The following is a cautionary tale for tech recruiters everywhere – do a little research on your recruiting target first.
About a week ago, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” author Eric S. Raymond disclosed the contents of an email he’d received from a recruiting firm. The recruiter suggested, based on information he’d been given about Mr. Raymond, that he might be interested in discussing a career at Microsoft.
Mr. Raymond’s response, posted online with the original pitch, definitely emphasized his opposition to such a consideration:
I’d thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both) couldn’t get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats….
…On that hopefully not too far distant day that I piss on Microsoft’s grave, I sincerely hope none of it will splash on you.
The recruiter, Mike Walters, probably was the victim of a little joke being played by his co-workers, as Mr. Raymond asserted to him; Mr. Walters should have done a little more research first.
It would not have been Mr. Raymond’s first visit to Redmond; he gave a talk on open source there in June of 1999. He further notes a chat with former Microsoft exec Steven Walli over dinner regarding Microsoft’s practices in 2004.
ComputerWorld notes that an email exchange with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, arguably as important to the open source movement as Mr. Raymond, shows that not everyone took the response as a joke: “It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about … public humiliation.”
The lesson for readers of this article today is “email does not convey tone.” Mr. Raymond notes on his site that he was polite to Mr. Walters on the phone. The email response, which should be read to get the full context, may have been written in a completely light-hearted, exaggerated tone. A third party reader has no way to know that without being explicitly told so.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
