Looking for good {Yahoo,Google, Microsoft} engineers

I was talking recently to three excellent engineers from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft this week, and that reminded me that I meant to do this post a little while ago. So I’ll keep this post short and sweet: if you’re an excellent Yahoo or Google or Microsoft engineer with solid experience in everything, I am hiring. If you want to apply for a Research Engineer position  in the beautiful town of Orsay (France), use my e-mail and we won’t need recruiters to discuss. Thanks!

The beginning of this post remind you of something? yes, sure, it’s a pastiche of this Matt Cutts’ post: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/yahoo-search-engineers.

Is this a ballsy move as many people say in the comments of Matt’s blog? I don’t think so, but this this clearly a very clever move. This is Matt personal blog, so there is no problem for him to explicitly mention Yahoo as a good source of engineers for Google. Moreover, Matt is applying standard social psychology tricks (and so is Google, through Matt).

If you look at the social psychology page in wikipedia, you can read « Persuasion attempts that rely on the mass media frequently result in failure. This is because people’s attitudes and behaviors are often established habits that tend to be resistant to change. Communication campaigns are most likely to succeed when they use entertaining characters and messages, tailor the message to fit the audience, and repeat messages across relevant media channels. »

Here, we have the perfect channel (the blog of a very well known expert). We also have an entertaining writing of a serious message that is perfectly fitted to the usual geeky audience of Matt. Moreover, Matt is using the concept of reciprocity (you’re great, you’re strong, so I am, so trust me about the fact that working at Google is good for you), Respect for authority (Hey, this is Matt Cutts!) and friendship (We all belong to the brotherhood of geekness). Well done Matt!

p.s.: This post is voluntarily sarcastic, but I really think that Matt did a very good move in the current search engines market context. Also, I will post soon a long post about social psychology.

And BTW Matt, if you want to work at Orsay, I am really hiring 😉 (a postdoc working on signal processing for astronomy).