Saturday, March 24, 2007

30 out of 37 immediate rejects!

Attended Nexus 2007 yesterday. Shall blog more about it when I am done with my presentation assignment, but here's a quick post on something Cory Ondrejka, CTO of Linden Lab, said:

"...out of 37 potential hires I interviewed (here in Singapore), 30 of them were immediate rejections...not that they're not intelligent or don't have the skills necessary...but they don't have what it takes to survive in a place like Linden Lab..."

Ok, it might not be his exact words, but I think that's the essence of what he said. In fact, there were about 100 applicants, he interviewed 37 and in the end chose 3. So that makes it 3%. Now compare that to Harvard's admission rate of 10.3%. Does it mean that Second Life is an even more "prestigious" place to "enroll in", or just that Singaporeans don't quite make the cut? You decide.

One additional note: Cory mentioned that one of the 3 he selected was of such caliber that she would easily be in the top 5 of the thousands of people he has interviewed over the years. And she comes from poly (and instantly someone sent a message onto the real-time comment projector screens: "Poly 1 Uni 0"). I tried to ask him the difference he found between the Singaporean candidates vs those in America; too bad he sort of eluded the question.

Meanwhile, also check out this amusing post by O'Reilly Radar's Nat Torkington, who also attended the event.

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