message was HTML formatted), which they might not do if they're inundated with responses.

Maybe he or a friend should submit the cover letter and his story to the business press. Wouldn't they be interested in something like that (as a job-hunting innovation)?

Exactly. I recently made a few webpages specifically for one job offer to go with my cover letter/resume. Unfortunately, these pages have never been opened…

I couldn't think of the best way to do it: a very short cover letter basically saying "open that webpage to see my real cover letter" might just annoy the recipient; a somewhat regular cover letter (my choice then) with an invitation to open a link still needs to be distinctive enough to convince the recipient to click the link.

Why don't you start the story off with your email. If they are interested, they will click through to the rest of your pages.

What a horrible interview process and post-interview discussion. Even if I had gotten the job, after watching that self-important and vague, irrational driven reasoning process I'd promptly turn it down.

I hope they were at least being paid for becoming part of a TV show.

No kidding. I only hope those Rorschach tests were a joke but I'm not so sure.

I think I know why: the only funny part was the last cell. And this man was trying desperately to be funny the whole time.

Oh, and the "design". Humongous blank space on the left; comic pushed off to the right. I really hope he didn't send it like that.

I thought the final panel was less funny than several other bits. The dog? The food rapping? The fact that he's now Gabe and Tycho's son?

The problem I see is that he seems to be angling less for the job as a designer and more for Gabe and Tycho's (wait, are those their real names?) job as a cartoonist. One might worry that he'd have to be repeatedly told "No, sit down and fix the website, stop pitching us strip ideas"

I found a copy of the original job ad, btw:

http://www.be-mag.com/msgboard/showthread.php?18856-Penny-Ar...

Well, I didn't think those things were funny. They were just forced and random.

It follows the humor of the actual strip pretty closely.

Though in order to be more like the strip, 80% of the jokes would need to be references completely opaque to anyone who hasn't played whatever obscure video game came out yesterday.

It may be trendy, but I wouldn't call it a fad. The key to getting a job is demonstrating your skills. That's exactly what this comic does.

They actually covered the final interview process for this job in a couple episodes of PATV, starting here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/pa-the-series/112/

Looks like this sort of thing is becoming a trend. I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

Oh, like every other gimmick, it will become the hot thing to do. When it is overused and burnt out, it will die and everyone will hate it. Until then, a well-executed one is still fairly standout.

This specific form might get overused and burnt out, but spending time on learning about the company and finding out and explaining why you are a great candidate for the opening will always require some time investment that not everyone will be ready to make. How you present it might change, but I'd think that it will always make you stand out.

However, at the end of the day, the only thing it does is calling attention to your resume/portfolio, and making sure the company knows you're very interested. (rather than being one company out of tens to which you sent your resume) But if the resume/portfolio doesn't interest them, it won't change much.

This seems like a losing strategy: invest tens of hours in a single application for a highly visible opening with no expectation of a callback.

I'd think an applicant would want to cast a wider net and then escalate investment in individal openings as hiring companies signaled some mutual interest.

Maybe some rules of thumb are in order, i.e. x hours for an application, 2x hours for a first interview, etc.

I'm not sure that's how designers think about things

Your time investment should also scale based on the value of the position. I know a position at Google would be immensely valuable to my career and pay more. In that situation, spending 10x time investment on my Google application vs my Joe's Coding Shack application seems natural.

Bee Keeping, Food Rapping & Growing a Reliable Bear Quickly are all generic skills.

He only needs to change a few names & characters to use the same awesome application for different openings.

This is the Internet. If you're looking for a job, and something impressive with your name on it gets to the top of HN, Reddit, Slashdot, or even Digg, you'll have ample opportunities.

Heck, the only reason I haven't quit my job yet is I'm working on something potentially impressive right now that isn't done yet.

We live in a world full of cattle. Go to school, get a job, retire, etc... Fill out a boring resume, get promoted, get promoted again, have kids, GOTO 10.

Even if someone is good at their job, I'd never hire some run-of-the-mill joe who has zero creativity over someone like this, who thinks outside the box a bit and gives something like this a shot.

It's certainly not a trend, we're just seeing a lot of these unique approaches to being employed recently on HN.

Whether or not they hire him is moot -- funny and creative is a hard thing to get across, and he did a bang-up job. I'm sure he'll get noticed by someone.

Does any know if the job actually required Javascript? As cool as the comic was, it sounded like it was a must have.

I hope he gets the gig - he did a great job on this comic.

Side note: Does anyone know where the job posting is? I'd like to see what they are actually looking for.

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=823322

I think it just went bye-bye.

Here is who got the job, according to LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=7248250...

Here is her personal site for those w/o LI. http://www.erikagreco.com/

Looks like they are attacking Robert Ebert: http://www.erikagreco.com/portfolio-web.html

http://gamescanbeart.com/

It's been filled, a few months back actually.

It's too bad his actual website is broken in FireFox, that seems like a bit of a downer compared to his awesome cover letter.

Hire this man immediately.

My vote is Hire. I'll be watching PA for your name. Good luck!

That's the kind of research and work that you need to do before applying any job. Not just sending you resume to 50 potential employees.

I don't see what's so great about this comic. It's not funny, there's no perspective except an infatuation with PA, and a third of the comic is talking about what skills he doesn't have or other reasons to NOT hire him. I'm all for self-deprecation, but it should GO somewhere.

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