Good enough to steal
Posted by Tom Moertel Sun, 10 Jul 2011 22:06:00 GMT
Recently, I wrote a simple plagiarism detector as a fun programming exercise. Then, merely a few days later, some company gave me cause to use it.
This company, it seems, was looking to hire a programmer. So they posted a job ad that was more or less word-for-word copied from a job ad that I had written for the company where I work. The duplication, being so extensive, was hard to miss. (The offending company, to its credit, promptly removed the copied ad from its web site when we let them know about it.)
I had originally written the text used in that ad back in December 2010, when we were starting another round of hiring. I had hoped that when the right kind of programmers read it, they would discern that we were programmers just like them, programmers who cared for their craft enough and who cared for their team enough to take hiring other programmers seriously. I didn’t want our ads to seem anything like those spat out by people just mouthing the words that everyone else was mouthing to “get talent.” So I worked on getting the words right, thinking the investment would somehow help us stand apart, if just a bit, when hiring.
But I had failed to consider that authenticity in job ads can be faked by just copying what seems authentic. So, a few days ago, when Googling for statistically unlikely phrases from the text I had written, I was actually surprised to discover that a number of companies and recruiters were now using my words, more or less unchanged, to signal how “authentic” they were.
At first, I was annoyed. But, upon reflection, I realized that the plagiarism was telling me that I had written something worth stealing. That’s a good thing, right?
After all, in a society where all too many people are willing to claim your words as their own, which is worse: to write something and have it stolen or to write something and have it not?
Curious to know what the job posting was now :-)
”... So, a few days ago, when Googling for statistically unlikely phrases from the text I had written …”
What a great line!
Is there any correlation between applicants who plagiarise and businesses who plagiarise. Maybe they are meant for each other and the rest of us have to just beaver away being honest. They cause problems like Enron and the banking collapse in the United States.
Edward, I thought about linking to the job posting but figured it would cause people to focus too much on this particular incident, rather than on what such incidents indicate, in general, in a society where plagiarism is rampant. The insight for me was that, in such a society, plagiarism is going to happen, so you shouldn’t get too agitated when it happens to you; instead, you should just consider it positive feedback on your work. And maybe have a beer.
Maybe the real lesson behind this incident is that people looking for (industry) jobs should look past the exact words of job ads and do some research on their own. If a job ad includes multiple “statistically unlikely phrases” I’d be somewhat hesitant to believe anything those phrases would like to tell me.
Thomas: To clarify, by “statistically unlikely phrases,” I don’t mean phrases that are unlikely to be true but phrases that are unusually unlikely to occur in a typical document. In other words, they are the phrases that most distinguish the source document from all others.
Cheers,
Tom