An advert for an engineer at Apple has been found hidden in the company’s website.
The text on finding the ad says: “Hey there! You found us”, and says the firm is looking for “a talented engineer to develop a critical infrastructure component”.
The job ad got quite a bit of press last week (I would have covered sooner, but I WAS OFF ON PATERNITY LEAVE, OK!
?), and has since been either removed or moved elsewhere.This isn’t the first time a job has been hidden in the source code of a website, not generally an area less technically able people will find themselves. It’s a shareable and PR-worthy tactic previously used by brands like Flickr and even the Guardian, here from back in 2015:
ZDNet reporter Zack Whittaker discovered the Apple job ad ‘by chance':
“As part of the stream of traffic I could see, it was connecting to this one URL – and there it was,” he said.
The page was listed in the HTML code for “us-east-1.blobstore.apple.com” – which now contains an error message.
So, not an original idea, but one that gets the right audience talking and searching – you can guarantee that there have been and/or are developers/engineers (I’ve never really understood the difference, if there is one, but I figure that’s my ignorance) hunting for the moved/deleted page.
Think it’d work nicely for one of your duller more technical clients? Give it a few months, PR Land, rinse, re-purpose for relevance and repeat. According to a quick Google, Kit Kat, Paypal, Mozilla and eBay have also given this a crack, to varying degrees of applause.
Read more: ZDNet