I think the answer is in the comments:
"6/4/08 - Just saw this and googled it, of course.
If I had to guess on hedge funds, this sounds like something D.E. Shaw might try for recruitment. They're big on the whole "just be brilliant" bit in order to recruit talent. Additionally, I noticed in their own recruitment posts on CL the respond-to e-mail address is Craig-Gen@career.deshaw.com while that one is gencraig@spsfind.com. Coincidence?"<p>Blog author's reply:
"Aha! At long last, after nearly four years, I believe Jennifer may have finally cracked the mystery. This seems pretty plausible. I only wish her link carried me somewhere that I could thank her. Here's hoping you come back and take a bow, Jennifer. Thank you all for taking part in this bit of distributed intelligence exercise. I loved watching it all unfold. And of course, I'm not discounting the distinct possibility that it will continue to unfold in ways I couldn't have guessed."<p><a href="http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2004/08/gee-i-wonder-if-this-will-attract-any.html#c7218485345738743166" rel="nofollow">http://workingwithwords.blogspot.com/2004/08/gee-i-wonder-if...</a>
For anyone else who was confused by this submission:<p>-The second part of the blog post ('Coming Across This Line [...] no better than its woods." Indeed... ') appears to have nothing to do with the first part (the quoted classified ad) and can be ignored.<p>-The blog post's comments section chronicles various sightings of this ad over the years. Unfortunately, the site only shows the <i>time</i> the comment was posted, not the date. The first comment is from around 10 years ago.
CTRL + F "Tue. Nov. 24th 2009" on that page. Apparently someone got into the Gmail account of one of the emails used for that ad and found various references to <a href="http://deshaw.com" rel="nofollow">http://deshaw.com</a>, as well as the various other people mentioning D.E Shaw in the comments.<p>I guess that's the end of the mystery? Or am I missing something?
The answer is obvious and simple to anyone who has worked for "one of Wall Street's most successful entrepreneurs."<p>These assholes churn through assistants like you wouldn't believe. Most quit, in spite of the high pay, out of basic self-respect. The others are fired during a tantrum.<p>Most of these jagoffs have a few pending wrongful termination lawsuits at any given time. Just ask them, they'll probably brag about it.
Here's an example, from the latest New York Review of Books: <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/classifieds/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nybooks.com/classifieds/</a>
At 3:35 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...<p><i>For me, the experience was just as weird and intriguing as the ad itself. First off was the reception area. The cathedral ceilings throw scale completely off, dwarfing the visitor... <a href="http://tiny.cc/ne5pew" rel="nofollow">http://tiny.cc/ne5pew</a> It does convey a sense of power and high-tech savvy, but it also seemed dated. A young, very polished woman took my jacket. I looked her up later and she'd been a child actress in at least one film that I'd seen. Everyone was very nice in kind of a cult-y way. I was led to an office in the middle of a floor full of empty workspaces. The guy who interviewed me was a lawyer and said he still worked part-time on the side, and that that was an accepted part of the culture. Mr. Shaw had basically unlimited money thanks to the success of his hedge fund, but he did not have unlimited time. To create more time, they were staffing up for personal assistants who could handle everything from getting Knicks tickets to making dental appointments. We both figured out it wasn't a match early on, so we had a nice conversation instead. And somewhere in that building I guess my resume still sits...</i><p>edit: The thread started by yesprocrast2 covers the topic further. I guess working among geniuses for one of Wall Street's winners isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Perhaps this is a slightly more sophisticated version of the "Make $10,000 a month working from home" scheme used to recruit mules for money laundering.
Well, if you go to spsfind.com, it 301 redirects to sps-app.com, which seems to be a social positioning app, in Hebrew. Doesn't seem to be related to D.E. Shaw, though.
Well, given that it seems to be confined to the NYRB and has been consistently going for so long, could it perhaps be an in-joke of theirs?<p>EDIT: Well, I guess not. Looks like the resolution was far more anticlimactic.