Hidden job ad found in Apple’s site source code

By on Wednesday, August 30, 2017

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

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