4 ms·

Get Poached

35 points by RougeFemme 13y ago

sown 13y ago
I remember a weekend project someone showed here on HN quite some time ago that was something similar. Does anyone else remember?
- tylerlh 13y ago
  I believe you're thinking of JobPoacher. https://jobpoacher.com https://jobpoacher.com
x0x0 13y ago
Dear employers: it's expensive to live in the bay area. I think for many people, you can credibly claim sf is as or more expensive than manhattan (particularly once you nearly require a car per couple in order to live an adult life, go grocery shopping, travel to tahoe, go places on weekends, get to the gym in under 50 minutes each way, etc.) Options are fine and all, but they pay neither rent to landlords nor mortgages to bankers. If you don't keep your employees well paid, there will be people whispering in their ears offering another $10 or $20k.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  The cost of owning a car is one reason why I picked NYC over SF, when I was lucky enough to be given the option. I prefer SF in many respects, but the fact is that in NYC I can get to anywhere of interest without a car. And in the Bay Area I cannot. I simply can't.
  - bzalasky 13y ago
    While I do have a car, I've found that I have to go out of my way to find a reason to need it in SF. I live in the Inner Sunset next a grocery store and Golden Gate Park. The Muni is two blocks away and there's a bus stop outside. The car is reserved for weekend trips North, South or East. SF is also a pretty compact city, so UberX, etc... usually isn't that expensive if you're hanging out in a part of the city that makes public transit a hassle. All this being said, public transit definitely takes you more places in NYC.
  - Hamatti 13y ago
    Never been to NYC, but I think it's super easy to live and move in San Francisco without a car. Publics (MUNI, BART) are good, Caltrain takes you to south and when in areas inside the city where you can't get bus/bart, Uber and Lyft etc. are easy to use. Not to mention that this is quite small city so even walking is not too big of a problem.
    - x0x0 13y ago
      > MUNI is good gonna leave that right there as testament to your credibility
      - Hamatti 13y ago
        I really don't understand the MUNI hate people here seem to have. MUNI covers most of the city, goes frequently and is inexpensive. I use buses everyday to commute and to get around the city and find them surprisingly good.
        x0x0 13y ago
        the smell of fresh-squeezed piss first thing in the morning the slowness (glacial) [1] [2] the expense (very high, in part because of the speed) [2] [3] the poor service intervals the homeless, crazy, and aggro allowed to run all over the bus while the drivers watch the difficulty getting between many parts of the city; it was often faster for me to walk from haight to castro than ride the bus the multiple busses on different lines that come down the same street together in order to maximize time between buses the joke of a "schedule" that muni doesn't even pretend to keep to the man on muni picking body lice off and flicking them at people the homeless woman on muni with her pants down masturbating [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are-slow-but-just-try-eliminating-a-stop.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are... [2] http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spiral/ http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spira... [3] http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/driver-salaries-fueling-deficit/Content?oid=2135249 http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/driver-salaries-fueli...
        13y ago
  - jonnathanson 13y ago
    Really? I live in SF, with a car that I haven't touched in over a year. I mean that literally. Not for grocery runs, not for weekend trips, not for visits to friends' houses, not for drives to work. It sits in my garage, collecting dust. For groceries, there's a Safeway two blocks from my place (and also Amazon Fresh or Google Express). For anything else, there's UberX, Lyft, bike, Caltrain, and BART. (MUNI is, well, ostensibly an option, but I'll leave it be and maintain my uneasy peace with its existence.) There's no question that NYC has a much better, more extensive, and more connected subway system. No question whatsoever. But SF's isn't bad at all. Granted, I am an LA native, so I am predisposed to think of the mere presence of some form of public transportation as magical.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      I guess I should've said "without using a car". I could catch a cab, use uber etc to get from downtown Manhattan to deepest Queens. But why would I? I'm from Perth, Australia, a city which several observers have compared to LA. So I hear you on public transport.
- hox 13y ago
  but but but Steve Newcomb's post from the other day states "getting a full salary is generally not a good dependency - if it is, you've got bigger problems with that candidate." sorry, had to. absolutely crazy that developers latch on to jobs where they are abused and overused for a mythical carrot.
rwhitman 13y ago
If the idea of all out bidding wars over candidates sight unseen catches on, what would it do to the economics of startups and tech workers? Seems like it could either inflate salaries to levels unattainable by early stage startups or on the flip side turn good engineers into a commodity
- davidgerard 13y ago
  Given that we know for a fact that large employers have been actively conspiring to depress salaries, call this the visible hand of the market.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bzalasky 13y ago
The "Get Hired" call to action feels like it was yanked from hired.com... I'm not big on trademarking common words/phrases, but that's a little too close for my taste.
jluxenberg 13y ago
https://www.whitetruffle.com/ https://www.whitetruffle.com/ has been doing this for a while. Anyone with experience as a candidate on there want to tell us what it's like?
- wtracy 13y ago
  I've gotten several interviews through them. I believe that an actual human matches up job descriptions and resumes there, and you get an email every time your resume gets matched to a job. You're then given a chance to allow or deny the company to receive your contact info. The experience felt like something halfway between a traditional recruiting agency, and a job board like Monster. You don't have a recruiter in your hair trying to push jobs on you, but you don't have the option of browsing all available positions at your leisure, either. They're pretty good at filtering out the noise (they've never pinged me over a job that was an obviously bad match, unlike some recruiters I could name) but I'm left wondering how much signal gets filtered out as well. Getting bites for anything other than web development can be tricky.
dsl 13y ago
I couldn't figure out why PoachBox's apply page rendered so terribly in Chrome on Windows. Taking a look at the source, the entire site is built with iWeb. I don't think it is a real site, just harvesting info.
- ejain 13y ago
  They were going to build a proper site, but then one of their key employees was poached...
jrockway 13y ago
Why would you put your actual salary into this site? If you just put in $300,000 and wait for someone to contact you, you're probably going to get a raise.
Jemaclus 13y ago
I love the idea in general, but the main problem I see with it is that the "offers" you get aren't enforceable. If I say I make 130K and someone "offers" me 150K, and then I go in for an interview, and they decide they only wanna pay 120K, then they just wasted my time. And there's nothing in any of these sites (Get Poached, Developer Auction, etc) that says the company has to go with the offer they put on the site. Very frustrating.

35 points by RougeFemme 13y ago

sown 13y ago

I remember a weekend project someone showed here on HN quite some time ago that was something similar. Does anyone else remember?

tylerlh 13y ago
I believe you're thinking of JobPoacher. https://jobpoacher.com https://jobpoacher.com

x0x0 13y ago

Dear employers: it's expensive to live in the bay area. I think for many people, you can credibly claim sf is as or more expensive than manhattan (particularly once you nearly require a car per couple in order to live an adult life, go grocery shopping, travel to tahoe, go places on weekends, get to the gym in under 50 minutes each way, etc.) Options are fine and all, but they pay neither rent to landlords nor mortgages to bankers. If you don't keep your employees well paid, there will be people whispering in their ears offering another $10 or $20k.

jacques_chester 13y ago
The cost of owning a car is one reason why I picked NYC over SF, when I was lucky enough to be given the option. I prefer SF in many respects, but the fact is that in NYC I can get to anywhere of interest without a car. And in the Bay Area I cannot. I simply can't.
- bzalasky 13y ago
  While I do have a car, I've found that I have to go out of my way to find a reason to need it in SF. I live in the Inner Sunset next a grocery store and Golden Gate Park. The Muni is two blocks away and there's a bus stop outside. The car is reserved for weekend trips North, South or East. SF is also a pretty compact city, so UberX, etc... usually isn't that expensive if you're hanging out in a part of the city that makes public transit a hassle. All this being said, public transit definitely takes you more places in NYC.
- Hamatti 13y ago
  Never been to NYC, but I think it's super easy to live and move in San Francisco without a car. Publics (MUNI, BART) are good, Caltrain takes you to south and when in areas inside the city where you can't get bus/bart, Uber and Lyft etc. are easy to use. Not to mention that this is quite small city so even walking is not too big of a problem.
  - x0x0 13y ago
    > MUNI is good gonna leave that right there as testament to your credibility
    - Hamatti 13y ago
      I really don't understand the MUNI hate people here seem to have. MUNI covers most of the city, goes frequently and is inexpensive. I use buses everyday to commute and to get around the city and find them surprisingly good.
      - x0x0 13y ago
        the smell of fresh-squeezed piss first thing in the morning the slowness (glacial) [1] [2] the expense (very high, in part because of the speed) [2] [3] the poor service intervals the homeless, crazy, and aggro allowed to run all over the bus while the drivers watch the difficulty getting between many parts of the city; it was often faster for me to walk from haight to castro than ride the bus the multiple busses on different lines that come down the same street together in order to maximize time between buses the joke of a "schedule" that muni doesn't even pretend to keep to the man on muni picking body lice off and flicking them at people the homeless woman on muni with her pants down masturbating [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are-slow-but-just-try-eliminating-a-stop.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are... [2] http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spiral/ http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spira... [3] http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/driver-salaries-fueling-deficit/Content?oid=2135249 http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/driver-salaries-fueli...
      - 13y ago
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  Really? I live in SF, with a car that I haven't touched in over a year. I mean that literally. Not for grocery runs, not for weekend trips, not for visits to friends' houses, not for drives to work. It sits in my garage, collecting dust. For groceries, there's a Safeway two blocks from my place (and also Amazon Fresh or Google Express). For anything else, there's UberX, Lyft, bike, Caltrain, and BART. (MUNI is, well, ostensibly an option, but I'll leave it be and maintain my uneasy peace with its existence.) There's no question that NYC has a much better, more extensive, and more connected subway system. No question whatsoever. But SF's isn't bad at all. Granted, I am an LA native, so I am predisposed to think of the mere presence of some form of public transportation as magical.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I guess I should've said "without using a car". I could catch a cab, use uber etc to get from downtown Manhattan to deepest Queens. But why would I? I'm from Perth, Australia, a city which several observers have compared to LA. So I hear you on public transport.
hox 13y ago
but but but Steve Newcomb's post from the other day states "getting a full salary is generally not a good dependency - if it is, you've got bigger problems with that candidate." sorry, had to. absolutely crazy that developers latch on to jobs where they are abused and overused for a mythical carrot.

rwhitman 13y ago

If the idea of all out bidding wars over candidates sight unseen catches on, what would it do to the economics of startups and tech workers? Seems like it could either inflate salaries to levels unattainable by early stage startups or on the flip side turn good engineers into a commodity

davidgerard 13y ago
Given that we know for a fact that large employers have been actively conspiring to depress salaries, call this the visible hand of the market.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bzalasky 13y ago

The "Get Hired" call to action feels like it was yanked from hired.com... I'm not big on trademarking common words/phrases, but that's a little too close for my taste.

jluxenberg 13y ago

https://www.whitetruffle.com/ https://www.whitetruffle.com/ has been doing this for a while. Anyone with experience as a candidate on there want to tell us what it's like?

wtracy 13y ago
I've gotten several interviews through them. I believe that an actual human matches up job descriptions and resumes there, and you get an email every time your resume gets matched to a job. You're then given a chance to allow or deny the company to receive your contact info. The experience felt like something halfway between a traditional recruiting agency, and a job board like Monster. You don't have a recruiter in your hair trying to push jobs on you, but you don't have the option of browsing all available positions at your leisure, either. They're pretty good at filtering out the noise (they've never pinged me over a job that was an obviously bad match, unlike some recruiters I could name) but I'm left wondering how much signal gets filtered out as well. Getting bites for anything other than web development can be tricky.

dsl 13y ago

I couldn't figure out why PoachBox's apply page rendered so terribly in Chrome on Windows. Taking a look at the source, the entire site is built with iWeb. I don't think it is a real site, just harvesting info.

ejain 13y ago
They were going to build a proper site, but then one of their key employees was poached...

jrockway 13y ago

Why would you put your actual salary into this site? If you just put in $300,000 and wait for someone to contact you, you're probably going to get a raise.

Jemaclus 13y ago

I love the idea in general, but the main problem I see with it is that the "offers" you get aren't enforceable. If I say I make 130K and someone "offers" me 150K, and then I go in for an interview, and they decide they only wanna pay 120K, then they just wasted my time. And there's nothing in any of these sites (Get Poached, Developer Auction, etc) that says the company has to go with the offer they put on the site. Very frustrating.