Would you answer this job ad?
ROCKET FUEL INC HIRING ROCKET SCIENTISTS
I'm happy for you, I really am. But dudes. You used to be cool. What happened?
The last time I recruited heavily at Stanford was 1997/98, when I got 7 of the top 7 students to join me as employees #18 thru 24 at E.piphany. See http://ai.stanford.edu/~gjohn/fountain98.gif. I'm not kidding about the ranking, one guy in that photo had A+'s in 12 CS classes.
Two of the people in that photo went on to get CS PhD's at Stanford and MIT, two became professors, one even became a prof at Stanford, three are CEO's of their own companies, the rest went on to high-impact management roles, and they all enjoyed working on hard CS problems with fun co-workers while watching their net worth hit 8 figures.
So it may be worth checking out what I'm up to now, which is disrupting online advertising with advanced AI and CS. We just hired our 7th employee today, so you can be #8.
We have some job descriptions posted for people who care about that stuff, but if you're smart and good at coding + databases, machine learning, or distributed systems please drop me a note with your resume including grades in Stanford CS classes + SAT/GRE.
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Some friends and I saw this ad recently and we laughed our asses off at how incredibly arrogant it seemed, but thinking back on the undeniable quality of the team that recruiter assembled, I'm wondering now if we were wrong. Thoughts? Is the ad unbearably arrogant or just funny>