Unconventional Ways Companies are Finding Tech Talent (opens in new tab)

What a blatantly ignorant article. Most of these tips are yawn-inducingly normal. The last two are almost offensive.

I think it's cool if a company is willing to support someone who has come forward as having been diagnosed with Aspergers. Someone with this condition might have challenges in the work place that other people do not. Any support and understanding is a good thing.

But I think it's ignorant to hire someone with Aspergers "because they have that genius disease." It's just plain wrong and totally not what Asperger's is.

One of the thing that we (Wolfram) have noticed is that our NKS summer schools provide a great way to track someone's problem solving ability (and domain expertise) over a long period. A lot of previous hires for Wolfram|Alpha have come from summer schools. The Cambridge grad who wrote Alpha's first-generation parser, for example, studied at the very first summer school in 2003.

Two related things: we get a lot of international applicants, and this turns out to be a great filter for selecting very motivated and talented people who have perhaps saturated the opportunities their local countries can provide them (certainly this was true of me for South Africa).

Another thing is that the math and physics people who apply seem to adapt better to programming in our house functional language, Mathematica, than people with a more traditional CS background (MIT's SICP aside, do they still do that?).

I've recently noticed that > 90% of my gmail ads are job-offer-related (mainly Jane Street, Google, and Intel). That seems to be a new trend, at least for me.

#8: By commenting on relevant Hacker News stories.

i've noticed that my linkedin mail from recruiters has doubled (or more) in the last year. i'd say it's a valid trend

We're currently in hiring mode and finding talent is super tough. You need people who are not only a good fit (hard enough) but are willing to leave their cush jobs, join a startup no one has heard of and believe in your vision.

Some things we've tried:

- Scouring Dribble for Designers: I built a system that allows me to search Dribble by location, then pull up all the relevant shots of people from the locations I type in. A bit of scraping work, but so much more efficient now.

- Pinging people on Forrst. I've met with a bunch of people off of Forrst. You can hack some URLs to find all people from a particular location.

- LinkedIn. I've never once used or enjoyed LinkedIn until I've had to hire people. Their search is actually pretty awesome for recruiting. Actually getting people to respond is harder.

- Emailing local universities. Finding fresh talent out of school. Sending emails to CS listservs.

Finding people is so tough. Its the hardest part of a startup I've had to do so far.

Obligatory shameless plug: Let me know if you're interested in an early employee gig in Palo Alto doing Ruby development + a bunch of awesome statistical graphing / information mining.