Against All Applications
experimentalhistory.substack.com
experimentalhistory.substack.com
I think one part of the answer is administrative bloat, where "processes are implemented" and "guidelines need to be maintained". Especially for technical jobs it is hard to judge people from the perspective of HR, which is why you have "personal statements" and such, which only effectively measure your ability for coherent and flattering writing.
Another part is the job market, both employer and employee side. As long as only reasonably qualified people apply and companies accept reasonably qualified people having multiple rounds of interviews is just a waste of everyones time.
Personally I think "coding interviews" are just very insulting and speak of an awful state of the industry. Imagine giving an electrical engineer a 1st year undergrad assignment to make sure he really can calculate the properties of a basic circuit. Seems like a good reason to just walk out.
The paranoia of tech companies speaks to me as a desperate attempt to filter out applicants who are completely unqualified, from the vast ammounts of people applying.
Right but that doesn't happen. People throw their resume at any company without a second thought, and then outright lie on it.
We have a rule that we only ask questions about stuff they write on resume or submit in questionnaire (that is basically "here are few things, judge in 1-5 scale how much you know them) and still some people say they are expert and fail basic non-curveball questions or topics.
Going back to EE example it would be like writing you're an expert on amplifier design then not being able to recall equation for gain for noninverting operational amplifier
One problem I see is that these types of interviews, which are essentially basic aptitude tests, might be regarded by the interviewers as far more than they really are. The idea of "preparing" for a coding interview is absurd. If the applicant feels it is neccesarry to prepare he either is completely unqualified or the testing method is bad.
I am quite certain that in a 15 minute talk I could easily figure out if some applicant has the technical knowledge for a position similar to mine. And that seems to me what Interviews should be about.
With any modern tech-heavy business, there's just so much industry specific jargon that if you hadn't done whatever was on the CV that led to the interview invitation, you would get found out in a short conversation.
I hear people sometimes run into some smooth talker who knows all the words and none of the actual skills. Never happened to me, and it's so far from it I can't really imagine it.
I think it is because it started as just simple "weed out the weeds" questions and somebody got bright idea that "the harder brain teasers they ask the better candidates will be left", not realizing they are just recruiting people that are good at trivia.
> filter out applicants who are completely unqualified, from the vast amounts of people applying.
It's not really surprising that industries which pay incredible amounts of money get a lot of applicants.
The "gate" has to be somewhere. At the employer, or at a professional body, or at the education system? All have advantages and disadvantages.
CS and CE cover some theory, but that theory is widely inapplicable to most jobs in the industry. People that don't come from formal backgrounds often work in cross-functional roles or roles that CS and CE deeply don't touch on. An example of the former is SREs. You can become a SWE by getting a CS degree, but a SRE job involves policy, userland software, systems, and so on skills. An example of the latter is Systems Engineering. I've found very few formal schools for Systems Engineering in the way it's practiced in industry. To make matters more complex most systems engineers also need to be familiar with writing application code.
edit: and only the second is a real problem, the first is a feature.
A further lemma: No matter where the gate is put, a lot of people will complain.
I don't want to defend whiteboard programming, not at all. But I think one can get a lot of value out of simple concrete questions.
Example: Person applying to C/C++ systems programming job -- think low-level file formats, kernel interaction, custom network protocol -- without understanding hex numbers.
Me, the interviewer, asking what 0x10 is in decimal (feel free to use pen & paper!) is a lot quicker than trying to sniff out a good bullshitter that you've allowed to be in control of the conversation.
No, I really don't think you can do the job without knowing hex.
Yes, I really think any background that would have prepared you to be successful at the job would have had you interacting with binary data in some form. (Saying you personally prefer octal would have been a plus, not a minus -- it would have communicated experience.)
The difference to the coding interview is that nobodys time is wasted. It is a very quick question and if you get a slightly confused "16" back, you can just move on to more relevant matters.
This is different to a 30 minute long question where you examine the applicants ability to solve first year undergrad homework.
But that you are asking the question at all speaks by itself for major problems in employment.
Informal, application-free processes are great for those for whom they work, but are also frequently a path to discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, religion, or other factors. Standardised forms and recordkeeping provide a track record that can help address any claims or investigations arising (though won't always cure the underlying problem).
That and simply increased information-handling capacity by businesses, moving from pen-and-paper to computerised formats --- initially punch-cards, now almost entirely electronic recordkeeping.
- People who want to get hired put low quality projects on their Github which are optimized to look impressive at a first glance.
- People spam popular open source projects with low quality pull requests to buff their Github contribution metrics.
- People who don't have the time to create software for free are put at a disadvantage. Also people who aren't passionate about programming enough to have side projects are at a disadvantage (not necessarily bad).
I also suspect that this phenomenon is what motivates the development of a lot of the "leftpad" or "is-even" type libraries. Which could be interpreted as either good or bad.
I guess other professions have similar things going: Lawyers might take on high-profile cases on a pro-bono basis to build a name for themseves, or contribute to academic publishing even when they are not on payroll in any academic capacity, etc. But they have a different culture to go with that. As a lawyer, I guess your X-hours work week will stay an X-hours work week and your non-billable hours Y are simply subtracted from X.
But most jobs in the software engineering profession come with the expectation that you have an X-hours work week, and your employer usually does not allow you to use any of that time for personal professional status-building through open source or publishing etc. ...your only chance is to do it on weekends, which eats into your work-life balance.
We recently got a paper accepted at a conference cooperating with our local university and my employer was more than happy to pay for that time.
What's the real problem IMO is that studying, training, etc. is pushed to your time off. When you account for all of that, my 40-hour week is more like 50 hours.
I think people very seldomly took him up on the offer and if they did, I would guess there was a certain probability that he would read it as a negative signal along the lines of: This person is really going out of their way to do networking, so they're probably working on finding their next gig so they can leave the company.
In one other company I worked at, the company was keen on conference participation, but the way it would work there, if you were the person doing the legwork it would be your boss presenting at the conference. So you couldn't really use it as an opportunity to make a name for yourself. You'd just make a name for your boss.
I've also done extensive freelancing. If you run a low-risk freelancing strategy, clients pretty much expect you to work for them fulltime. It's already a tough sale to get them to give you a day off every quarter to do your own bookkeeping. And the hourly rates aren't high enough to allow you to spend several weeks or months in between freelancing gigs to work on status-building. ...now if you're using your status-building to get the most choice consulting opportunities where you have the bargaining power to do few hours at high rates that's a different story, but that's a different kind of freelancing altogether. (The "high-risk" kind which I'd distinguish from the low-risk kind that my personal experience is limited to).
If you lose interest, there's nothing wrong with pursuing a different career -- I know a couple of people who started over because they just couldn't bear how boring tech jobs get after 20 years.
Same goes for "for free", although here the job market doesn't offer too many opportunities yet.
Why our generals were more successful in WWII than in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq/Afghanistan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxZWxxZ2JGE
Briefly, minimize the application process and aggressively review work. Any mistake or failure and you're fired, two weeks to prove competence or you're fired, six weeks until a significant accomplishment or you're fired. And no stigma against being fired, just keep trying until you find a fit.
The problem is that, in most countries, employment law will make it pretty difficult to do this. Also, with deliberate high turnover like that, you'll find it difficult to keep trade secrets and there will be a huge drain on resources for onboarding those people who are quickly come and gone.
(This is for software engineering jobs, at least. In other industries it might work differently.)
In a country like Germany, if you fire an employee and they walk away with a hurt ego and start talking to a lawyer, you will end up hurting in some way or another, so the game is to manage egos and make sure that, when a company parts ways with an employee, the employee feels that it was mutual.
Actually, I think it would be a step in the right direction for both bosses and employees, if bosses could just say: Hey, I'm firing you because I just no longer want you here. You didn't do anything wrong. I just have other people who do the job better.
The perverse incentive is that it's probably better for companies to single out individuals they want to get rid of and treat them badly until they leave of their own account, rather than do that.
Regulations are written in blood. They are always Chesterton's fence. That doesn't mean it's still a good idea, or even that it ever was. But there's a reason it was put there, and it's wise to at least know why before removing it.
Today we have at least three "layers" of social security in most European countries:
The first layer is that government makes sure everyone has employment and makes it difficult for employers to get rid of employees, even those ones that cost the company more than they're worth. Family law extends the coverage to everyone else, e.g. for non-bread-winning spouses (even ex-spouses), it's the bread-winner that's on the hook (so, transitively, the bread-winner's employer) and for children the parents (again: ultimately the parents' employers).
The second layer is mandatory social insurance.
The third layer is usually some kind of outright government handout that kicks in for people who, for some reason, fall through both the first AND the second layer of social security. (e.g. [1] in Austria)
My guess would be that each layer was brought in at a time when the layers below were not yet in place, though, maybe, someone can provide the necessary facts to the contrary here.
I just wish they'd do away with all that crap, and instead just implement universal basic income, paid for by the tax payer.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedarfsorientierte_Mindestsich...
If you don't like your boss you can pack your things and go elsewhere. Your boss doesn't have that luxury.
This requires a really comprehensive social security net to not be abusive.
No one would work awful jobs for terrible pay because why? No employers would keep ineffective employees onboard because why? Unions might become obsolete because bad employers can't exist (people just quit). Anyone would be at liberty to try and start a new business because they never have to risk their passional safety.
Right now many employment situations are like an abusive relationship, staff (and bosses) are getting hurt, but they are afraid to break up. People with strong safety nets and personal wealth can leave terrible relationships much more easily than people who depend on a partner for everything or live in a society where breakups are taboo or illegal.
UBI might let you live in some small town in the middle of nowhere where the rent is low but it's unlikely to let you live in a high demand area. You could say "rent control" but that's not a solution. All that does is start a lottery of who gets it live in the city and who doesn't.
Further, there's a ton of jobs that need to be done but arguably no one wants. jobs like farming and shipping, stocking grocery stores, construction. Ok, so UBI lets everyone quit and now those jobs have to pay more to get anyone to take them. But then all the costs go up and UBI is no longer enough to make it. Raise the UBI and you get a vicious circle.
I don't know all the reasons prices are out of control in the bay area but for example, I ordered 3 simple Thai dishes the other night. $135! In Thailand that would have been $6. 3 burritos in the poor part of town, $60. 4 plates of Chinese dumplings, $80. My guess is this is in part, high rents, and paying higher wages. Sounds great, but now no low-income people can afford to eat out. UBI would take that even further because (see previous paragraph)
Someone will now chime in how it's bad to make people work in jobs they don't want. I don't disagree. My point isn't that people should work shitty jobs. My point is UBI won't fix the problem.
I don’t have much say in UBI, but your mention that rent-control would simply “start a lottery of who gets to live in the city” sounds like a good thing. If you don’t already have established family in a high-demand city (in which case you should be grandfathered in), isn’t a lottery the fairest way to get in?
But on the long term? Senior-level employee makes an error? Bam - fired! With all the institutional knowledge gathered over the years, experience, etc. If it was a major screw-up - you'll be firing an employee who will not do that mistake again, but you will risk it with a new hire.
I take a risk to accept your job offer. I turn down other offers. Maybe I quit my current job to work with you.
if EVERYONE in the economy played by your rules, it might work. Might. As long as labor is in strong demand.
At peacetime, people may not like to put up with the strain which such arrangement puts on them. It does improve efficiency, but had a cost, and works better at times of very high demand.
Private industry could do this if they want, but it would require cutting executive pay in half, hiring twice as many executives, and creating intentionally redundant positions that serve little purpose other than preparing the next cohort for leadership. This works for the military due to a unique combination of the organization itself not having a profit motive and the personnel valuing non-monetary accomplishment more than personal wealth. And, of course, the military is a monopoly. This also works because there isn't a different military that can offer your generals triple the salary and poach them away. If they want to be generals at all, they have no choice but to buy into the unique culture of the only military they can serve in. Theoretically, a foreign military could try to buy them away, but countries mostly seem to not allow foreigners to command their military units for security reasons and the possibility of being executed for treason and/or desertion is a pretty strong incentive not to leave even if you got an offer.
An equivalent private sector practice would be not hiring leaders at all and only appointing them via internal promotion, but to get into the organization at all, you need to apply to a training academy first, then spend several years in that academy learning the organizational doctrine and culture and being evaluated and stack ranked before you're ever given a real job. Typically, the bottom 40% of so of cadets don't even get in at all and have to become reservists.
The allies were better in WW2 than the others, because they had a feasible grabd strategy and outperformed the Axis on operations. That, and the fact the Allies committed their full industrial might for years, while having public support for doing so.
Different subject, but I was just thinking what ww2 would have looked like if we had the slightly evolved social order, protections, liberties we have today. We still have racism and sexism and ... but it's different now (but still there). Most large organizations like the military still have an old boys club but they also did a lot of work to improve things. We have so far to go as a society. What if we didn't round up all the Japanese people and destroy or steal their possessions. How would the groups have dealt with the war? I think it would be like Russians living in Europe today, plenty are influenced by propaganda news orgs to think that Ukraine is somehow the bad guy, even though they are living in free, safe, and well off societies out of Russia.
Seems like an awful idea. Especially if you are new to something failures happen and are a good way to learn. This just rewards the lucky and those who minimize their own work.
You relieve someone from a position for not winning (and not just not failing). The theory proposed by the video is that relieve culture INCREASES (even if counterintuitively so) the willingness to take risks.
If there is no reward for winning then people will minimize risks. If you make winning necessary for keeping the position, they will be more likely to take risks. (In military context, officers these days, according to the video, care more about minimizing losses and not messing up than actually winning the wars.)
Translating it into civilians contexts might be a bit difficult but one thing that I believe can work well is allowing people to move to different positions to find one that they can be most effective in inside the company.
Like sometimes people get promoted to managers and then it turns out they are actually ill fitted for that position. Firing them might be a waste but just keeping them around will be to the detriment of the people they need to manage. So the solution is that they need to removed. Maybe even take a lower position until a better position can be found.
I think this is main take away: Just like you should not keep around badly performing general as that will cost literally lives you should also not keep around bad managers in a company to the detriment of the people they manage. It is better to pull the plug early, for both sides.
It doesn't make sense to apply the concept to rank and file soldiers or like junior software engineering roles.
The higher someone is on a the hierarchy tree, the more people they can influence and the more important it is to remove them when they are not a good fit.
It is very unfortunate that people think the video war arguing for hiring and firing normal employees just because they don't perform perfectly in the first few weeks. That would be absolutely psychopathic behavior. Your job as a junior is to learn and make mistakes.
This honestly admits that it’s both competence AND luck instead of pure competence.
- Eric Hoffer
Look, if you are hiring an engineer, it's easier than it seems. Just sit an hour with them and have a good talk about his career on the business domain or the technical field. At the end of that hour you should have a non-100% accurate but solid perspective on these things: "Does this person communicate effectively? Would I want to work with this applicant?" And that's it.
On this basis the whole hiring field and each and every interview is discriminatory because the companies want to select who they want to work together with based on the candidates skills/values.
This isn't really my experience. Similar people will have a better initial perception of each other as it takes less time to synchronize with each other however in most jobs that's of little importance. What matters is how they work together in the long term and most people don't need clones to work well with. If anything else having too many similar people is a problem for a team since you get overlapping blind spots which tends to cause serious issues over time.
>most people don't need clones to work well with
Having similar values doesn't mean that they have exactly the same value/skill set, they aren't "clones".
> having too many similar people
similar values != similar people
You would think it was if you were a member of e.g. a minority religion and no one would hire you for a job you were capable of doing.
If you don't want discrimination select the applicant by lottery.
“his”? Doesn't sound like a very fair recruitment process.
I just can't believe there are so many people out there with the skill and will to do that, who also haven't found a better way to employ those skills directly, that our field can be awash in them. I believe there are plenty who try, but I doubt there are very many who could talk about tech and their career for an hour without tipping their hand.
And working remote with software, if you're in a low income country, can make you wealthy compared to those around you.
Is it possible that it works better to "just talk to people" in some parts of the world, than other parts? In SF, software engineer salaries can be $X00k/year, but a lot less in Madrid. I wonder if this can influence people's behavior.
(Nonetheless personally I'd never do only such unstructured interviews.)
Dude here who designed and built an early multitenant mobile app server-side support system from scratch, serving millions of daily users (the spikes in traffic when our users sent out pushes to some of those apps... yikes), among a bunch of other stuff. Actually, in-fact did that. Code-language-polyglot, often considered the one to go to for low-level stuff (nothing I seek out, I just keep getting that reputation), getting paid to write code for ~22 years now, et c., et c.
I've nonetheless bombed "basic coding screens" a couple times, including after having done years of nontrivial and highly-independent coding for pay. And I don't mean leetcode shit, I mean really basic stuff.
Some percentage of those folks who seemed great in the interview but failed your basic screens are false negatives, no matter how much you believe no one who had a tenth of a clue could possibly fail them. Maybe that rate's negligible, but maybe it's not. I do think unjustified confidence that very simple tests can't have a significant false-negative rate is part of why so many people are convinced our industry is drowning in expert-level bullshit artists who can't even write a for loop.
The idea that you can pinpoint someone's skill level (and estimate their performance potential) through additional hours-long exams is arrogant. Job performance has more to do with the environment than the incoming skill set.
When it comes to promotions, there was a paper this year that won an Ig Nobel prize, which made the case that promotions are awarded at worse-than-random https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07068.pdf
... or 5%, and rest fails at basic litmus test of not too hard questions.
People will apply anywhere regardless of their own (perceived or actual) skill level. And it is no wonder as the requirements will be half-lie or wishlist most of the time.
So the one side throws resumes everywhere they can and the other just tries to best guess which one is worth spending time to even interview as there is too many to interview all.
On other side, testing candidates puts a "homework requirement" on them, doing that online also makes cheating easy so you might bore/detract the good ones (they most likely already have decent job and don't care for few hours of homework on off chance they get thru the filter) while the less good will just find a way to check the box and pass anyway
As much as I agree with the sentiment, employer incentives are not to find ALL suitable candidates but to find just ONE suitable candidate. Everything beyond that is a waste of resources. For some positions (e.g. finding a co-founder or an artist with a unique style) - yes, low recall might be a limiting factor. It is just a market for most other roles - in particular, all that can be summarized with a job title.
No one is saying "random" means "no standards at all". If you're a graduate pure math department you don't need to admit a grad student whose background is that they have a GED and worked as a welder for 5 years before getting a 135 on the GRE Math side. Instead, split your screening into two phases: one phase that is targeted to exclude people who absolutely positively do not meet requirements and could never work out, and one phase designed to pick the best feasible candidates among those who meet requirements. Do the RCT in the latter phase.
If you have relatively continuous or regular hiring processes, you'll be well powered to assess your hiring screen in pretty short order. The larger your organization or the faster your overall turnover is the more robust you are to the risk of this going wrong. Not every company can do this -- academic departments that hire one person a year and sometimes have blown searches or people going back on the market within a year or two are clearly going to be a little risk averse. But if we're talking Deloitte hiring a cohort of 150 office admins, they can absolutely, positively make use of this strategy.
The other thing I'd add is that a lot of people are under the mistaken belief that hiring is about determining the best candidates. In fact that is not true and it has never been true. It's about maximizing the probability that a candidate you offer a job to takes it and is good... or else maximizing the frontier of some function of probability the candidate accepts, is good, and how good they are. Hiring nothing but the best candidates will increase the likelihood of a blown search, increase the rate of attrition, etc. This makes almost all of the discussion around mErIt In HiRiNg a distraction from how hiring actually works.
There are more narrowly tailored options. The more local you make the randomization, the less power and the less downside risk. Suppose you rank candidates from 1 (terrible) to 100 (ideal) and tend to hire candidates in the 80-90 range. Even a willingness to allocate some positions to candidates scored at 70-80 is going to give you lots information about whether your ranking system is useful at all.
Do more RCTs!!! Please!
And this is why I ended up going to a for-profit school.
Circa 2003 I was a B level student who had taken a couple college level math courses. I applied to three colleges, all local, one of which my friend payed the application fee (thanks, Paul) and was rejected from all three.
$50+ dollars is a lot of money to a 17 year old in a single income household whose parents are completely disinterested in their education.
You know who didn’t charge an application fee? The for-profit college advertised on late night television.
If you need a senior developer, take someone internal who has proven themselves as a junior developer and make them into a senior developer.
If you need a junior developer, hire someone straight out of college and give them all the training and mentoring to make them productive.
If you need a manager, look within your ranks for an individual contributor who wants to step up to manager, and give them a chance.
The author has clearly never been involved in hiring/selecting before, because the idea that application processes are as good as random is positively absurd.
People will apply to all sorts of things they're not even remotely qualified for. Hell, I've certainly done it in the past. A resume screen is essential to eliminate the obvious unqualified, and a first round of interviews weeds out people who also clearly don't have what's needed for the role or who throw up a gigantic red flag. (And then after that it's about trying to find the best match, not just a barely sufficient one, since suitability for a role isn't binary but exists on a continuum.)
Applying and then interviewing/screening is something we do because it's necessary. Obviously people are always looking for ways to improve the process, e.g. what types of signals actually correlate most with job performance?
But the idea that the application is no better than random flies in the face of all evidence, as well as all common sense.
This makes as much sense as saying that going on dates is useless -- just pick a partner at random and get married and be done with it, because the odds are just as good! (When of course the research shows that personality compatibility and chemistry compatibility are huge determinants of successful marriages.)
How sure are you this is false? I'm not completely convinced. Some people are very, very bad at picking compatible partners. Now I'm trying to figure out how we could ethically run this study, because I think the results might surprise you.
Also divorce rates can only be meaningfully be compared within the same culture. The pressures to stay married or get divorced vary widely between cultures, separately from whether marriages are arranged or not.
> Trust Windfalls are a Rorschach test for whether you trust people or not. I’m a guy on the internet going “hey give me a bunch of money and I’ll give it to my friends and it’ll be great!”... If you don’t know me and you’re a bit of a misanthrope, this sounds like the worst idea ever.
Indeed, it does sound like the worst idea ever because I don't know you. That means there is zero chance of me getting the funding. And when you give the money to a friend, it's likely your friend will return the favor and give it back to you. Why nominate a person you know will not return the favor? And when they do, who is your next pick? Well, their wife needs funding, and so does your wife. So you go another round. Then who? Your cousin need funding, and so does your college roommate. You know who doesn't get funding - that person with a rival theory, and that person attempting to replicate your work.
And if the money does happen to migrate to me, nothing against you, its just that if the money migrates out of my 'trusted network' it will likely not return for a long time. And my lab won't survive several years waiting for the funding to return.
[0] Obviously the problem of what %age to give to each camp is an important second-order problem, but if you imagine a scenario like a university, I find it more likely the Provost's office can figure out how much to give to which Dean than they to be able to figure out how much to give to which lab.
(I also think you're right to observe that even within a particular camp of a particular field there will be relationship-driven gladhanding that helps determine the flow of money, and that's a real concern, but it's just a more localized concern than I think you give it credit for. I'm also not entirely sold on it.)
If left to the provost or dean, the money will inevitably be distributed equally between all faculty. Once the money enters the university, there is no longer a separation between funding agency and recipients. And since 'equally' is the least complex/controversial way to distribute the funds, that's where it will eventually settle. (Hm, perhaps I am a misanthrope).
But often companies don't really know what they want. Advertising a job becomes a way of seeing what's out there, and whether anyone can bring them some missing "magic".
If we think of work as being about relationships then successful ones are slow, sometimes painful routes by which we find lasting partnership. It may involve many on-and-off dates, exploration of shared values and interests, introductions to family, and so on.
OTOH, the idea of a "job market" in which human beings are rapidly traded as they "climb a career" is akin to a nightclub for picking up casual sex. Many companies experience nothing but a series of one night stands. Passionate embraces and big promises are followed by tempestuous exits.
The cost of casualisation and rapid churn isn't really appreciated by either party, or society at large. Workers, forever "dressing to impress" never really develop deep skills that come from stability. Companies spend a fortune on HR, perpetual transformation, induction, on-boarding and reconfiguration around the latest hire. Little real work gets done and eventually it becomes mutually disrespectful, or even hostile.
This gig economy is harmful in unseen ways. Now we have companies desperate for good people, but unable to recruit, and talented workers unable to find a happy workplace, because both are "playing hard-to-get" out of pride and restless, undirected ambition. Imho, it's a situation rooted in immaturity and something Adam Phillips touched on when he said "capitalism is for children".
Somehow OP was bothered with spending time to write applications and would prefer we wrap our entire lives around them instead.
As a thought experiment, imagine how someone with jail history or with a small child and no spouse or with disabilities would cope in those worlds.
Modulo a very small subset of top-tier performers, I think we’re already there!
Wanted — An archaeologist with high academic qualifications willing to spend fifteen years in excavating the Inca tombs at Helsdump on the Alligator River. Knighthood or equivalent honor guaranteed. Pension payable but never yet claimed. Salary of £2000 (or $6000 U.S.) per year. Apply in triplicate to the Director of the Grubbenburrow Institute, Sickdale, Ill., U.S.A.
If not, could you at least point to the source?