As sourcing and recruiting technology professionals, we often fancy ourselves as hackers and coders. Some of us have failed startups in our past (here I am pitching a failed startup on a local morning show 2 years ago). Others have made a career out of teaching others how to reverse engineer social networks and online forums to find more information about potential job candidates.
Below are two new shows that cater to the tech geek gene in all of us:
1) Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a new HBO series that pokes fun at startup culture in, as the name implies, Silicon Valley. If you’ve been involved in a startup, you’ll find yourself laughing at the experiences of the Pied Piper team. If you recruit tech candidates, you’ve likely encountered a few people who will remind you of the characters portrayed.
The jokes are extreme and often crass. The humor can be raunchy, but the way they characterize the stages of a startup and the struggles of a genius co-founder with no business acumen is hilarious. The jokes are raunchy, it’s NSFW (not safe for work) and definitely not safe for your children. Personally, I think they could have left out most of the foul language without losing the authenticity of the show. That said, maybe Silicon Valley really is that raunchy. If so, I’m glad I reside in the south. West coasters, is it really that bad?
2) Halt and Catch Fire
This new series is about a group of hackers in the early 80’s who set out to reverse engineer the new IBM computer. Per Wikipedia, “Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object, or system through analysis of its structure, function, and operation.”
Why would a sourcer enjoy this? Good sourcers reverse engineer websites and social networks to understand how they work. This allows us to find more information and extract data from places others might not be able to access. The SourceCon blog is filled with examples of how sourcers have reverse engineered websites to extract candidate data. See this post from Matt Ferree where he demonstrates how to find the email address of almost any Github user.
The pilot episode of Halt and Catch Fire can be viewed on AMC’s Tumblr page between now and May 31st.
What other shows do you think the SourceCon audience would enjoy?