from Patrick McKenzie | by Patrick McKenzie

I don’t understand why every Factorio fan space isn’t wall-to-wall engineer recruitment ads or similar.

Like you could make that argument for a lot of geeky hobbies, just based on CPMs, but the hit rate for factory games specifically has to be off the charts.

“The ad wouldn’t feel authentic!” I mean then someone in the chain needs to be better at their job, because all you’d need is your company name drawn in Factorio game assets and one sentence of copy.

“G O O G L E : Organized the world’s belts? Organize the world’s information. Enquire within: “

These sorts of opportunities are a good case for LLMs, incidentally, because maybe if one operates advertising poorly one wouldn’t have a process to pay a designer $50 for that creative, but an LLM can presumably get really close very quickly for almost nothing.

“Can you steelman not putting up that ad?” I think at many companies if you proposed it the most clueful objection would be “I think that will exacerbate demographic skew in our engineering department”, though that objection will be made without any particular evidence.