SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Feb. 10 (DPI) — Craiglist, the free-classifieds monopoly that has revolutionized so much of American life, posted recently its own help-wanted ad for site-management engineers, a narrative revealing for its proud hostility toward non-engineers.
Amid the bullet points of its offering, Craigslist added the following cultural features of its organization, which is said to consist of 30-40 support staff, webmasters and programmers:
- a workplace free of VCs (venture capitalists), MBAs, sales, marketing, biz dev;
- laid-back, down-to-earth, non-corporate vibe;
- a small team of smart, interesting, idealistic people;
http://www.craigslist.org/about/craigslist_is_hiring
Of course, the reputation of Craigslist – and its operational leader, James Buckmaster — as “anti-capitalist” and hostile to anything other than user-driven growth is fairly well chronicled.
A 2009 report by Gary Wolf in Wired Magazine describes the small outfit’s cultural purity — “its most tenaciously guarded asset,” he wrote — in which programmers toil all day patrolling and improving the site, with no presence of salespeople or managers, and financial performance is irrelevant because the income from paid job postings is a constant gusher.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all
The company has grown increasingly private, though. It stopped uploading articles about itself about 8 years ago, largely because it was becoming a high-profile target for lawsuits stemming from such things as prostitution ads on the site:
http://www.craigslist.org/about/press/
But the fact that the firm advertised job openings on its own site suggests not everything is perfect in the old San Francisco Victorian that houses the CL staff. Engineers and other staff “hardly ever leave,” Buckmaster told The Financial Times in 2007, but the openings suggest some have been fired and the small but influential firm is reaching out for new talent. “Or maybe,” said one programmer employed by a Bay Area start-up, “they were just bored and fired people to keep things interesting.”