Where PAs are ex-PAs...

A recent visitor to MySpace HQ in Santa Monica reports that many of the executive's PAs are very good looking. He said that at least two of the executives he met with boasted that their PAs used to be former adult movie stars and even named the movies they were in.

It seems that the acronym PA can stand for more than just Personal Assistant. And in the MySpace executive culture, it can represent a mark of status if your PA also used to be an ex-PA.

It is good to see MySpace is an equal opportunity employer. And maybe its hiring practices are not that unusual. The adult movie industry is huge in Southern California. It probably shoots more movies in that area than Hollywood (which moved to Canada). So that means that former adult movie actors can most likely be found in all businesses across southern California.

I hope this story doesn't cause problems for MySpace. It provides fantastic online services for millions of children and it shouldn't matter who works for them, or what they did in their former jobs. So if any PA jobs are lost I'm sure Silicon Valley companies can be found that would gladly offer employment.

The lonely MySpace engineers...

MySpace located its developer group in the LookSmart building on 625 2nd Street in downtown San Francisco. This is the same building that used to house more than a dozen small startups.

In December 2006 the Wall Street Journal wrote about the building as representing the return of the boom for the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood, which had once been a center of San Francisco's dotcom boom, then languished with empty buildings in the dotbust. [Please see:Epicenter of Web 2.0 boom]

I had a desk in the same building for a short time, and all around me there were nests of desks that belonged to many small startups. The place was a hive of activity.

Late last year everyone had to move out so that MySpace could move in. However, there are only eight people working there. All that space and only eight engineers.

MySpace says it is looking to hire more but engineers are scarce. It's hoping it might be able to recruit some of Yahoo's engineers. The Yahoo campus is incredibly crowded, so I'm sure that Yahoo engineers would be attracted by the 1,000 square foot cubicles over at MySpace.