150 people did... and most had pretty good jobs already. 40 on the first day! Think about it another way. How much time do you spend/waste when applying to a s

150 people did... and most had pretty good jobs already. 40 on the first day! Think about it another way. How much time do you spend/waste when applying to a standard corporate job? I graduated at the height of the Lehman fallout. I really wanted to work in finance. I applied to over 200 companies and did a seemingly endless string of interviews. In one case, a fund interviewed me an incredible 17 times for an analyst position (about half of which were "technical" i.e. "here's a bunch of accounts, tell us what you think of the company"). In every occasion that led to an offer, I spent way more than 4 hours travelling, talking with HR, doing various rounds of interviewing with various team members, having "social" coffees with other same-level folks... hell just the automated screening tests, essays, forms for somewhere like Goldman Sachs would take a good couple of hours if you did them properly. I still know many experienced people for whom a job search during an economic downturn means sitting for months at home doing these stupid screening tests and perfecting their cover letter (after all, putting the wrong company name in your letter is enough to get you rejected, because of course you really, really want to work at this particular bank and none of the competitors even though the reputation, work and compensation are identical). I think a lot of more experienced people realised the trade-off and thought this was quite a positive signal on our part - at least based on the number of people who were willing to quit incredibly well paid jobs for our pretty average Asian retailer with no equity and a third of the pay. I had one prominent member of the open source community slam us publicly for "wasting people's time with free work" whilst one of his work colleagues was gleefully submitting his solution to the task...