7 ms·

This is a brilliant insight into how little I understand the world. If I was applying to the same company I'd be VERY upset this guy gets an interview. If I w

This is a brilliant insight into how little I understand the world. If I was applying to the same company I'd be VERY upset this guy gets an interview. If I was the person he got delivered the donuts I'd curse him out of the office and tell him to apply like everybody else. What makes him special or give him the right to basically break the rules and disrespect everyone who tries their best to get through the recruiting door? What would happen if everyone acted the same and started stalking execs and managers trying to "serve" them whimsical resumés? Clearly I'm the one who's strange since everyone else thinks it's great... maybe it's a cultural thing?

chrismcb 10y ago
Break what rules?
mlaretallack 10y ago
It would annoy me to know that someone has an interview because they bypassed the rules. For me, I think this is a difference between "engineering" and "marketing". For Marketing, this sort of thing is seen as a good characteristic. For engineering, no so much.
- chrisbennet 10y ago
  Like I told a previous poster, I think you are perceiving rules where there aren't any. Just because there is a dating web site doesn't mean that is the only way to ask someone on a date.
davemel37 10y ago
First, he was applying for a marketing position. A position that demands creativity and the ability to stand out and be noticed...so, essentially he proved himself with this gimmick. In other words, this wasnt just a gimmick but rather a demonstration of his skills. It just like an engineer getting interviewed after finding a bug in your code. On a more critical note, applying for a job is a zero sum game. Only one person gets hired. If you are more concerned with rules and respecting other applications by not standing out, you are just playing the game poorly. Your job as an applicant is to a)get noticed and b)beat out everyone else for the job. All this is to say that if followong the rules are so important in your organization, this guy is a bad fit. If it requires scrappiness, creativity, and "hacker" mentality, it is a perfect fit. In this case, as a marketer, it was brilliant!
- whybroke 10y ago
  >If you are more concerned with rules and respecting other applications by not standing out, you are just playing the game poorly. So say sleeping with people from HR is ok? Either we have social norms, fairness and an (attempt at) a rational system or we don't. And btw, the behavior you reward is the one you get. So expect a hell of a lot of donuts over the next year.
  - davemel37 10y ago
    >So say sleeping with people from HR is ok? Do you really equate sleeping with HR to getting noticed by delivering donuts to executives? I want to point you to Paul Graham's essay about what they look for in Founders. Specifically, "They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter." http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html 4. Naughtiness Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
    - GuiA 10y ago
      Yeah, so the thing about stuff like this is that it is inherently classist. There are 2 things at play here: - knowing what rules are permissible to break highly depends on your upbringing and social status. In other words, "the rules that don't matter" for Paul Graham are the rules that don't matter for a rich old white dude. - it's much easier to break the rules when you know that there will be no consequences because of your wealth/social status . Kids whose parents paid for a Stanford education will "delight in breaking rules" much more than the hard working kid from immigrant parents desperate to fit in in a world where no one looks like her. This is exactly the kind of privileged rhetoric that people who push for more diversity and sensitivity in Silicon Valley and tech are trying to highlight/stave off.
GuiA 10y ago
Not really a cultural thing, as every culture has some form of this (see for instance the conversation here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535415). I'd say probably more of a personality thing. A lot of analytical types tend to find comfort in rules, and feel a great sense of injustice when people break them in order to have unequal footing. I'm with you on this - if someone pulled this stunt on me, I'd thank them for the donuts and then tell them to put their resume on the pile like everyone else. That being said, it's sadly not how the real world works.
chrisbennet 10y ago
Yes, I think you are perceiving "rules" where their aren't any. Applying for a job is similar to dating in many ways. Metaphorically speaking, this guy chose ask a girl out by singing under her window instead of "applying" through the dating site.
PostOnce 10y ago
Fortune favors the bold. It's not that he has extra rights or privilege, it's that he _made extra effort_. He took the initiative and went the extra mile. Applying online is easy, perhaps he did that as well, but showing up in person is really recognizable and obviously took him extra time and work. Now, on the flipside, he could be seen as absolutely wasting a busy person's time by not going through the proper channels, thereby destroying his chance of getting the job. That's the risk of being bold, but they also say, nothing risked, nothing gained.
solipsism 10y ago
What makes him special? Your lesson to help you better understand the world lies in the answer to that question. What makes him special is knowing how to break the rules in ways that don't have too many negative repercussions. It's not easy, but if you can do it, it puts you ahead of the people who play by the rules.
yomly 10y ago
Have you ever applied to very large desirable companies / competetive positions? In most cases the system is completely broken. Here are a few genuine personal anecdotes: Friend applies to Amazon via website. Finally gets reply 6 months down the line. Seriously - who has 6 months to wait around for a job. In that time he had 6 months to get actual experience and have an even better resume. Different friend gets summer internship at top legal firm, on leaving/ "you're hired" party, drunk HR manager admits they were very busy so the entire team decided to base internship interviews on the first sentence of the cover letter. While at working at bigcorp see numerous roles, including positions in senior management go unadvertised to people who are recommended for the position. More generally, there are a great deal of places that will bin your application if you didn't go to an Ivy, so how is someone from another country to even get a chance? So is this unfair on the other applicants? Probably. But mainly, the system is unfair on applicants.
ap3 10y ago
What is the rule against delivering a resume with donuts?
LouisSayers 10y ago
Dude, welcome to the real world! There are but two rules. #1 Anything possible, you can do. #2 Anything impossible you can try to do, but it will fail because it is impossible. Oh, and just a small note. Any action you take (including inaction) has side effects. Take a think of what they are (positive or negative) and balance them up to decide your course of action. The world has but two rules dude. Any others are the ones you've imposed upon yourself.

chrismcb 10y ago

Break what rules?

mlaretallack 10y ago

It would annoy me to know that someone has an interview because they bypassed the rules. For me, I think this is a difference between "engineering" and "marketing". For Marketing, this sort of thing is seen as a good characteristic. For engineering, no so much.

chrisbennet 10y ago
Like I told a previous poster, I think you are perceiving rules where there aren't any. Just because there is a dating web site doesn't mean that is the only way to ask someone on a date.

davemel37 10y ago

First, he was applying for a marketing position. A position that demands creativity and the ability to stand out and be noticed...so, essentially he proved himself with this gimmick. In other words, this wasnt just a gimmick but rather a demonstration of his skills. It just like an engineer getting interviewed after finding a bug in your code. On a more critical note, applying for a job is a zero sum game. Only one person gets hired. If you are more concerned with rules and respecting other applications by not standing out, you are just playing the game poorly. Your job as an applicant is to a)get noticed and b)beat out everyone else for the job. All this is to say that if followong the rules are so important in your organization, this guy is a bad fit. If it requires scrappiness, creativity, and "hacker" mentality, it is a perfect fit. In this case, as a marketer, it was brilliant!

whybroke 10y ago
>If you are more concerned with rules and respecting other applications by not standing out, you are just playing the game poorly. So say sleeping with people from HR is ok? Either we have social norms, fairness and an (attempt at) a rational system or we don't. And btw, the behavior you reward is the one you get. So expect a hell of a lot of donuts over the next year.
- davemel37 10y ago
  >So say sleeping with people from HR is ok? Do you really equate sleeping with HR to getting noticed by delivering donuts to executives? I want to point you to Paul Graham's essay about what they look for in Founders. Specifically, "They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter." http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html 4. Naughtiness Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
  - GuiA 10y ago
    Yeah, so the thing about stuff like this is that it is inherently classist. There are 2 things at play here: - knowing what rules are permissible to break highly depends on your upbringing and social status. In other words, "the rules that don't matter" for Paul Graham are the rules that don't matter for a rich old white dude. - it's much easier to break the rules when you know that there will be no consequences because of your wealth/social status . Kids whose parents paid for a Stanford education will "delight in breaking rules" much more than the hard working kid from immigrant parents desperate to fit in in a world where no one looks like her. This is exactly the kind of privileged rhetoric that people who push for more diversity and sensitivity in Silicon Valley and tech are trying to highlight/stave off.

GuiA 10y ago

Not really a cultural thing, as every culture has some form of this (see for instance the conversation here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535415). I'd say probably more of a personality thing. A lot of analytical types tend to find comfort in rules, and feel a great sense of injustice when people break them in order to have unequal footing. I'm with you on this - if someone pulled this stunt on me, I'd thank them for the donuts and then tell them to put their resume on the pile like everyone else. That being said, it's sadly not how the real world works.

chrisbennet 10y ago

Yes, I think you are perceiving "rules" where their aren't any. Applying for a job is similar to dating in many ways. Metaphorically speaking, this guy chose ask a girl out by singing under her window instead of "applying" through the dating site.

PostOnce 10y ago

Fortune favors the bold. It's not that he has extra rights or privilege, it's that he _made extra effort_. He took the initiative and went the extra mile. Applying online is easy, perhaps he did that as well, but showing up in person is really recognizable and obviously took him extra time and work. Now, on the flipside, he could be seen as absolutely wasting a busy person's time by not going through the proper channels, thereby destroying his chance of getting the job. That's the risk of being bold, but they also say, nothing risked, nothing gained.

solipsism 10y ago

What makes him special? Your lesson to help you better understand the world lies in the answer to that question. What makes him special is knowing how to break the rules in ways that don't have too many negative repercussions. It's not easy, but if you can do it, it puts you ahead of the people who play by the rules.

yomly 10y ago

Have you ever applied to very large desirable companies / competetive positions? In most cases the system is completely broken. Here are a few genuine personal anecdotes: Friend applies to Amazon via website. Finally gets reply 6 months down the line. Seriously - who has 6 months to wait around for a job. In that time he had 6 months to get actual experience and have an even better resume. Different friend gets summer internship at top legal firm, on leaving/ "you're hired" party, drunk HR manager admits they were very busy so the entire team decided to base internship interviews on the first sentence of the cover letter. While at working at bigcorp see numerous roles, including positions in senior management go unadvertised to people who are recommended for the position. More generally, there are a great deal of places that will bin your application if you didn't go to an Ivy, so how is someone from another country to even get a chance? So is this unfair on the other applicants? Probably. But mainly, the system is unfair on applicants.

ap3 10y ago

What is the rule against delivering a resume with donuts?

LouisSayers 10y ago

Dude, welcome to the real world! There are but two rules. #1 Anything possible, you can do. #2 Anything impossible you can try to do, but it will fail because it is impossible. Oh, and just a small note. Any action you take (including inaction) has side effects. Take a think of what they are (positive or negative) and balance them up to decide your course of action. The world has but two rules dude. Any others are the ones you've imposed upon yourself.