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This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job
- NonEUCitizen 14y agoPerhaps they should pay for time spent on interviewing?
- learc83 14y agoFor multi-day interviews, they should definitely pay. With the current job market, I'm surprised more companies don't.
- NonEUCitizen 14y agoThere are 52 weeks in a year -- minus 2 weeks vacation (USA) and 1 week holidays, yields 49 weeks. 49 * 5 days = 245 days. So if you take one day off to interview, that's 0.4% of your annual pay. So DA should ask the companies to pay the candidate 0.4% of their bid to bring the candidate in for an interview. In the current system, making a bid doesn't mean the company has skin in the game (since they may not make an offer), but it costs the candidate a lot to take a day off.
- pdx 14y agoI like where you're going, but let me tweak it. The company who really needs different incentives is the recruiter themselves. They can shotgun their database of candidates at their database of companies and hope something sticks, and waste a lot of candidate and company time in the process. There is no cost to them to make bad recommendations. (OK, eventually they lose the company's recruitment business, but I think that penalty is too tenuous). So, make somebody pay 0.4% of the candidates salary for the interview, but make it the recruiting company. That will align everyone's incentives.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- debacle 14y agoHas anyone used this site to success?
- timdorr 14y agoDA was featured a couple weeks ago on TC: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/quora-airbnb-others-made-30m-in-job-offers-to-engineers-in-first-2-weeks-of-developerauction/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/quora-airbnb-others-made-30... Seems pretty successful to me!
- silentific 14y agoApparently Mashable even used techcrunch's screenshot..
- asdfprou 14y agoI like that they have the ability for one employer to ask a question and have that question answered in public for all other auction-goers to see. Seems like they have put a lot of thought into the website design.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoIt's essentially a crowdsourced interview, and a way for employers to engage with candidates while remaining anonymous, before they submit their offer.
- bduerst 14y agoThat's good, but where is the incentive to stay at the job? They should make a requirement that you are at the job for 3-6 months before you get the pay.
- ChiperSoft 14y agoAnd that works both ways. We've had several new hires who didn't last a month. Does the hiring company still pay the full price in those cases?
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoNope, we have a 100% cash back guarantee to the employers if the recruit doesn't work out (not just a credit for future services, like most headhunters/agencies).
- biot 14y agoThe incentive? Having integrity perhaps? Besides, it's not even financially worthwhile to job hop just to get a bonus. The bonus works out to be less than eight days of salary. If you're really a top developer, you're not going to tarnish your reputation for such a paltry sum.
- bduerst 14y agoI wish "having integrity" was a more universal incentive, but you have to see it from all angles. I can see how top talent would avoid it, but what about the others?
- asdfprou 14y agoAt least from what I have seen, the Valley is much friendlier when it comes to job-hopping than most other markets. Maybe changing jobs every year is a little extreme, but certainly every 2-3 years is not out of the question.
- biot 14y ago
- MortenK 14y agoFun idea, but it seems extremely sensitive to downswings in the demand for developers.
- dllthomas 14y agoOkay, but it's still turning away most of us, right?
- columbo 14y agoYeah, from a revenue standpoint I can understand why, saying you are from google means you passed the 'google interview' or something. Therefore those candidates are probably easier to place (there's an assumption of excellence). That doesn't make it any less frustrating for those of us not graced with the big names on our resume. In the meantime however I've found places like Angel List is a good place to put your profile to find out about startups.
- noahc 14y agoNot that you necessarily feel this way or aren't doing something about it, but I think it's important whenever someone brings up the "us not graced with ..." argument that we point out that at one point and time those graced with it didn't have it either. So, the logical question to ask is "What are you doing right now so that in 2 years you are graced with it."
- dean 14y agoYes. They only take "top developers", who are "25 times more effective than the average developer". Which is precisely measured by looking at what school you went to, or what gigantic tech company you have previously worked for.
- lazerwalker 14y agoI can't speak for these guys, but assuming they have good intentions I'd like to think that "went to a brand-name school or worked for a brand-name tech company" is essentially just the MVP of a system for verifying credentials that will eventually get more nuanced and less embarrassingly-biased.
- dllthomas 14y ago
- tocomment 14y agoI wonder why all recruiters don't do this? It would really put them at the top of the line for a developer's attention, and with the market being so tight, you'd think we'd be seeing this.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoBecause they are stuck in their old ways. We're trying to shake things up.
- michaelochurch 14y agoGood recruiters start bidding wars or negotiate people to the top of what the market has for them, which is what this auction site is trying to do. Bad recruiters go for churn: they try to fill positions regardless of fit or the candidate's long-term interests and capacity.
- singalongwithme 14y agoWhy would highly qualified engineers even sign up for this? Love the idea, but seems like most talented engineers I come across don't even have the chance to check their email short of having tons of inquiries from startups and other companies looking for their services.
- rbellio 14y agoIt's an interesting idea and I wish whoever runs it the absolute best. I can tell the motivation here is to maximize the earning potential for a developer and find a good fit through a novel approach and I commend the thought. I can't help but laugh at the idea of someone being auctioned off, though. Pretty sure they used to do this and you got the manacles with your purchase. How invested is an employer going to be in a employee that he had to go into a bidding war for? I'm going to imagine a great deal. What happens if the individual just isn't a good fit for the role or the culture of the company?
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoIt's not a traditional auction in the sense that "highest bidder wins". The goal is to present each software engineer with 5-10 opportunities at cool companies, with numbers attached to them. They can then choose which offers are worth following-up with via phone or in-person interviews based on any number of factors (location, product/service, company stage, who the investors are, equity, salary, etc.). Like you say, there's much more to a job than a salary but in an environment where the average SF Developer gets recruitment spam every 40-hours, we hope to provide a more efficient way of vetting & comparing opportunities.
- rbellio 14y agoThanks for clearing this up for me. I do appreciate the response. Hopefully you can clear one other troubling thought up for me: How is this recruitment tool going to avoid falling into the same recruitment spam of sites like Dice et. al.? One of the greatest finds I've made in recent years was a decent recruiter. This individual not only finds opportunities that I find interesting, but supported and handled the minutiae that is involved in the recruitment process. I don't have to worry about submitting resumes or negotiating meeting times for interviews, he does all those things for me. He knows my salary requirements and I only have to invest a small amount of time into negotiations. There's obviously some benefit in using a website like this, as it opens up opportunities in other locations that I wouldn't be aware of, but as someone who is content staying in his current area, what other benefits would using the site give me? Thanks.
- obiefernandez 14y agoIt's about time we see some real innovation in this space, but will they be able to avoid the usual stench associated with tech recruiters?
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoI hope so! The cash-back is just one more way we're trying to be different from everybody else in this space.
- armored_mammal 14y agoDeveloper Auction == Silicon Valley farce to recycle Silicon Valley players at the expense of outsiders and newcomers. Yes... propagate the myth of 'the hard to find' developer by pretending that only the 'elite' exist by dint of their Alma Mater or current employer...
- Jabbles 14y agoA 3% bonus? I guess it's better than traditional recruiters, but I think the real (financial) value lies in being offered a larger salary (which could be worth substantially more than 3%).
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoYeah, it's not massive, but a few grand is nothing to sneeze at either. We're just trying to think differently, and act differently, from everybody else in the space. And you're right, the real value lies in being offered a larger salary.
- NickLarsen 14y agoI have my doubts about this. Disclosure, I work for a Careers 2.0, but little of my thoughts are biased by that in this case. For starters, this doesn't even seem to fix the problem stated, "The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that". So you give a guy $3K pop if he would earn a salary of 100K... great, but that doesn't even address the differences in salary unless he continually changes jobs. I am also not convinced this service raises the average amount developers would make. From the employers perspective, it's ridiculous to determine how much you'd pay someone without interviewing them first. People develop the longer they spend time at a company, and if you expect them to be worth your original offer in a few years, you are now forced to hire them for your original amount (by over paying for their current skill set) or just decline them an offer. Now if I'm not mistaken, that's encouraging employers to overpay for less productive talent... which is in direct contrast with the goal specified above. This seems more inline with just increasing the overall salary for developers, and that's laudable, but you cannot build a developer job board claiming to just sell the best talent. When good talent does go on the market, it's generally pretty good at selling itself.
- dllthomas 14y agoAs I understand it, it's the bidding that is meant to change the amount developers are paid, not the bonus. I am not sure what problem the bonus was meant to solve. I can speculate that they had a problem with too few developers accepting the offers. If so, they might want to look at whether underemployment is actually a problem amongst those they are allowing in - I would guess "great in practice, not great on paper" is worth more and paid less than "great on paper, not great in practice", and everyone they are targeting is necessarily great on paper. Those who are both great in practice and great on paper are probably also working on whatever they want to be working on already.
- 001sky 14y ago"The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that" For consideration. Two counter examples--(1) A great engineer working on a shitty project is not worth much. (2) And a great project can be executed with competent engineers. People are only as "effective" as the problems they solve are potenially valuable. Now imagine another variation: "The top [founders] are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that" Is this more or less likely to be true? And does it have anything to do with engineering and or Job titles? or is this phenomena something else altogether?
- alainbryden 14y agoAm I the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to ask for a 15% of annual salary recruitment fee? Why would any reasonable company agree to pay a website $15,000 just because they indexed their new 100k/year hiree's résume?. I think they're way over-valuing the service they provide. A smart recruiter who found someone they really wanted on Developer Auction would simply look them up elsewhere and make them an offer outside of the site. The site is creative, sophisticated, well built, and could easily charge some sort of monthly service fee akin to a dating site, but the notion that companies would willingly toss 15% of a highly paid employee's salary out of pure laziness boggles me.
- kolya3 14y agoIf an employer is smart they'll calculate the hours wasted interviewing candidates * avg hourly pay and likely realize that this cost is far greater than the $15K fee they'd pay a recruiter. Not to mention the delays in your projects as a result of your best engineers being distracted with interviewing candidates.
- lhc- 14y agoEven if your recruiter suggested some potentially strong candidate, you still have to interview them to be sure they are a good fit and to be sure they actually have the skills they claim. I'm not sure how this saves you time in that respect.
- bulibuta 14y agoAm I the only one looking for a link to the website actually doing that? As a company how do you subscribe to such a feed? As a developer how do you create a profile, update a resume, checkout the companies?
- asdfprou 14y agoYou mean www.developerauction.com?
- asdfprou 14y agoThis reminds me of the "fellowship" programs such as those offered by Bain Venture Capital Group (http://www.baincapitalventures.com/startupacademy/ http://www.baincapitalventures.com/startupacademy/) and Greylock Partners Network (http://www.greylock.com/careers http://www.greylock.com/careers). For those who haven't heard of either - essentially they allow candidates to apply to a broader "portfolio" of companies that Greylock or Bain represents. Internal recruiters then try to match the candidate skillset and interests with a company from the portfolio for a potential placement. So why can't Developer Auction candidates go through a more rigorous selection process? I would assume it is not nearly as easy to scale. But certainly, as many others have echoed, their screening process is a far cry from something that will produce 25x candidates. I applaud the effort and look forward to seeing this develop.
- vanni 14y ago"DeveloperAuction.com is currently open only to employees of Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Zynga, and Google as well as Stanford & MIT graduates." [http://developerauction.com/for_developers http://developerauction.com/for_developers] Meh.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoWe're actually accepting a broader base of applicants than our site suggests, we're vetting every application manually, so if you've got some impressive stuff to show to us (and potential employers), go ahead and register. Employers & education history are only rudimentary filters for the time being, and only part of our vetting process.
- meaydinli 14y agoHow long does the vetting process usually take? (My profile has been waiting for approval for some time now and I haven't received an email saying I was accepted or rejected.)
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoNext auction is launching towards the end of September. If you send me an email -- matt@sitename I'm happy to have a closer look at your profile.
- michaelochurch 14y agoWhy not limit your search geographically? Start in the Valley only, then expand. It seems like this is the natural way to rate-limit.
- creativityhurts 14y agoIt doesn't stop anyone from creating a profile though. It's still weird, it looks more like an attempt to snatch talent from some of the highest paying employers.
- 14y ago
- creativityhurts 14y agoI created a profile out of curiosity although the plain boostrap site didn't give me any confidence but I found it a bit irritating that the phone number was mandatory. I just hope it doesn't fall in the hands of just any recruiter.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoThanks. The phone number will not be disclosed to anybody without your permission. At the end of the auction, you get the select what offers you're interested in and which ones you're not. When you say "yes", we shoot out an intro email.
- cancelbubble 14y agoAre you working on a sister site that places devs in the 67% percentile?
- michaelochurch 14y agoHere's the problem with the "25x-programmer" concept. There is such a thing, but it's not just about the programmer. It's about the engineer, the company, project/person fit, the team, the technology stack, and the project itself. I've had months that were worth over $500,000 to my employer easily, but I've also had months close to zero. Productivity compounds multiplicatively. Individual ability is certainly a factor, but not the only one. To be able to sustain 10x levels of contribution, you need to be using excellent tools that you know well, on a project that fits your skills and interests, in a position where you can have an impact (and those positions are coveted and usually allocated politically, not on merit) in addition to being a good programmer. I wish these conditions could be reliably obtained, but for most people, they can't. That's why the 10-100x programmers aren't banking $1 million and up per year. Companies can't possibly know in advance whether a person is going to have all those other performance-altering variances in place, and they also know from experience that creating conditions in which 10x programmers can thrive is a political mess.
- Evbn 14y agoIt's a commission refund, the Redfin of recruiting.