We all have our office gripes. We know who plays well with others and who doesn't. But it'd be too mean, or career suicide, to say so publicly. Enter a ranking application called Cubeduel, which taps into your work history via LinkedIn and pulls up pairs of former co-workers. A la Hot or Not, choose the person who's the answer to this question: "Who would you rather work with?" It's all done privately, so no need to worry it'll get back to them!
You can see why this could quickly become addictive.
The "duels" can sometimes cause a bit of a conundrum, as you like working with both of them equally, as the example above shows. Or, if you know one better and it's not really a fair comparison. In that case, there is an option to "Skip duel." Now between Winda, who works with me here at msnbc.com (and at the Seattle P-I) and Dan (also a former P-I'er, now at Smart Grid Today), it was impossible to choose. I think both of them are great! So I chose to skip. Some may call it a cop out. I call it being a nice girl who doesn't want to needlessly torque people off, even if they'll never know.
It takes 100 such duels/votes to unlock "company specific high scores," which allows you to see your rank, co-worker high scores and scores from the companies you've worked for (at least the the last three, anyhow).
The application is so new — it's just launched this week — so many of my former and current co-workers don't have rankings yet, and the high scores are in the single digits (i.e. 5 of 7 duels won, 3 of 3 duels won). But in certain companies, this app has spread faster than a Twitter worm: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Yahoo and eBay, which are the five most popular companies according to Cubeduel tallies. The top job titles and geographic locations are also on there, with software engineers in Seattle and San Francisco riding highest on the popularity wave.
Cubeduel arose from the minds of Urbanspoon co-founder Adam Doppelt and founder/CEO of RescueTime, Tony Wright. Wright told TechCrunch that Cubeduel "came together over the course of the last two weeks. Since launching yesterday, Wright reported "thousands" have signed up, submitting over 50,000 votes in the past day.
Will you be one of them?
