| Hey guys, this is Brooke Allen, the fellow Deborah was talking about. And yes, I am the guy who changed how he hired in 2004 and wrote about it in How My Life Was Changed When I Began Caring About the People I Did Not Hire. (On: http://BrookeAllen.com) And I am the guy who offered to all takers a free three-week course in a little used language called APL, and I am the guy who helped the folks who did really well find jobs elsewhere if I couldn’t hire them. I am also the guy who talked about how I learned APL in "I owe EVERYTHING to some funny symbols" (also at: http://BrookeAllen.com). In that I describe how in the spring of 1972 I was just falling in love with programming language when the semester ended and they took it off the mainframe and so I convinced a book author to give me 11 copies of a textbook that used the language and I rounded up 10 students for the summer and I got IBM to waive the $10,000 licensing fee and I got the computing center to put the language up for the summer and waive the CPU and connection fees. That is how I came to teach a class all summer for free to a bunch of eager young people all because I wanted to learn a language a chapter ahead of my students. I got so much for free and gave so much for free and luckily there wasn’t Hacker News then so none of us had to defend ourselves against people with keyboards, opinions, and too much time on their hands. I am also the guy who, in 2009 became sick and tired of my unemployed friends at a finance industry conference bellyache about how there is no work. I was sort of annoyed that half of them helped engineer our financial collapse, but I still told them about how I used to believe that crap about “no work” until the morning of May 6, 1982 when I was unemployed and the first speaker at a conference I attended began by saying, “Never ever in the history of human endeavor has there been a shortage of work, and when the money dries up the work piles up.” He said I should forget about finding a job but look for worthy work and roll up my sleeves and start doing it. I started doing stuff for free but within two weeks I was working for pay at Morgan Stanley and that is how my career in finance got started. I’ve been unemployed for about a week in 1993 but I’ve worked as much as I’ve wanted to ever since. I have gotten rich because I believe that money is the soil, not the spoil, and if you have a choice do something of value for others and "what's in it for you" will take care of itself. So in 2009 I started http://NoShortageOfWork.com where our motto is, “Even when you’re not doing something for pay, do something anyway.” I invited a few dozen unemployed people from the conference for a dinner and instructed them to all get to work for each other. Within a few weeks they were all busy and soon thereafter they were landing paying jobs left and right. It is obvious to me that if you want to get work you should never fall out of the habit of working, even when nobody is looking or paying you a bribe to do it. But boy did I attract the cranks and complainers who criticized my message – one woman even told me I shouldn’t build my website for free until I got someone to pay me to do it. I told her I’d respond if she sent me $50 and I have heard nothing from her since. Eventually I couldn’t take it so I created http://HumongousShortageOfWork.com where the motto is, “No teaching without tuition. No learning without grades. No work without pay.” Sometimes people have no idea how ridiculous their complaints sound until you get them to make the case for what they want instead of against what they don’t. The default way people hire sucks for most people. I’ve innovated how I hire and helped others do the same and many of the ways I’ve come up with suck for some people too. They are especially unpleasant for the kind of people I don’t like working with, which is fine, because there are plenty of bosses who hate their work and hate working with people who do, so these complainers should go hang out with them. My favorite complaint is how my approach advantages people who are unemployed. Actually it only advantages kind-hearted generous curious hard-working unemployed people who wish they weren’t discriminated against because of their hard luck. But so what; the employed shouldn’t bemoan the fact that someone doesn’t care about them if they don’t care about loving work. Or, if you love your job then congratulate yourself and let someone else try for the job I'm offering. I love to work and I love to work with people who love to work and I don’t like working with people who won’t do anything – no matter how interesting or valuable to others – unless they know what’s in it for them. Now, any of you out there going to Burning Man? This is what I’m working on: http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1329. Nobody is paying me to do it and I’m not looking for anyone to be impressed and hire me as a consequence. I do what I do because anything is better than daytime TV (and posting complaints on blogs) and if any of you out there feel the same then I hope to meet you on the Playa or at a Staffup Weekend – they are both one and the same in spirit if not in dustiness. |
If you are looking to hire someone just let me know. I cannot vouch for their skills but I can attest to their grit. As Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and these folk did way more than that.