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Given the financial acumen and street smarts involved, it almost sounds as if there's a possible role for someone acting as an agent for potential startup emplo

by leoc 11y ago

Given the financial acumen and street smarts involved, it almost sounds as if there's a possible role for someone acting as an agent for potential startup employees: not an employment agency which gets a lump sum when an employer fills a vacancy, but a talent agent getting something like the traditional ten percent, or two-and-twenty, or whatever, of the employee's ongoing earnings. Not that dealing with talent agents is always a wonderful experience either, of course...

nostrademons 11y ago
As part of the market research for a previous startup, I talked with plenty of recruiters who would love for their to be a market for software talent agents. If you're curious why such a market doesn't exist, read Aline Lerner's article "Why talent agents for engineers don't exist": http://blog.alinelerner.com/why-talent-agents-for-engineers-dont-exist/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/why-talent-agents-for-engineers-... tl;dr: Agents exist when it's hard to get a job. It is not hard to get a job in software right now. If your company mistreats you, you figure that out pretty quickly and move on to a company that doesn't mistreat you. There's no need to pay anyone to make that happen; in fact, you can get paid a significant amount more just by asking around. You hear about stories of startup employees getting screwed because the software engineering labor market (particularly for startups) is expanding rapidly now, and so there are a large number of employees who have no experience in the industry. These people are easy prey for a good salesman who wants to make their sham company seem like one of the winning startups. But it takes only a couple months for most smart employees to catch on, and move to another job. My first couple tech jobs were at startups where I was paid below market rate. The first one had some serious shenanigans going on when it went down in flames; the second had no shenanigans, it just wasn't going anywhere. But I left, and my compensation very quickly caught up with and then surpassed what I thought possible. I probably ended up significantly better off, financially, by taking the hard knocks early and learning the lessons myself rather than paying an agent 10% to handle everything for me. As they say, "when someone with no experience does business with someone with lots of experience, the person with no experience gains some experience."

by leoc 11y ago

nostrademons 11y ago

As part of the market research for a previous startup, I talked with plenty of recruiters who would love for their to be a market for software talent agents. If you're curious why such a market doesn't exist, read Aline Lerner's article "Why talent agents for engineers don't exist": http://blog.alinelerner.com/why-talent-agents-for-engineers-dont-exist/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/why-talent-agents-for-engineers-... tl;dr: Agents exist when it's hard to get a job. It is not hard to get a job in software right now. If your company mistreats you, you figure that out pretty quickly and move on to a company that doesn't mistreat you. There's no need to pay anyone to make that happen; in fact, you can get paid a significant amount more just by asking around. You hear about stories of startup employees getting screwed because the software engineering labor market (particularly for startups) is expanding rapidly now, and so there are a large number of employees who have no experience in the industry. These people are easy prey for a good salesman who wants to make their sham company seem like one of the winning startups. But it takes only a couple months for most smart employees to catch on, and move to another job. My first couple tech jobs were at startups where I was paid below market rate. The first one had some serious shenanigans going on when it went down in flames; the second had no shenanigans, it just wasn't going anywhere. But I left, and my compensation very quickly caught up with and then surpassed what I thought possible. I probably ended up significantly better off, financially, by taking the hard knocks early and learning the lessons myself rather than paying an agent 10% to handle everything for me. As they say, "when someone with no experience does business with someone with lots of experience, the person with no experience gains some experience."