We’re looking to hire two programmers who fit this description. They’re going to pair up with the new interface designer and form our third team of three.

With these additional faces on the team, the count of signals will be 25!

We’re looking to hire a fourth systems administrator for our operations team. We are specifically looking for someone who lives in Europe (GMT or GMT+1) to help balance the on-call duties and off-peak upgrades.

See the full wanted ad on the 37signals Job Board.

Apple has decreed that Flash must die and developers everywhere have shown up with shovels to dig its grave. Now, I’m no dear friend of Flash and I think the energy that is being poured into improving HTML5 on account of its future demise is wonderful for the web. But that doesn’t make me feel any better about Apple’s demonstration of might.

Today we cheer because Flash is every Real Web Developer™’s favorite piñata and what’s more fun than seeing a giant bat it around. It of course doesn’t help that Adobe is a big, stodgy software company with plenty of dysfunctional products. They play the role of a sympathetic victim poorly.

My fear is that Apple will take the expedited death of Flash as an invitation to play king maker with increased abandon. Apple is fighting everyone on all fronts. They’re on the outs with Sony, Google, Motorola, Microsoft, and an endless list of other companies. What technology or technique is next on the hit list? (Think what happened or didn’t to Blue-ray, USB3, Java).

The fact that this is just a general sense of unease about what Apple-the-superpower might do next is exactly why this is so harmful. Once you start flexing your muscles, everyone will be fearing they’re next.

After a long hiatus from doing workshops, we’re ready to get back in action with the 37signals Masterclass: How We Work. It’s a full day’s worth of insights and demonstrations of how we design and develop products presented by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Ryan Singer.

We’re doing the masterclass at our new office and will be capping the class size at 37 people. There’ll be lots of time for direct consulting on your own issues. Whether it relates to business, design, or technology.

The class will take place on November 19th, 2010 and the price is $1,000. We’re accepting signups now. Past workshops have sold out quickly, so you might want to hurry to secure a seat.

The first time you hear Gary Vaynerchuk talk about how he’s going to buy the New York Jets, you’ll probably let out a chuckle. The second time you hear it, you’re still in “suure” mode. The third time, you start to believe that Gary is fucking serious. By the fourth time, you know he is.

Once that realization sinks in, it’s a new day. Here’s a guy with such an outlandish goal, given where he is today. And he believes that it’s actually going to happen. He’s actually working towards making it happen. It might have a long horizon, but every day is a tiny bit of work going into making that happen.

That’s incredibly inspiring. If Gary can think it’s okay to work towards owning the Jets, then I can surely work towards turning 37signals into a $100 million/year company. Or race the 24 hours of Le Mans and stand on the podium at the end of it.

Now something magic happens when you believe that your big goals are achievable and you make those goals public. You start thinking, plotting, and doing all the little steps that are going to take you there.

Hey, if I’m going to stand on the podium of Le Mans, I better start racing a car that’ll be similar to that and in a series that’s going there. If we’re going to turn 37signals into a $100 million/year company, we better start thinking about how we can keep more customers from canceling during their trial.

So what’s your big goal? Make it public and we’ll egg you on.

Are there any recruiters working in technology who get it? Anyone putting in just a minimum of effort to appear even half-way competent? If so, they need to speak up. The reputation of their profession is being soiled by completely clueless hacks.

Here’s a pitch I just got this morning:

Dave –

My name is Kelly ** and I am reaching out to you to see if you would be looking to make a career move. I am searching for creative and talented Ruby Developer to add to a rapidly growing team. The position is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. You do not need to be there now, but should be willing to relocated there within a short but realistic time frame. Relocation expenses will be shared by my client.

They are serious about bringing on the right talent, so they will pay for the right person. Base Salary is open and depends on your experience.

..snip…

About My client: They are a rapidly expanding, VC-funded tech startup positioned squarely on top of the social media marketing revolution. Their platform allows brand managers and marketers of all shapes and sizes to quickly create a variety of promotional campaigns to engage and interact with the users and fans of their brands.

You’d think that the job of the recruiter would be to narrow down the field of suitable candidates by actually doing some research on them. If they’re just going to spam people from emails they find on tech sites, why not just pay some shady Russians to do it?

The problem with this kind of hackery is that it has bred an outright animosity to recruiters in large parts of the tech world. The gut reaction of programmers to any recruiter interest is that they’re just as clueless as all the others that went before them. And that’s too bad, since I’m sure that there are companies out there who could actually use good recruiters to screen and find talent for them.

As things stand right now, though, I would never recommend the use of recruiters to anyone for a technical position. You’re much more likely to be associated with the incompetence of the recruiter than you are to find highly skilled technical talent.

Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos.

But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even serious publications like Forbes jump on for a ride. It’s time to take deep breath and take a look at reality.

Minority investment valuations aren’t real
Facebook is now supposedly worth $33,000,000,000, but that number is entirely based on what star-struck minority investors have paid for a tiny slice of the company.

The company has supposedly taken just under a billion dollars in venture capital and small secondary-market sales of stock. So the actual money that has changed hands is just 3% of the total valuation of the company!

In other words, the valuation is resting on the flawed assumption that Facebook could actually ever get 33 times as much money to change hands if they wanted to. There’s just no way, no how that’s happening right now. If it could, they’d IPO tomorrow.

So the Facebook valuation based on minority investments is in my mind a complete joke in the sense that there was $33,000,000,000 dollars on the table. Irrational investor exuberance indeed.

You’re only worth something if you can make money to keep
If you boil it down to what valuations really should be about, discounted future cash flow, it gets completely bizarro-world funny. The rumor is that Facebook will be generating a billion dollars in revenue. That’s certainly real money, right?

Wrong. Real money is what’s left over after you pay your expenses. If the supposed billion dollars Facebook is allegedly pulling in this year was happening at anywhere a decent margin, they wouldn’t have needed a series E round of $120 million from Elevation Partners just three months ago.

But let’s be charitable. Let’s imagine that Facebook miraculously made $200 million this year — a 20% margin. (I don’t think that’s true, otherwise why take another $120 million from Elevation Partners, but hey, let your imagination roam). That would put Facebook’s P/E at some 165.

That’s about 7.5 times as much as Google, the golden cash cow of the internet world. Would you seriously think that Facebook is 7.5 times as good or as promising a business as Google? Get outta here.

No outrageous profits after seven years and half a billion users
Oh, well, but maybe Facebook just needs to mature, you say. If we give them just a few more years, the profit fairy might drop by and sprinkle her billions all over Facebook and its shareholders. I call fat chance.

Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do.

Now this was all fun and games until somebody promised the Newark schools $100 million in stock based on the fantasy valuation of his under-profiting company. But now it’s real. They’re selling the skin before they shot the bear or peeing their pants to get to the hut or whatever you want to call it. It’s just not good, alright?

Related: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT
Related: Don’t believe BusinessWeek’s bubble-math