Posted by josh at July 17th, 2008

The awesomest thing ever happened to me today. I was apparently one of 416 lucky people who looked promising to a probably-clueless recruiter who’s looking to hire for a Ruby on Rails job.

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:57:59 -0500
From: “Pradipta [lastname]”
Subject: Ruby on Rails position…
To: [416 people]

I have a couple of Ruby on Rails position, wanted to know if you are interested?

Max [lastname]
Technical Recruiter

Of course, as the number of people on a thread increases, the chances that one of them will hit “reply all” approaches 1 asymptotically:

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:10:37 -0700
From: Zack [lastname]
To: [416 people]
Subject: Re: Ruby on Rails position…

What are the positions?

Which triggers the absolute inevitability that there will be follow-ups about how people should stop hitting “reply all.”

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:15:39 -0500
From: “Mark [lastname]”
To: “Zack [lastname]”
Cc: [416 people]
Subject: Re: Ruby on Rails position…

this is fun. it’s like a message thread i did not subscribe to. please no more ‘reply all’s. thanks.

Best Regards,

Mark [lastname]

This was amusing already. But then people started taking advantage of the fact that they had a list of 416 people who were ostensibly interested in Ruby on Rails, and started posting other job offers, conversing about who’s going to OSCON, and volunteering their efforts to remove bad email addresses from the list of 416 that the thread started with. It wasn’t long until people started suggesting that this be made into an actual email list.

It is such a fascinating thing to watch. It’s like a flash mob, except the surprise is on us, the mob participants. It’s like we were all beamed into the same virtual room by one single person who chose the group of us, and left us to figure out what to make of the situation. I can’t wait to see where this ends up.

Update (10:30pm, a scant 2.5 hours after the initial mail went out): there’s a Google Group now — they’re calling it Pradipta’s Rolodex, after the recruiter who emailed us all to begin with.

Update (1am): Pradipta’s Rolodex now has a logo — pretty hilarious.

Update (July 18, 10:40am): First off, sorry the blog was down for a while. I enabled caching (which isn’t enabled by default in Wordpress) so hopefully the site can handle the load now. Also, the real Pradipta has spoken up and apologized for the whole incident. Though I’d like to think that only the exceptionally grumpy among us are really all that upset.