Microsoft Is Poaching Engineers: With A Bacon Cart

Brier Dudley/Seattle Times

For some reason, Microsoft seems to think that experienced software engineers are difficult to find in this down economy, so it's trying to recruit talent from the Seattle offices of Amazon, Adobe and Google. The Seattle Times reports that the battle for skilled coders is being waged with free bacon.

Yesterday, a bacon cart parked outside Amazon HQ, and served up strips from Seattle's artisanal butcher The Swinery to everyone. A stream of the curious (and who wouldn't be?) stopped by, and presumably, each also received a complimentary and desperate elevator pitch for why they should give up their job at Amazon and go work for Microsoft's Kinect team instead.

Note to desperate L.A. screenwriters: Crib this move and park a bacon cart just around the corner from some studio lot.

Brier Dudley/Seattle Times

Serious candidates were also given a free bacon air freshener with the words "Wake Up and Smell The Future." The Seattle Times' Brier Dudley reported, "also free were toppings, including spray cheese, Sriracha, peanut butter, maple syrup and chocolate sauce." While that may not be your idea of great bacon toppings, we're talking about software-engineer-bait. We can totally see the code monkeys that we know scurrying back to their darkened offices and downing their free, peanut butter and chocolate sauce-topped bacon with a Super Big Gulp of Code Red.

Just remember, Microsoft, that Google's free gourmet employee cafeteria has a much better reputation for good food than your little Trojan bacon-horse. It might be tougher to lure Google employees when the cart parks near their Seattle office today.

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Shuji Sakai writes about genuine imitation whisky and Trojan horse bacon carts. Follow him on Twitter and professorsalt.com.