Reallocating The Highly Skilled To Be Highly Impactful

Or ‘Why you should work at SpaceX, not Zynga’

Some founders aim to make money. Others aim to change the world.

What if every developer, designer, marketer, and so on chose their employer based on the founder’s vision/mission for the world?

In many cases, this is what happens. You’ve probably read that the best way to recruit is to have an inspiring mission.

I’m far more than willing to support less traditionally interesting companies, provided their founders really aim to do amazing things in the world. Tesla is just an electric car company, but Elon Musk created Tesla because he wants a sustainable world. So if a highly skilled engineer was choosing between working for Tesla, or some other electric car company, I’d try and convince them to work at Tesla.

I want to try a crazy experiment. I’ve experimented with quite a few different ideas in the startup recruiting space, I’ve been able to talk to the right people in a bunch of cool and world changing companies, but nothing has stuck.

I want to become a recruiter for a few months. I’m a Computer Science student at Stanford, but I’ve also been exposed to and explored quite a bit of research on happiness/purpose/job satisfaction. And more importantly, I want to see the best people working within organizations that a) are awesome to work at, and b) are part of a bigger vision that involves improving the world in a significant way.

If you are an engineer either from San Francisco or Palo Alto, and want your work to be part of a much bigger picture, I’d love to buy you a coffee. Send me whatever you think is relevant — a GitHub link, resume, Quora profile, HN profile, whatever. If you hate recruiters, hopefully I can make it a more enjoyable experience (I created RecruitingIsBroken.com recently).

My email: cjbarber@stanford.edu

Whether or not you do that — consider the larger picture when you choose a job, and try and influence your friends for the better too.