I think you may be missing how central absurdly high quality salmon is to the northwest.
It's the local Thing. Lots of places have that sort of strong geographic tie to an art or food or what-have-you; the only odd part here is that most local foods don't travel well -- but smoked salmon obviously can and does.
Vegans at most account for 3% of the population. In a corporate entity that large, it doesn’t matter if you miss a hire or not. So if a vegan was offended, I’m sure no one cared and was happy to offer the job to someone else.
A large portion of MS employees are vegetarian because many Hindus are vegetarian. At MS Build they always have both vegetarian and Indian vegetarian options.
If it doesn't matter if you miss a hire or not, why would you be going through the effort of buying a large fancy salmon and shipping it to the candidate? You could just not do that and not care about the ones you miss since they don't matter.
That's a very dismissive attitude to your hires, and it makes the salmon even more pointless.
If you want to make a point about how good the salmon is, invite them and treat them to the best salmon in town, instead of dumping a dead fish that nobody asked for on their doorstep.
"Don't send him the nice fish, he might be a vegetarian AND might be the next CEO"... Yeah, huh, I don't think that's the usual concern. I think many people wouldn't want to hire a person that takes offense from a misplaced but nice gesture, anyways - I would not.
If you're a hiring manager and can't even be bothered to know the most basic facts about me and that I might not like that piece or pork or salmon
for religious or ethical reasons then that about says it all.
> Yeah, huh, I don't think that's the usual concern
Keep in mind that they missed out on Forstall. It seems unlikely he would have ended up CEO, but that’s not as far fetched as the prospects for most hires.
Maybe the failure rate had been acceptable, ain’t fix if it ain’t broke style.
I wonder if it has been the inspiration for Steve Jobs’ “Japanese are like dead fish washing up” quote, if Microsoft was sending dead fish left and right around California and he was sick of it.
It's the local Thing. Lots of places have that sort of strong geographic tie to an art or food or what-have-you; the only odd part here is that most local foods don't travel well -- but smoked salmon obviously can and does.