Our New Year’s Resolution For Hiring | Hacker News Reader

Our New Year’s Resolution For Hiring

gazehawk.com

33 pointsbkrausz6 comments

> I, in my usually procrastinating ways, put these off for so long that replying to the person at that point would be rude (imagine getting a rejection email months after applying to a job, when you’ve all but forgotten about it)

It's happened to me before. Yeah, it's a bit rude and bewildering. But once a few months have gone by, it's difficult not to move on. After that point, it was kind of a cute thing I'd mention to my friends ("They finally told me they weren't going to hire me a few months after I applied. Isn't that crazy!")

When someone from your company talked at SHDH@hackerdojo, I was a bit put off on the company because of the attitude the presenter gave about the photograph of the woman on the web page. I don't think that you should wear a suit and tie to work every day, but you should know that the jokes that "push the boundary" do influence how people perceive you. It hasn't influenced what I think of your product, but it does influence who I'd recommend to join you.

I'm sorry you felt that way Aaron. For context for the rest of the HN: when giving a talk on our HTML5 heatmap generation I was using a heatmap of an NBC homepage for an example. That homepage featured a promotion for their coverage of the Miss USA 2010 contest.

The heatmap showed a disproportionate gaze length on the woman's body (as did most of the heatmaps for that study), which I pointed out as a fairly common observation in the world of ET studies. I've been told by several experts that this is a quick way to check if your ET device is working properly.

That being said, I of course did not intend to offend anyone, it was meant more as a humorous jab at where our attention is drawn (both male and female btw). I'll definitely be more sensitive to things like this in future talks.

Thanks for addressing this head-on and in a professional way. Nothing you said was particularly offensive. Sex sells, and that is a part of life.

Do I think that you're a misogynist? No. Nothing you did was even remotely as offensive as the CouchDB talk at GoGaRuCo last year.

As a result of the hoopla around that talk, Martin Fowler wrote a fantastic piece that discusses the interaction of gender, programming, professionalism and humor here: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html I highly recommend you give it a read.

It's one thing to make a comment about sex selling, it is another to make it a theme to talk about how you can see that visitors are spending a lot of time looking at the woman's breasts. Once again, I don't think that your approach was overtly offensive, but there is some great writing that the GoGaRuCo incident inspired. Articulate and measured (as usual,) Sarah Allen's post talks about the difference between a comment and a theme: http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...

My thoughts about feminism changed in college when I went to gay clubs and was aggressively pursued for the first time. It was weird to think that I had to be on the defense against people's advances and question their reasons for having an interest in me -- that's an experience that many men in our society never have. I can't claim to understand the struggles of feminism, but I do put more thought into how I approach women that I may be interested in (both sexually and professionally.)

I'm sure that you were being lighthearted and meant no harm, but if you're going to crack jokes about staring at boobs when giving a presentation to a room full of strangers, I have to wonder about the jokes you'll make in a more casual workplace environment and will be selective in my recommendations because of that.

This all being said, Zed Shaw has (in entirely different ways) offended a lot of people. I am careful in who I would recommend to go work with him. Personally, I think that working with Zed would be a fantastic opportunity and would jump at the chance.

Unrelated to your blog post, but that sounds like a fantastically interesting technology you've got there.

It harkens to the sort of testing that Hollywood movies and television studios go through to see what the audience responds to.

Digital agencies must be banging down your door ... in testing designs for their new websites before they choose which mock to run with.

They could even run a test against their target audience, like women 35 to 45 etc...

I love it.

I really like keeping response mail for things like hiring in a ticketing system, vs. my individual mailbox, so it's easier to make sure everything has gotten a (fairly timely) response.

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