Appreciate all the data packed into this post. There are some amazing stats here. Agree that we definitely need this type of clarity to increase awareness and generate dialogue.

Very cool. Congrats, guys! This was a great talk - http://www.hakkalabs.co/articles/how-rethinkdb-works/

Alas! Incidentally, the vid of the talk will be posted later on g33ktalk.com if you're interested.

to keep out recruiters

The format of this vid is interesting to me. We've played different media formats for our engineering talks at g33ktalk (audio, video, slides and sometimes screencaps/demos) and it's been somewhat challenging to find the best format. Of course, ultimately it depends heavily on an individual user's prefs. meaning there's no perfect answer.

I find this format compelling since it's relatively short (19 mins) has high quality audio, and the only visuals are the main points represented as motion graphics.

Curious, why misleading?

Public Relations for your Engineering Team suggests working on getting them out in front of the product, not just hiding behind it.

You touched on it, "Engineers are no longer the loner geeks, working in dimly lit rooms, hacking away" but didn't realize the potential of that statement. Instead you used the idea to jump into a different topic; using the Tenants of PR to hire Engineers.

It's very true. Many times orgs write generic, catch-all engineering job specs. Or they say they're looking for any 'good' engineer.

They think this is a good idea since it seems to apply to the broadest number of candidates. But it totally backfires - no one gets excited about the role since it's not targeted at anyone.

yep - this is totally designed to be a more scalable lead-gen strategy (top of funnel).

Next post will be on effective interviewing by/of engineers. I find many companies don't tend to do that in a scalable way, either.

Good comment, thanks. And appreciate the connection with professional networking.

As a young engineer, it was very hard for me to come to understand the value of building my network. I guess when there's so many horrible 'networking' events out there (just like 'bad' marketing), it takes some time for one to overcome an adverse knee-jerk reaction and really apprehend the value.

I couldn't agree more. Engineers are loathe to enter into a traditional recruiting process (i.e. go in through the front door) when they have so many options out there.

It's far more attractive if they can 'window shop' and get a true sense for your team/culture/challenges without kicking off a gauntlet of interviews for them to learn the same stuff.

Obviously, interviews are still important for the hiring team, but it's time to make the overall process better (and more front-loaded with the company's engineering project info) for the engineer candidates.