I was at an MIT job fair yesterday in Cambridge. We met a lot great students while looking to fill several open positions and internships in the Technology group. It was a pretty typical job fair for us, except for one thing. Nearly every student that sopped by asked “What is ESPN doing here at MIT?”
I was pretty surprised at the number of times we got that question. Some of the students seemed to believe that few MIT students would be sports fans (I think they’re wrong, of course). Even more students, though, thought that we were out there trying to recruit folks for the television broadcasting side and didn’t know why we’d be looking at MIT. Even once we explained that we were there for ESPN.com, people still thought we were looking for athletes and sports people over technology folks.
I shouldn’t have been surprised because, well, ESPN’s brand is all about sports. Which is too bad, because ESPN.com is a serious technology shop. ESPN.com (and the Walt Disney Internet Group) build, maintain, and enhance nearly our entire application stack. From the application servers to the caching technology to our streaming update technology, WDIG/ESPN.com engineers maintain and write it all. There’s a strong technology foundation here that rivals the other big sites.
We also have the traffic, obviously, that measures up to the other big sites out there. Working here is a great way to deal with crazy problems like how to let a million people update their fantasy rosters in the same 15 minute period. Or, how to serve the millions of people checking their brackets during March Madness.
Don’t get me wrong. Disney and ESPN are both content companies first. We’re not Yahoo or Amazon or Google. What we are, though, is a platform with a big, mainstream audience. When the next big media thing happens, it’s going to happen here, where we have the mainstream audience and the compelling content to bring them in.
All of this is my long way of saying that if you’re a technology geek and a sports fan, you really ought to work here. We’re hiring for a number of open positions at varying levels of experience. My team is looking for really good engineers that can be comfortable parsing data feeds from our outside providers as well as working on tweaking asynchronous I/O behavior inside our servlet container. If you live technology and you live sports, click on over to ESPN’s job web site to see the open positions in the technology group. If you have any questions, you can leave comments here (fill out your email address, don’t worry it won’t show up on the site).
February 19th, 2006 at 10:36 PM
I think a big challenge in recruiting is the location. Kids graduating from MIT want to live in Boston, in NYC, or on the West Coast. The new grads don’t think about things like cost of living, quality of life, or the reality that most days, regardless of where they live, they’ll wake up, go to work, and go home. I’ve lived in DC, suburban NYC, and now Hartford, and I’ve gone out at night about the same percentage of time in each place, except I come home w/money when I go out in Hartford. Also, two hours from Boston, two hours from NYC, and most importantly, an hour from Foxwoods.