How to Get Geeks — Part 1: Geeks like Geeks
I blogged before about how to hire and retain kind, caring people.
You also want to hire technically talented people. Not just people that know the basics of electronics, but the kind of people that have, in the past, tried to harness said power to build a robot that can fight other robots. These people are geeks. You want them on your team.
This is part one of my advice based on my personal experience:
Geeks like to work with geeks
First a story.
When I was in my late teens, I went through a phase of being addicted to Pi. I couldn’t get enough. I would download megabytes and megabytes of it, clogging my dialup connection. Soon it was gigabytes. I would email my friends random parts of Pi with the email subject being “here’s a piece of Pi”. I had a plan to use the university’s printers to print out thousands of pages of Pi in a 9-point font so that I could wallpaper my room in a shade of grey that, only when you looked close, would you realize was actually made up of millions of digits of Pi.
My addiction reached it’s climax when I couldn’t get enough Pi through publicly available means. I wrote an email to a Japanese research institute (which at the time, had calculated the most digits of Pi). The Japanese institute would only share their Pi with other researchers, so I had to use university computers to lie and pose as a fellow researcher. I never really thought about the fact that I didn’t have enough hard drive space to store that much Pi (lesson: Pi doesn’t compress at all — it’s random). Lying and losing all my hard drive space to store text files containing random numbers was the limit. I had to quit cold turkey, and to this day, I have to turn away when I see a screen filled with Pi – my mind starts racing and I get foolish ideas.
Don’t let me start about root 2.
The point of this story? I am a geek.
I get two kinds of reactions when I tell this story to people:
Reaction 1) “I have to go to… umm.. this other place…”
Reaction 2) “Let’s work together somehow”
When we interview for technical jobs, we like to spend time chatting about geeky things we’ve done in the past, geeky stuff we’re interested in, referencing xkcd comics, making fun of people who don’t know how to use VIM, and arguing about which programming language is best.
It works.
“But I am a non-geek marketing/sales/executive-type person who is trying to hire geeks, what’s your advice then,” you ask?
My answer: “I… umm… have to go to… uhh.. this other place…”
March 6th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
One of the things I’ve discovered is that there are marketing/sales/executive type people who are geeks about marketing/sales and, um… executions?
Anyway, there’s technical geekiness which you’re absolutely getting right here but the deep trait of geekiness is the curiosity and the mild (or not so much) obsessiveness when something catches our eye. I think for the non-geek types to attract geeks, they can start talking about things they geek out about and try to work towards some kind of common ground. I think most geeks are going to be attracted by someone else’s obsession.
I’ve had perfectly great geeky discussions about marketers with a simple topic like “if you were given a dump truck full of food and the only thing you could eat was the food in that truck (until the truck was empty), which food would you fill it with?” which in and of itself isn’t inherently geeky, but does allow people to get curious and deep.
March 6th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
> people who don’t know how to use VIM,
calling it VIM instead of VI shows a lack of geekiness. have you heard of Bill Joy?
(VIM is great and I use it every day but VI is the canonical form)
March 6th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I was waiting for some geek to say that I meant VI and not VIM. Yay! Keep it coming, geekazoids.
March 7th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Hmm, why were you storing pi as a text file?
March 8th, 2009 at 5:07 am
I was storing them in text files because I needed it in base 10 so I could print it out and memorize it. The common challenge is to get as many digits of Pi in base 10.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
“I had a plan to use the university’s printers to print out thousands of pages of Pi in a 9-point font so that I could wallpaper my room in a shade of grey that, only when you looked close, would you realize was actually made up of millions of digits of Pi.”
That would be so damn cool. I wonder if the shade of grey changes throughout PI with trends in the shape of the numbers.
Submit the pattern to – http://www.nakedandangry.com/
March 12th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
How far did you get to memorizing Pi? I still remember the 50 digits I memorized in 1988
January 4th, 2010 at 7:21 am
Awesome! We were looking for this anywhere!
January 19th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
xkcd is pretty terrible.
July 2nd, 2010 at 7:47 pm
great i enjoyed reading all the best http://www.autoclassads.com
July 7th, 2010 at 8:26 am
Thank you for that advice..
July 20th, 2010 at 5:16 am
teen pictures and webcam teen Webcam pictures