4chan is Hiring - Unless It's a Prank

4chan is Hiring - Unless It's a Prank

Unless it's an elaborate and pointless prank - and come on, how likely is that? - 4chan is hiring. To be more specific, a 4chan spin-off, called Canvas, is hiring for several New York-based technical positions.

Canvas has yet to be publicly defined, but the jobs page on the the White Album-ish placeholder site hints at it in describing the type of people they're looking for.

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"Ideal candidates are heavy users of online communities who want to invent new and better ways for people to hang out and collaborate online. We're working on a product that takes forums and re-imagines them for an era of increasingly sophisticated users and browsers."

Specifically, they are looking for a "Frontend developer/designer" and a "Tech lead - Backend developer/operations."

4chan was started in 2003 by the then-15 year old Christopher Poole, as a place to talk and post about Japanese anime. But in the intervening years it's become the largest image-based bulletin board in the U.S. It also launched such celebrated and decried memes like Rickrolling and lolcats. (If you by any chance don't know what those things are, don't look them up. You'll start up another wave and that will only encourage them.)

Given the radically anonymous nature of the site - anyone can post under any, or no, name - and the mischievousness of its users (who tried to exile teen singer Justin Bieber to North Korea), the roll-out of a funded website might seem out of character. But people grow up, perhaps. That's what my mommy tells me anyway. And venture capitalist Andreesen Horowitz must think so, as they were big investors in the $625,000 the startup's raised, according to WebNewser.

Their rigorous interview process includes you sending them your "links to public projects, your GitHub, open source contributions, whatever you have." (I've sent them a mannequin filled with stoat paste and a recording of my harmonica interp of Satie's "Gymnopedies." I presume that's what they're looking for.) After that, there's probably a fair bit of ID checking and some sort of obstacle course along with a variant of the Spanish Prisoner.

I don't know. What do you want? I'm old. You kids get off my lawn.