32 ms·

The Programmer's Price: Want to hire a coding superstar? Call the agent

374 points by eroo 12y ago

forrestthewoods 12y ago
Those rates really don't seem all that high. I mean 250 hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks year = $500,000. That's kind of a lot. Except then the article itself mentions employees getting a few million a year in stock from Facebook or Google. I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend? If your idea is good and the work is good it would easily be worth it. Of course proving that you can deliver ahead of time is more than a little difficult.
- crdb 12y ago
  It depends on your definition of "rockstar" but your pricing appears high. To share an anecdote: I was having a chat with a HNWI who wanted to "get into startups" about the cost of launching a product that he was thinking about (something similar in complexity to OpenTable). He had very high estimates in mind, something along the lines of what you're talking about and half a year. I told him it was probably possible to do it much faster by employing experienced developers at a high hourly rate but whose experience would drastically cut both mistake time and planning time. He asked me to get him a quote, so I contacted two guys I knew from the functional programming meetups, both with PhDs and recently published papers, both with half a decade experience in a big famous company based in Silicon Valley, both having worked with each other on consulting projects for years, and they spent a week drafting a rough, serious quote. The estimate came to around 25-40x cheaper than what you're talking about, and two months (part-time, on the side of their research work) to launch + USD 2k/month post launch to maintain it with no new features. Of course, the HNWI changed his mind (in part due to a co-investor on another project who objected to the "high" estimate and told him to use free or cheap fresh grads instead... welcome to the world outside the US) and I profusely apologised to my contacts for having wasted their time, but it did put an order of magnitude on the "high quality contracting" idea.
  - forrestthewoods 12y ago
    I didn't understand consulting until a post on HN awhile back. It was a friendly guy who liked to hangout and chat with fellow devs. While visiting a city, Chicago I believe, he met up with coffee with a guy possibly also from HN. They talked, went back to the office, and he talked with another employee for awhile. The guy in question I believe had a background in SEO so he just kinda shared what he knew for 2 or 3 hours. Then they shook hands and went their separate ways. A few weeks later he e-mailed back asking how much he would have paid if that friendly chat with an official consulting job. The answer was around $10,000. Yes it was only 2-3 hours of time, but built upon thousands of hours of experience. And the changes they could immediately implement would generate more than $10k in increased revenue so it would easily be worth it. My point here is that it doesn't matter jack shit how many hours are spent on a project or how cheaply it could be done. What's infinitely more important is how much money can be made. If you can get more money out than you put in and putting more money in means you get more out then you put as much in as you can afford. Now for someone to plop down a million bucks on three months worth of work means they'd have to be unusually confident in a project's chances of success. So that number I gave is pretty high. However paying big money to a seasoned vet to get the ball rolling makes an unbelievable amount of sense.
    - tlrobinson 12y ago
      That would be patio11 and tptacek: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
    - jcr 12y ago
      Your recollection of the story is a little off, but it's close. The story you mentioned was from 5 years ago (2009). It was mentioned in a blog post in 20011 [1] and again in a podcast in 2012 [2]. It involved Patrick McKenzie (a.k.a "patio11" [3]) and Thomas Ptacek (a.k.a "tptacek" [4]). They are two of the most prolific contributors to HN [5]. Needless to say, times change. At present, Patrick's consulting rate is somewhere north of $30K a week [6], and dare I say it, I'm sure he's worth every penny of it for the right companies. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ [2] http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541
- lnanek2 12y ago
  It's pretty typical for Pivotal Labs to charge 500k to write up an MVP for a startup.
  - forrestthewoods 12y ago
    Good data point. Thanks! And I'd wager the quality of that work isn't particularly strong. So 1m for exceptionally high quality work seems plausible. And good call on the price being for an MVP. It doesn't really matter how many people are working on it or, for the most part, how long it takes. You're paying for a product. If that happens to be done by one person or four then so be it.
    - sanswork 12y ago
      Why would you wager the quality of work from Pivotal wouldn't be particularly strong?
      - venus 12y ago
        Code from these outsourcing shops is never particularly good. They sell on name, trust and client relationships - the product just has to work, and it usually does. They can't attract and keep top devs, who don't want to work on boring client projects, and won't pay to get them anyway. They're inevitably junior-heavy, supervised by 2 or 3 year seniors, who do a reasonable job of keeping things in line but there's only so much you can do. The code ticks all the boxes for testing, etc, but is far from inspired and usually built with the present, not the future, in mind. There are uncomfortable organisational incentives to not over-deliver in quality - wouldn't want changes and maintenance to be too easy, and it's not like the client is tech-savvy or they wouldn't be hiring a "name" shop in the first place. Most really good programmers who know their value (that I know, anyway) are working for product companies, where quality is visible, valued, and rewarded, or are highly-paid consultants/freelancers.
        briandear 12y ago
        I'm not sure you know anything about Pivotal.
- Silhouette 12y ago
  I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Given that (a) most start-ups fail, (b) the reason for failure is very rarely due to some irreversible technical error in the early stages of development, (c) the kind of quality a really good developer can offer is much more valuable later, when you've thrown out the initial junk implementation that got you some customers and need higher quality to start scaling up/out, (d) you'd need serious outside investment to be able to afford even one person at that rate, and (e) there are plenty of smart people who could and would produce a useful baseline product for a typical start-up in 12 weeks for a lot less than a million bucks, I suspect you are being highly optimistic about the size of that market. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend? I know they wouldn't. Most bootstrapped start-ups have enough trouble keeping the power on for the first three months, and no start-up with experienced investors is going to take that kind of proposition seriously. Why do you think most start-ups are so keen to offer long-term, success-based compensation for employees who work crazy hours rather than offering real money at market rates for normal working days, and why do you think so many competent developers now insist on market rates and normal working days anyway? If you're a freelancer/contractor/consultant type then taking on start-ups as clients is like being a small business trying to sell to students: they want the moon on a stick, but most of them have no money.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    Dunno, I've seen the QT near a major university... plenty of market for things on a stick (or a roller/bun) so to speak. If you would need 8 lesser devs to do what 2-3 very skilled devs can do, for only 2x-3x the amount.. you'd be surprised what the differences are... I've cleaned up enough code to know the difference.
- phpnode 12y ago
  > I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend? I've been in this part of the market for a while (getting startups to launch). There are very few people who have that kind of money to drop on initial development, usually you're talking about 1/10 of that at most. The companies that do have that kind of funds are not looking for an individual "rockstar", they're looking for a nice established company that gives them confidence and can be sued if things go wrong.
- codingdave 12y ago
  But your idea almost never is good. Your first prototype tends to simply open up discussions surrounding your problem area, which you can then iterate around until you have precisely defined the problem and solution. This is why most startups "pivot". A true rock star is not the guy who can code up a great system. It is the guy who can see the pivot coming before you ever start writing code, and get you on the right track from day one.
- walshemj 12y ago
  but as contractor you need to budget on only getting 35 weeks a year you cant guarantee that you will get a year long contract every time.
eroo 12y ago
>>"Enter the agents. Solomon describes himself as an equalizer. In creative industries, he told me, 'there’s always this pattern that the creatives start out at the bottom of the food chain and are exploited.'" Even recognizing that the current hiring model has major inefficiencies, it's hard to not see this as awfully ironic. >>"part of our goal is to de-risk freelancing and make it more viable. [...] She also appreciated that they had been vetted for interpersonal skills. At one point, they had to speak directly with the health-care company’s New York offices. 'They were good,' she said. 'And it wasn’t embarrassing to let them out of their cave.'" The value proposition of the agent, pushing both technical and personal professionalism of candidates, should be addressable through a reputational system that doesn't take 15% and require ad hoc negotiations. It would, however, have to be complex enough to address how well certain talent is at addressing specific projects. How much of that is a lack of proper metrics and how much is the hiring party's inability to frame their needs?
- altay 12y ago
  I'm with you, it's certainly not the most elegant solution to the problem, but we're basically Doing Things That Don't Scale. (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) As we grow, we identify bottlenecks, and we write software to automate those processes; I imagine we're iterating towards something like what you're envisioning. (At least internally, if not externally.) But your last couple sentences got at an important point... as much as I'd like to see this problem solved with software, there are still a lot of unavoidable, messy, people-related issues that, currently, still require manual finesse.
mathattack 12y ago
Can you really get rockstars like that for $150-$250/hour including the agent's fee? How are these agents any different than other contracting firms, other than their supposed access to the best?
- skrebbel 12y ago
  The difference is that these guys get feature in a Newyorker article.
  - x0xMaximus 12y ago
    Michael (& Altay) continues to do a lot of me to excel in my other life goals. They provide advice, outlets and scheduling (via assistant) for me to take my art and science career ahead just as much as my software. If they weren't interested in my best interest of being happy on my own standards above all else then I wouldn't be with them for ~2yrs now. I want to also note here that I leverage 10x to do less recruitment for jobs and more with purely figuring out which are the best opportunities to pursue at that time. Personally speaking, I want to spend as little time on the planning / business side of my tech career as possible so I can use that time to focus on my other pursuits. I trust (& they've proven) to be able to make the most advantageous choices for me professionally with long term goals in mind. M
- tracker1 12y ago
  Their rockstars are actually getting 85% of that hourly rate? Many contracting firms are taking anywhere from 50-75% if the rate they are charging.
  - venus 12y ago
    > Many contracting firms are taking anywhere from 50-75% The only firms I know of taking that kind of cut target governments, which carries a lot of risk and is very high-touch. They need a fancy office and a lot of overhead just to stay in the game. Perverse, I know, but the way things are. The firms in question then charge very high rates to cover all this, and keep a large percentage of it, as you say. The contractors who actually do the work end up seeing about as much as they'd see in private practise (~$800-1000/day from a chargeout of maybe 1800-2200) Source: friends working for this kind of company in Australia.
danso 12y ago
I've never been a freelance developer so I don't know what my rate would be...but I would really like to get some insight on what $200+/hr web-development is like. I mean, what are the expectations versus a $50-developer? For example, I could probably build in 10 hours a customized, nice-looking Twitter bootstrap Rails site with Stripe integration and deploy it onto EC2 and set up Capistrano to integrate with whatever existing Github flow they have...but then when it comes to building the admin...um...developing the admin from a technical standpoint is non-trivial, but developing it in such a way that it is hassle free from the client...How exactly does the developer do that, without extensive consultation time with the client? And what if their in-house developer (let's pretend they have one who is competent) doesn't have a workflow like I imagine a good workflow should be? In other words, I'm having a hard time imagining what a rockstar developer could singlehandedly create that would be spectacular and would be something that that mortals can use and maintain on their own...but obviously that's why I'm not a $200+/hr freelance developer.
- llamataboot 12y ago
  I don't think the $200/hr developers are building greenfield apps with simple models, but building quite complex logic or dealing with extending the functionality or fixing very large and brittle apps. At least, that's where I'd spend my $200/hr.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - patio11 12y ago
    It gets easier to envision if you think less of "apps" and more like "systems which will exist within an existing business which already has many, many millions of dollars flowing through it." If the new/improved system significantly increases how many millions flow through the business, then that is the only thing that needs to be said, right? After that it's just administrivia what sort of charging model gets worked out. If you're an insurance company and you need a computer system to support adding a new line of business to your products available, there are very specialized programmers who can help you do that. (Or you can hire Accenture and, for a 150% premium, you won't need to know that any programmers were harmed in the making of your system.) There are virtually infinite examples of this.
skrebbel 12y ago
Sounds like 10x Management hired a PR firm.
- msoad 12y ago
  Not only "a PR firm", in fact many PR firms: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/representing-programmers-as-if-they-were-celebrities/ http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/representing-progra... http://abc7news.com/archive/9075316/ http://abc7news.com/archive/9075316/ And links to many more in their website: http://www.10xmanagement.com/ http://www.10xmanagement.com/
  - x0xMaximus 12y ago
    As far as I know they haven't hired anyone, from personal experiences most of these leads came from emails asking them what they we're up to... 10x certainly doesn't employ a full time PR person. M
    - altay 12y ago
      (Founder of 10x here.) Max* is right... we have spent literally zero dollars on PR. The New Yorker approached us for this article. (As did Mashable for their piece last week which interviewed a bunch of 10xers: http://mashable.com/2014/11/09/digital-nomads/ http://mashable.com/2014/11/09/digital-nomads/ .) Frankly, it makes it even more exciting to me, because it means this is an actual trend, rather than a manufactured one. * Yes, the parent is Max Nanis from the article. The article failed to mention that he also currently has a sculpture in the Smithsonian. :)
      - skrebbel 12y ago
        I admit that that's pretty impressive indeed. Good for you, and thanks for replying!
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r0h1n 12y ago
Playing the devil's advocate here, but why is the concept of free-agent developers who (a) command huge premiums, and (b) prefer working on short, intense sprints instead of with one employer, still not here yet? I'm not saying 10X Management is an example, but why can't individual programming be valued like, say, acting/singing etc.?
- patio11 12y ago
  Many consultancies work on this model, particularly in specialities where it is extraordinarily difficult to find anyone qualified or to retain them on W-2 payroll for a year at a time. Hate to toot my own horn, particularly as I no longer do much consulting, but if a hypothetical software company said "OK we have a product and it works but we can't convince our Dev team to build marketing plumbing and they don't know where to start even if we ask" one could hypothetically have called me up, gotten advice like "You should probably do lifecycle email", and if you were incapable of shipping that yourself in two weeks I could fix that for you for $X0,000. It works similarly if you need a crypto system validated, etc etc.
  - Locke1689 12y ago
    From what I gather (mostly through blog osmosis), you kind of fell into that career through the experience you had marketing BCC. How would you suggest someone do this intentionally, and in varying specialties? That is, how do you decide to specialize in a marketable niche? Sure, if I already knew the marketing business I could probably worm my way into doing marketing contracting. Similarly, if I were an expert in cryptography I could start fielding requests. What if, however, I'm just a proficient developer qualified in relatively mainstream technologies. By simple analysis of economic principles, I'm not highly valued due to the availability of general talent, so I have to subspecialize in some valuable niche. But how do I choose that specialty ahead of time? I can always choose an arbitrary specialty, but it's possible the demand isn't there. My specialty, for example, may be in compilers, but I have an inkling feeling that being able to untwist some truly horrific legacy Win32 COM garbage may be the more lucrative endeavor. How do I test these theories without wasting a huge amount of time and money?
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mallyvai 12y ago
I'm the lead engineer and founder of http://OfferLetter.io http://OfferLetter.io - We guide engineers (and designers and PMs) by helping them navigate the "last-mile" - that is, the offer selection/negotiation process - in exchange for a fee from the candidates. (We got brief shoutout in the article along with Dave and our friends at HackMatch) I want to specifically address 1) Sam Altman and 2) Chris Fry's respective points about the problems with regards to models that align with the candidate more directly (like ours): 1) Much respect for Sam, but he's dead wrong with respect to the 'negative selection' problem - yes, good people have no problem finding work, but the key problem is that the opportunity cost remains phenomenally high for suboptimal decision making. We have actually worked with outstanding engineers who are at YC portfolio companies, simply because they wouldn't have known how to get what they're worth otherwise and push for more. And Sam is missing the point entirely with regards to worth - people in the industry are not getting paid based on their merit - not at all. The gender wage gap is perhaps the most stark example of this, but we see it, starkly, along many other demographic slices as well. 2) With respect to Chris Fry's comments - I was actually in Twitter's eng org when Chris raised the internal engineering referral bonus from 2.5k to 10k because the company wasn't getting the volume of quality people it wanted. Chris is a really great guy, but I find his point about "[at] Twitter, you get the best résumés on your desk already [via recruiting department, referrals, etc]" somewhat misleading - there's no way he would have raised the referral bonus as sharply as he did if he really felt that. In fact, there wouldn't have to be an referral bonus structure at all. Twitter is wonderful, and I loved my time there, but even there we weren't getting all the high-quality people we wanted. [#plug: check out http://OfferLetter.io http://OfferLetter.io - we all deserve to get what we're worth]
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  I hope you guys are working with recruiters to find out compensation ranges. I had a friend who once responded to a recruiter "hey, how about you come work for me". It's a lot easier to ask for more salary, stock, or benefits when you have inside information on what each company is willing to offer for each position!
  - mallyvai 12y ago
scottru 12y ago
Boy. As someone who actually runs a contracting + project agency, that looks to be of an approximately similar size as 10x (at least before this was published), this was lifting-cars-painful to read - not just because they have PR and I don't, but because they (Solomon and Blumberg) _are the inefficiencies they are pretending to eliminate_. Let's take a few parts of the article: >>"The three partners have separate roles. Blumberg handles his and Solomon’s eleven remaining music and entertainment clients, and takes care of back-office matters: “Accounting, invoicing, collection, payouts. Everything that’s the bane of most people’s existence.” Guvench vets new talent. Potential clients have to fill out a questionnaire that one programmer compared to “the most complicated dating Web site ever.” Then Guvench and Solomon conduct interviews, to screen for communication skills. (I heard one potential client say, during a meeting in Solomon’s office, “We don’t want people who just write code and drool.”) Guvench also does code reviews—testing Web sites that aspiring clients have built, and reviewing the programs they’ve written." So... --Blumberg isn't working on the business at all; --Solomon's work isn't even described (except "conducting interviews for communication skills"). So there's one person, Guvench, an ex-engineer, who's actually doing the technical vetting - i.e. 100% of the value so far is coming from one guy. OK, then maybe the others are selling? Nope. >>"10x technologists are working with a variety of customers: Live Nation, a virtual-reality startup, and an N.B.A. player who has an idea for a social-messaging app. Solomon admitted, however, that this list is somewhat random—it consists mostly of people who found 10x through Google, or whom he or his clients know personally. He has hired a salesman, to pitch 10x to companies." OK, so you're closing PR-driven leads and your friends in the entertainment business? That's your sales pipeline? I know a number of agencies with two or three partners running the organization. I don't know a single one of those where there isn't somebody pounding the pavement, hustling, finding clients - and who know the difference between a long-term partner and a sports star with an "idea for a social-messaging app." (We _all_ hear about those.) The other value they're talking about is in the negotiation process. Hey, I'm totally willing to believe that a many-year entertainment agent is a better negotiator than I am, at least in the first-principles department. But this is not some magic skill in what is generally a well-defined and competitive market, and of course you're better at it when you deeply understand the technology and market, the BATNA for the client, etc. Those of us who actually understand the very small markets that one job description might meet are, in fact, pretty darned good at it too. For that matter, I've never told an engineer that you should work with us because we can get you a better deal than you can get for yourself, and if you're dealing with a client who understands the market (which said NBA player may not), that's pure hokum. (P.S. plenty of people on HN provide that coaching for free all day long.) It's ok that the author doesn't really understand this market, and so the competitors she mentions aren't really competitors at all - they're all focused on full-time hiring. I guess it's also OK that the New Yorker's fact-checking department didn't discover that there's no such programming language as "THP" - that should be "PHP." (Maybe it's just a typo.) But to let the reader believe that this approach represents the best this market has to offer - well, I guess that's just really, really great PR. Back to work. (Added later: I realized I commented on these folks 1.5 years ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5527610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5527610. I was feeling nicer then? Maybe? It looks like the participant in that HN thread was the partner who's clearly adding value.)
latch 12y ago
Many companies claim that hiring is a top priority, but do little more than put up a JD in a couple places. They then complain about shortages. You need to actively recruit talent, which means understanding what you're looking for. Building nginx modules? Go through github and see who's built an nginx module before. Do a google search for "nginx module development" and see where that leads. Then send out brief but targeted emails to people you sincerely want to join your team. There's a ton of developers who aren't actively looking, but presented with the opportunity, they'll jump. I don't know a single developer who isn't flattered and intrigued by a sincere cold call for employment from an actual company (they're pretty easy to filter from agencies) Second, money and location are a big deal. "We can't find developers" really means "We can't find developers who want to work for this salary and/or at this location." I remember not too long ago, our startup had a budget for 10 new developers, which we just couldn't fill. Our CTO and CEO 100% refused to get 5 developers and pay them 2x. So instead we stayed 10 people short, for over a year, while "hiring remains a top priority." TL;DR - If hiring is important, spend the necessary time on it, don't just pay it lip service.
- Animats 12y ago
  Google, in their growth days, had some interesting methods. One day I was looking up a topic in proof of correctness with Google, and there was a Google recruiting ad on it. I was once contacted by a Google recruiter because I'd been posting on "comp.lang.c++".
  - latch 12y ago
    My point exactly. That behavior shouldn't be considered special or google-esque. It should be business as usual.
    - justincormack 12y ago
      Yeah I remember seeing those. But now its just the Google recruiters, who don't really have any idea what Google does, or what I do.
einrealist 12y ago
How is the rockstar being evaluated? I mean, if the rockstar sucked at two clients before, is it still 250/hr for the next client, because he co-authored X? Or is the 100% success rate guaranteed in the contract? It is like reading about a homeopathy product.
- altay 12y ago
  No, we're constantly evaluating people during and after each project. Thankfully we've only had to drop someone in one situation, but we're not afraid to do that if necessary to keep the quality high. Also thankfully, the people we rep tend to bring their A-game to projects because they understand that it's not just their reputation on the line... they're also representing 10x and all of the other consultants that 10x represents.
  - einrealist 12y ago
    Thanks. I am biased, because I work as a consultant. I always bring my A-game to my clients, too. But if I ask for 250/hr, my client's procurement will just laugh and close the door. Well, there were some exceptions, when clients were really in need and I was the only person applicable to solve their situation. But that's rarely the case in longer assignments. Usually, those high rates are demanded by specialists, who are hired for 1-2 weeks of a critical product integration phase. In my experience, there is no guarantee that an A-grade technician will perform well in any environment. There are so many (not to say endless) factors, which makes it very difficult to value the performance objectively. So unless you have a very good monitoring in place to monitor your client's satisfaction and be very transparent about it to all clients, I tend to claim that you profit from the "Chivas Regal Effect". And I doubt, that your track record of successful time & material engagements really exceeds those of other firms (e.g. Thoughtworks). From another perspective, you do a great job. Because it is time for many companies to value their staff differently. There are so many IT departments which have not changed much since 20 years.
hackdays 12y ago
We are embarking on a reverse negotiation model for startups as well. Feel free to signup http://250ksalary.com http://250ksalary.com There are lots of areas in life where the cost of acquiring a quality product/service is clearly communicated. Salaries haven't been one of them, which might change. Don't confuse upfront salary negotiations with lack of motivation etc. This just brings more quality candidates to job markets, saves everyone a lot of time and lets you focus on other important parts of hiring process.
hackdays 12y ago
We are embarking on a reverse negotiation model for startups as well. Feel free to signup http://250ksalary.com http://250ksalary.com There are lots of areas in life where the cost of acquiring a quality product/service is clearly communicated. Salaries haven't been one of them, which might change. Don't confuse upfront salary negotiations with lack of motivation etc. This just brings more quality candidates to job markets, saves everyone a lot of time and lets you focus on other important parts of hiring process.
gregjor 12y ago
10X client (freelancer) here. I'm the guy living in Thailand mentioned in the article. Let me add to a few of the comments here. I am not writing on behalf of 10X, these are my own opinions. I would think that people hiring would like potential hires to be unrepresented. An un-represented developer is going to be cheaper. (chrisbennet) Price is just one factor. If I charge twice as much as someone else but I can solve the customer's problem in one-fourth the time, the customer saves money. Customers are usually focused on solving business problems within their budget and schedule, not just on hourly rates. It's not about the technology. It never has been. You're number one mission whenever you get a contract is to understand the business and figure out how you can get them making more money. (aantix) Almost exactly right. It's not always about making more money, though; it may just be to figure out how to make their software do what it is supposed to do. Too many job postings and too many résumés list technologies without addressing business needs or experience. For me, 10X has been good at getting both sides to talk about and describe business requirements and setting clear deliverables and goals. Boy. As someone who actually runs a contracting + project agency, that looks to be of an approximately similar size as 10x (at least before this was published), this was lifting-cars-painful to read - not just because they have PR and I don't, but because they (Solomon and Blumberg) _are the inefficiencies they are pretending to eliminate_. (scottru) The New Yorker article was not an exhaustive description of how 10X works or who does what. Most of my interaction with 10X is with Michael Solomon, so to say he isn't adding any value is just not understanding what he does. Everyone at 10X is adding value for me, and the several 10X customers I work for or have worked for have without exception said only good things about 10X Management. In my experience most projects go wrong due to miscommunication and conflicting expectations. 10X, and specifically Michael, are good at heading those things off before they become problems, and working out solutions that are acceptable to both sides. Yes, 10X has had some great PR. No, they aren't the only good freelancer agency or consulting firm. I've worked for quite a few placement/consulting firms and with many recruiters in my career (35+ years) and for the work I do now and the life I want to live 10X is a great fit. It may not be the right fit for every client (freelancer) or customer, and it may not be the way to go if you want to try to make millions at a startup. A few years ago I decided to concentrate on stalled projects and broken code, the almost-working or somewhat broken stuff left behind when developers fall out with their customer and stop answering their emails. My customers are mostly smaller businesses and non-profits, without the need or resources for their own IT staff, and without the sex appeal of Facebook or Twitter. They have real business problems to solve, they can't throw everything away and start over, and they aren't qualified to recruit and hire technical staff. I found plenty of this work on my own, but when I decided to travel and freelance remotely I worried about finding customers and easing their fears about hiring someone living overseas. 10X has been a good fit for me -- they bring in plenty of customers, they have clients with every technical skill you can think of when I need help, and they are a real US-based company that can assure customers I will deliver no matter where I happen to be. They have also negotiated better rates and more useful contracts that I was doing on my own.
_pmf_ 12y ago
Introducing a clueless additional middleman rarely solves a problems.
ExpiredLink 12y ago
The '10x' super star and other myths debunked: https://leanpub.com/leprechauns/read https://leanpub.com/leprechauns/read
- gregjor 12y ago
  The 10X productivity thing may be a myth. What I've seen in 35+ years programming is developers fall into three broad categories: 1. Can't get anything done on schedule or in budget. 2. May eventually get something done, late and over budget. 3. Delivers what the customer needs on time and within budget. The first two groups just cost the customer time and money, create uncertainty and stress for the customer, and may or may not deliver something of value. A better developer doesn't have to be 10x better (however that is measured). They only have to deliver what the customer needs within the time and budget parameters. From the customer's point of view the relevant scale is not 1 - 5 - 10 times productivity from the developer. The relevant scale is 0 - 1, where anything much less than 1 means their business problems weren't addressed in a useful way. It doesn't really matter that one programmer had 10x more commits on GitHub than another programmer if the customer can't ship packages because the programmer didn't correctly add shipping charges to the invoice (real example). Anyone who is freelancing, leading a project or team, or calling themselves a ninja, rockstar, wizard, etc. should not be surprised or indignant that customers don't understand their requirements and usually can't communicate their needs in a complete and consistent format. That problem has been known since the 1950s. Blaming the customer is not an option. An effective developer will concentrate on business needs, ask the questions and get the answers, and work with the customer to nail down requirements. When I get involved with a broken/stalled project the first thing I do is ask the customer to make a short list of the problems and missing features in decreasing priority order. What I always get, without exception, are business requirements, not technical glitches. The root cause of a missing business requirement may be technical (e.g. failed PCI compliance audit because of vulnerable PHP code), but all the customer cares about is the business requirement. It doesn't matter if I am 10x faster or smarter than whomever was working on the code before as long as I can fix the problem.
  - jnbiche 12y ago
    >...developers fall into three broad categories: 1. Can't get anything done on schedule or in budget. 2. May eventually get something done, late and over budget. 3. Delivers what the customer needs on time and within budget. And since software estimates is a known hard problem[1], the only different between 2 and 3 is often just the fact that 3 has learned to appropriately inflate his/her estimates. I say that as someone who has oscillated between 2 and 3 over my career, although the trend over time is toward 3. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6820547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6820547
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0800899g 12y ago
great comment section i must say
rajacombinator 12y ago
That's some lolworthy PR right there. The "UX designer for Apple's iCloud"??? These headhunters must have no idea how stupid that sounds to anyone who is actually in our industry.
- briandear 12y ago
  I am not sure I understand. iCloud.com does have a UX, and a nice one at that.
mgkimsal 12y ago
I've been predicting this sort of approach would happen for a while now, and glad to see it taking shape. I would like to see it more prevalent, but living in a somewhat less business-focused area, this approach may not trickle down here for several years.
sort3d 12y ago
Who would hire a firm called 10x (two timers?)
ap22213 12y ago
It's about time that high-end coders are getting the prices that they deserve. Many skilled coders aren't skilled in the art of negotiation, and that ends up bringing down the market price for everyone. I've seen far too many highly-talented people getting roped into five-figure salaries, when they'd be more appropriately priced in the six or even seven figures.
3rd3 12y ago
The rockstar metaphor always strikes me as unprofessional because it seems so incompatible with team work. Why aren’t there any rockstars in other areas of engineering?
- zimpenfish 12y ago
  It's even sillier when you consider that the average rockstar turns up after many hours of a large team of people setting up a precise controlled environment, does maybe 2 hours of work, then buggers off in luxury whilst the team dismantle, pack, and ship the environment. A true rockstar developer would change one or two lines of code in a finished project (created by a team) immediately before it was committed then move onto the next project.
stuaxo 12y ago
In the US are most jobs offered directly ? In the UK it's all pretty much through agencies ... agents vary immensly, at the top end they can be good, more often they don't know about the technology they are recruiting for, and about 1 in 5 times you will get a bad one that will do things like lie about the rate.
- talmand 12y ago
  It varies. In the past I have worked with agencies and directly with the company for different positions. Many companies will specifically state in their job postings they don't want candidates from agencies. It's kind of a mixed bag that I feel, in general, hurts everybody involved in some way.
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fecak 12y ago
This conversation about agents has come up here several times. The 'agent' model referred to in this article is not so different from what run-of-the-mill recruiters do for their clients. Client calls saying they need to hire someone, and the recruiter provides a candidate (often an independent consultant). If candidate is hired, recruiter marks up consultant's rate and makes a margin. That margin is the agent/recruiter's take - so the consultant is paying for the broker's service regardless of whether that broker calls itself an agent or recruiter. This isn't new, but using the term 'agent' makes it sound more appealing to all sides. The consultant can say "I have an agent", and the hiring company feels that the level of talent should be higher from an agency than from your everyday recruiting firm. If the talent is vetted better, it could be. Where the concept of agents gets much more interesting is when discussing those in salaried/permanent hire situations. Consultants are generally willing to cede 15% or so of rate in order to use a broker/agent/recruiter's services to find gigs. But will someone seeking a salaried employment role (a 150K software engineering job) pay an agent 5%/10%/15% of their salary in order to find a permanent position? Because most of the tech population works in salaried positions, this is the real question. Independent consultants make up a relatively small portion of the industry, yet this 'agent' conversation really only applies to them at this point. I like the agent concept as it aligns the incentives of the recruiter/agent and candidate much more clearly, as opposed to the current recruiter model where the recruiter is typically considered to be more aligned with the hiring firm. (The real estate agent argument comes up here). In this case, the 'agent' model is mostly just a rebranding of what we currently have in place. If this ever hit the permanent/salaried job market, that will be a bigger story.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  The 'agent' model referred to in this article is not so different from what run-of-the-mill recruiters do for their clients. Client calls saying they need to hire someone, and the recruiter provides a candidate (often an independent consultant). If candidate is hired, recruiter marks up consultant's rate and makes a margin. That margin is the agent/recruiter's take - so the consultant is paying for the broker's service regardless of whether that broker calls itself an agent or recruiter. That may be true of this case, but I think that the agent relationship, if done properly, is long-term and involves a lot more trust than exists between a job-searcher and a recruiter. If you get fired (let's say it's not your fault but potentially embarrassing, as most terminations are) and you have rock-solid trust in your agent, you can tell him and he'll tell you what to do next, and he'll know which companies you should be truthful with and which ones you should hide your past around. With a recruiter? You're not going to tell him that you were fired, because you know that he's paid by the employer's side. He might not even call you back if you admit to it. The difference between agents and recruiters is the amount of trust rendered to each. If you have a good agent, you can share your weaknesses and embarrassments and he'll know how to work around them. On the other hand, you're not going to tell a third-party headhunter about such things, because you want him to connect you with his best freight. Your agent can help you with the reputation-management work, but a recruiter is generally going to pipe everything you say back to his clients (i.e. prospective employers).
tptacek 12y ago
“Ballpark, for this role you’re talking a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars an hour.” So, standard market rate?
- trose 12y ago
  Is this actually common? I'm just curious. I have three years experience out of school and assumed that consulting rates were more like $50-$100/hr
  - tptacek 12y ago
    No, 50-100/hr describes unloaded headcount cost for salaried senior developers (and/or developers at extremely rich companies) in the bay area. The rates those agents were talking about seem to me to be approximately what every high-end iOS dev shop charges. Another ballpark estimator: that bill rate wasn't even in the ballpark of my (more specialized, of course) bill rate for the last two years I was consulting. It's nuts out there right now.
sireat 12y ago
When you read the examples given of super programming prowess such as making a function for repetitive tasks and bunching calls to db it gives the illusion that that is all it takes. Hey I do all these best practices, doesn't everybody else? Then you return back to reality of being a lazy 0.1xer and realize that there is a great deal unwritten and glossed over in these kind of general interest pieces.
hkarthik 12y ago
I find this agency model for hiring to be troubling because it's turning software into a hit-driven industry like Music, Movies, or Video Games. Hire a few rockstars, belt out a hit with hockey stick growth, watch it flame out or lose interest over time, and then watch the rockstars move onto their next project. What about the founders who put their heart and souls into building a real sustainable business? What about the customers who took the chance on an unknown solution and may have become dependent on it? What about the developers that might have worked with the rockstars, but are less interested in moving on and more interested in continuing to build great products? I can see why a lot of talented folks got jaded by this industry in the last bubble. And I think it's clearly happening again.
- phamilton 12y ago
  For founders it's simple. Cash out a few million in the A or B round. Flame out. Repeat. They are well taken care of in today's model.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    And the developers get squat. So if they want their cash up front, more power to them.
yoshiokatsuneo 12y ago
How about finding out from TopCoder, HackerRank, or any coding challengers ?
dreamweapon 12y ago
Hasn't the whole 10x myth been largely discredited, for some time now? How are we to take a company draws its business plan from it seriously?
- mynameishere 12y ago
  Well, since it's ultimately based on the fact that we evolved with 10 fingers and 10 toes, it's not meant to be taken literally. In fact, some programmers are effectively worth infinitely more than the average. The average programmer isn't even a fraction of Ken Thompson, for instance.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Sam Altman, of Y Combinator, said that, in the small world of Silicon Valley, the very idea of talent agents presents a “negative-selection problem”: “The actual 10x engineers don’t need or want an agent; people quickly discover they’re great, and they end up picking where (and especially with whom) they want to work. In my limited experience, the engineers that get agents are bad.” That may be true now, but programming has a huge reputation management component. Negotiation isn't hard to learn, but it's always better to have an advocate than to negotiate for yourself (note: lawyers retain other lawyers) and detecting trends in technologies and finding work that helps a programmer's career is a full-time job in its own right. By many measures, the star system didn’t work that well for Hollywood: it made moviemaking more expensive, which made studios more risk-averse, which led to inferior creative projects. And programmers are not movie stars—not yet, anyway. “Movie stars have their own brands,” McKinnon, the Okta C.E.O., said. “People will go to see a movie just because it has Tom Cruise in it. But programmers don’t really have that. No one’s going to pay for a product just because James Gosling built it.” (Gosling is one of the inventors of Java.) “Well, geeks like me will. But most people won’t. They pay for a service.” In Hollywood and software both, value delivered is multiplicative rather than additive. A good actor in the lead role might add 10% to revenue. If it's going to be a $5 million film, that's only $500,000. If it's going to be a $250 million film, that's huge: now we're talking about $25 million. Of course, many of these multiplicative variables are latent and unknown until the thing's actually released. Because of this, no one knows what "the base" is, or who contributed what, and there's wide room for negotiation.
penprog 12y ago
This is a parody right?
- floody-berry 12y ago
  Going off the comments here, "pretentious, over-priced twat" is quite real and worth being.
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prairiedogg 12y ago
"Todd McKinnon, the C.E.O. of Okta, a cloud-computing company, told me that top engineers are worth way more than what we’re paying them.'" Relieved to hear that Todd!

374 points by eroo 12y ago

Those rates really don't seem all that high. I mean 250 hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks year = $500,000. That's kind of a lot. Except then the article itself mentions employees getting a few million a year in stock from Facebook or Google. I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend? If your idea is good and the work is good it would easily be worth it. Of course proving that you can deliver ahead of time is more than a little difficult.

crdb 12y ago
It depends on your definition of "rockstar" but your pricing appears high. To share an anecdote: I was having a chat with a HNWI who wanted to "get into startups" about the cost of launching a product that he was thinking about (something similar in complexity to OpenTable). He had very high estimates in mind, something along the lines of what you're talking about and half a year. I told him it was probably possible to do it much faster by employing experienced developers at a high hourly rate but whose experience would drastically cut both mistake time and planning time. He asked me to get him a quote, so I contacted two guys I knew from the functional programming meetups, both with PhDs and recently published papers, both with half a decade experience in a big famous company based in Silicon Valley, both having worked with each other on consulting projects for years, and they spent a week drafting a rough, serious quote. The estimate came to around 25-40x cheaper than what you're talking about, and two months (part-time, on the side of their research work) to launch + USD 2k/month post launch to maintain it with no new features. Of course, the HNWI changed his mind (in part due to a co-investor on another project who objected to the "high" estimate and told him to use free or cheap fresh grads instead... welcome to the world outside the US) and I profusely apologised to my contacts for having wasted their time, but it did put an order of magnitude on the "high quality contracting" idea.
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  I didn't understand consulting until a post on HN awhile back. It was a friendly guy who liked to hangout and chat with fellow devs. While visiting a city, Chicago I believe, he met up with coffee with a guy possibly also from HN. They talked, went back to the office, and he talked with another employee for awhile. The guy in question I believe had a background in SEO so he just kinda shared what he knew for 2 or 3 hours. Then they shook hands and went their separate ways. A few weeks later he e-mailed back asking how much he would have paid if that friendly chat with an official consulting job. The answer was around $10,000. Yes it was only 2-3 hours of time, but built upon thousands of hours of experience. And the changes they could immediately implement would generate more than $10k in increased revenue so it would easily be worth it. My point here is that it doesn't matter jack shit how many hours are spent on a project or how cheaply it could be done. What's infinitely more important is how much money can be made. If you can get more money out than you put in and putting more money in means you get more out then you put as much in as you can afford. Now for someone to plop down a million bucks on three months worth of work means they'd have to be unusually confident in a project's chances of success. So that number I gave is pretty high. However paying big money to a seasoned vet to get the ball rolling makes an unbelievable amount of sense.
  - tlrobinson 12y ago
    That would be patio11 and tptacek: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
  - jcr 12y ago
    Your recollection of the story is a little off, but it's close. The story you mentioned was from 5 years ago (2009). It was mentioned in a blog post in 20011 [1] and again in a podcast in 2012 [2]. It involved Patrick McKenzie (a.k.a "patio11" [3]) and Thomas Ptacek (a.k.a "tptacek" [4]). They are two of the most prolific contributors to HN [5]. Needless to say, times change. At present, Patrick's consulting rate is somewhere north of $30K a week [6], and dare I say it, I'm sure he's worth every penny of it for the right companies. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ [2] http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541
lnanek2 12y ago
It's pretty typical for Pivotal Labs to charge 500k to write up an MVP for a startup.
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  Good data point. Thanks! And I'd wager the quality of that work isn't particularly strong. So 1m for exceptionally high quality work seems plausible. And good call on the price being for an MVP. It doesn't really matter how many people are working on it or, for the most part, how long it takes. You're paying for a product. If that happens to be done by one person or four then so be it.
  - sanswork 12y ago
    Why would you wager the quality of work from Pivotal wouldn't be particularly strong?
    - venus 12y ago
      Code from these outsourcing shops is never particularly good. They sell on name, trust and client relationships - the product just has to work, and it usually does. They can't attract and keep top devs, who don't want to work on boring client projects, and won't pay to get them anyway. They're inevitably junior-heavy, supervised by 2 or 3 year seniors, who do a reasonable job of keeping things in line but there's only so much you can do. The code ticks all the boxes for testing, etc, but is far from inspired and usually built with the present, not the future, in mind. There are uncomfortable organisational incentives to not over-deliver in quality - wouldn't want changes and maintenance to be too easy, and it's not like the client is tech-savvy or they wouldn't be hiring a "name" shop in the first place. Most really good programmers who know their value (that I know, anyway) are working for product companies, where quality is visible, valued, and rewarded, or are highly-paid consultants/freelancers.
      - briandear 12y ago
        I'm not sure you know anything about Pivotal.
Silhouette 12y ago
I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Given that (a) most start-ups fail, (b) the reason for failure is very rarely due to some irreversible technical error in the early stages of development, (c) the kind of quality a really good developer can offer is much more valuable later, when you've thrown out the initial junk implementation that got you some customers and need higher quality to start scaling up/out, (d) you'd need serious outside investment to be able to afford even one person at that rate, and (e) there are plenty of smart people who could and would produce a useful baseline product for a typical start-up in 12 weeks for a lot less than a million bucks, I suspect you are being highly optimistic about the size of that market. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend? I know they wouldn't. Most bootstrapped start-ups have enough trouble keeping the power on for the first three months, and no start-up with experienced investors is going to take that kind of proposition seriously. Why do you think most start-ups are so keen to offer long-term, success-based compensation for employees who work crazy hours rather than offering real money at market rates for normal working days, and why do you think so many competent developers now insist on market rates and normal working days anyway? If you're a freelancer/contractor/consultant type then taking on start-ups as clients is like being a small business trying to sell to students: they want the moon on a stick, but most of them have no money.
- tracker1 12y ago
  Dunno, I've seen the QT near a major university... plenty of market for things on a stick (or a roller/bun) so to speak. If you would need 8 lesser devs to do what 2-3 very skilled devs can do, for only 2x-3x the amount.. you'd be surprised what the differences are... I've cleaned up enough code to know the difference.
phpnode 12y ago
> I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend? I've been in this part of the market for a while (getting startups to launch). There are very few people who have that kind of money to drop on initial development, usually you're talking about 1/10 of that at most. The companies that do have that kind of funds are not looking for an individual "rockstar", they're looking for a nice established company that gives them confidence and can be sued if things go wrong.
codingdave 12y ago
But your idea almost never is good. Your first prototype tends to simply open up discussions surrounding your problem area, which you can then iterate around until you have precisely defined the problem and solution. This is why most startups "pivot". A true rock star is not the guy who can code up a great system. It is the guy who can see the pivot coming before you ever start writing code, and get you on the right track from day one.
walshemj 12y ago
but as contractor you need to budget on only getting 35 weeks a year you cant guarantee that you will get a year long contract every time.

eroo 12y ago

>>"Enter the agents. Solomon describes himself as an equalizer. In creative industries, he told me, 'there’s always this pattern that the creatives start out at the bottom of the food chain and are exploited.'" Even recognizing that the current hiring model has major inefficiencies, it's hard to not see this as awfully ironic. >>"part of our goal is to de-risk freelancing and make it more viable. [...] She also appreciated that they had been vetted for interpersonal skills. At one point, they had to speak directly with the health-care company’s New York offices. 'They were good,' she said. 'And it wasn’t embarrassing to let them out of their cave.'" The value proposition of the agent, pushing both technical and personal professionalism of candidates, should be addressable through a reputational system that doesn't take 15% and require ad hoc negotiations. It would, however, have to be complex enough to address how well certain talent is at addressing specific projects. How much of that is a lack of proper metrics and how much is the hiring party's inability to frame their needs?

altay 12y ago
I'm with you, it's certainly not the most elegant solution to the problem, but we're basically Doing Things That Don't Scale. (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) As we grow, we identify bottlenecks, and we write software to automate those processes; I imagine we're iterating towards something like what you're envisioning. (At least internally, if not externally.) But your last couple sentences got at an important point... as much as I'd like to see this problem solved with software, there are still a lot of unavoidable, messy, people-related issues that, currently, still require manual finesse.

mathattack 12y ago

Can you really get rockstars like that for $150-$250/hour including the agent's fee? How are these agents any different than other contracting firms, other than their supposed access to the best?

skrebbel 12y ago
The difference is that these guys get feature in a Newyorker article.
- x0xMaximus 12y ago
  Michael (& Altay) continues to do a lot of me to excel in my other life goals. They provide advice, outlets and scheduling (via assistant) for me to take my art and science career ahead just as much as my software. If they weren't interested in my best interest of being happy on my own standards above all else then I wouldn't be with them for ~2yrs now. I want to also note here that I leverage 10x to do less recruitment for jobs and more with purely figuring out which are the best opportunities to pursue at that time. Personally speaking, I want to spend as little time on the planning / business side of my tech career as possible so I can use that time to focus on my other pursuits. I trust (& they've proven) to be able to make the most advantageous choices for me professionally with long term goals in mind. M
tracker1 12y ago
Their rockstars are actually getting 85% of that hourly rate? Many contracting firms are taking anywhere from 50-75% if the rate they are charging.
- venus 12y ago
  > Many contracting firms are taking anywhere from 50-75% The only firms I know of taking that kind of cut target governments, which carries a lot of risk and is very high-touch. They need a fancy office and a lot of overhead just to stay in the game. Perverse, I know, but the way things are. The firms in question then charge very high rates to cover all this, and keep a large percentage of it, as you say. The contractors who actually do the work end up seeing about as much as they'd see in private practise (~$800-1000/day from a chargeout of maybe 1800-2200) Source: friends working for this kind of company in Australia.

danso 12y ago

I've never been a freelance developer so I don't know what my rate would be...but I would really like to get some insight on what $200+/hr web-development is like. I mean, what are the expectations versus a $50-developer? For example, I could probably build in 10 hours a customized, nice-looking Twitter bootstrap Rails site with Stripe integration and deploy it onto EC2 and set up Capistrano to integrate with whatever existing Github flow they have...but then when it comes to building the admin...um...developing the admin from a technical standpoint is non-trivial, but developing it in such a way that it is hassle free from the client...How exactly does the developer do that, without extensive consultation time with the client? And what if their in-house developer (let's pretend they have one who is competent) doesn't have a workflow like I imagine a good workflow should be? In other words, I'm having a hard time imagining what a rockstar developer could singlehandedly create that would be spectacular and would be something that that mortals can use and maintain on their own...but obviously that's why I'm not a $200+/hr freelance developer.

llamataboot 12y ago
I don't think the $200/hr developers are building greenfield apps with simple models, but building quite complex logic or dealing with extending the functionality or fixing very large and brittle apps. At least, that's where I'd spend my $200/hr.
- deleted 12y ago
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- patio11 12y ago
  It gets easier to envision if you think less of "apps" and more like "systems which will exist within an existing business which already has many, many millions of dollars flowing through it." If the new/improved system significantly increases how many millions flow through the business, then that is the only thing that needs to be said, right? After that it's just administrivia what sort of charging model gets worked out. If you're an insurance company and you need a computer system to support adding a new line of business to your products available, there are very specialized programmers who can help you do that. (Or you can hire Accenture and, for a 150% premium, you won't need to know that any programmers were harmed in the making of your system.) There are virtually infinite examples of this.

skrebbel 12y ago

Sounds like 10x Management hired a PR firm.

msoad 12y ago
Not only "a PR firm", in fact many PR firms: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/representing-programmers-as-if-they-were-celebrities/ http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/representing-progra... http://abc7news.com/archive/9075316/ http://abc7news.com/archive/9075316/ And links to many more in their website: http://www.10xmanagement.com/ http://www.10xmanagement.com/
- x0xMaximus 12y ago
  As far as I know they haven't hired anyone, from personal experiences most of these leads came from emails asking them what they we're up to... 10x certainly doesn't employ a full time PR person. M
  - altay 12y ago
    (Founder of 10x here.) Max* is right... we have spent literally zero dollars on PR. The New Yorker approached us for this article. (As did Mashable for their piece last week which interviewed a bunch of 10xers: http://mashable.com/2014/11/09/digital-nomads/ http://mashable.com/2014/11/09/digital-nomads/ .) Frankly, it makes it even more exciting to me, because it means this is an actual trend, rather than a manufactured one. * Yes, the parent is Max Nanis from the article. The article failed to mention that he also currently has a sculpture in the Smithsonian. :)
    - skrebbel 12y ago
      I admit that that's pretty impressive indeed. Good for you, and thanks for replying!
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r0h1n 12y ago

Playing the devil's advocate here, but why is the concept of free-agent developers who (a) command huge premiums, and (b) prefer working on short, intense sprints instead of with one employer, still not here yet? I'm not saying 10X Management is an example, but why can't individual programming be valued like, say, acting/singing etc.?

patio11 12y ago
Many consultancies work on this model, particularly in specialities where it is extraordinarily difficult to find anyone qualified or to retain them on W-2 payroll for a year at a time. Hate to toot my own horn, particularly as I no longer do much consulting, but if a hypothetical software company said "OK we have a product and it works but we can't convince our Dev team to build marketing plumbing and they don't know where to start even if we ask" one could hypothetically have called me up, gotten advice like "You should probably do lifecycle email", and if you were incapable of shipping that yourself in two weeks I could fix that for you for $X0,000. It works similarly if you need a crypto system validated, etc etc.
- Locke1689 12y ago
  From what I gather (mostly through blog osmosis), you kind of fell into that career through the experience you had marketing BCC. How would you suggest someone do this intentionally, and in varying specialties? That is, how do you decide to specialize in a marketable niche? Sure, if I already knew the marketing business I could probably worm my way into doing marketing contracting. Similarly, if I were an expert in cryptography I could start fielding requests. What if, however, I'm just a proficient developer qualified in relatively mainstream technologies. By simple analysis of economic principles, I'm not highly valued due to the availability of general talent, so I have to subspecialize in some valuable niche. But how do I choose that specialty ahead of time? I can always choose an arbitrary specialty, but it's possible the demand isn't there. My specialty, for example, may be in compilers, but I have an inkling feeling that being able to untwist some truly horrific legacy Win32 COM garbage may be the more lucrative endeavor. How do I test these theories without wasting a huge amount of time and money?

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mallyvai 12y ago

I'm the lead engineer and founder of http://OfferLetter.io http://OfferLetter.io - We guide engineers (and designers and PMs) by helping them navigate the "last-mile" - that is, the offer selection/negotiation process - in exchange for a fee from the candidates. (We got brief shoutout in the article along with Dave and our friends at HackMatch) I want to specifically address 1) Sam Altman and 2) Chris Fry's respective points about the problems with regards to models that align with the candidate more directly (like ours): 1) Much respect for Sam, but he's dead wrong with respect to the 'negative selection' problem - yes, good people have no problem finding work, but the key problem is that the opportunity cost remains phenomenally high for suboptimal decision making. We have actually worked with outstanding engineers who are at YC portfolio companies, simply because they wouldn't have known how to get what they're worth otherwise and push for more. And Sam is missing the point entirely with regards to worth - people in the industry are not getting paid based on their merit - not at all. The gender wage gap is perhaps the most stark example of this, but we see it, starkly, along many other demographic slices as well. 2) With respect to Chris Fry's comments - I was actually in Twitter's eng org when Chris raised the internal engineering referral bonus from 2.5k to 10k because the company wasn't getting the volume of quality people it wanted. Chris is a really great guy, but I find his point about "[at] Twitter, you get the best résumés on your desk already [via recruiting department, referrals, etc]" somewhat misleading - there's no way he would have raised the referral bonus as sharply as he did if he really felt that. In fact, there wouldn't have to be an referral bonus structure at all. Twitter is wonderful, and I loved my time there, but even there we weren't getting all the high-quality people we wanted. [#plug: check out http://OfferLetter.io http://OfferLetter.io - we all deserve to get what we're worth]

forrestthewoods 12y ago
I hope you guys are working with recruiters to find out compensation ranges. I had a friend who once responded to a recruiter "hey, how about you come work for me". It's a lot easier to ask for more salary, stock, or benefits when you have inside information on what each company is willing to offer for each position!
- mallyvai 12y ago

scottru 12y ago

Boy. As someone who actually runs a contracting + project agency, that looks to be of an approximately similar size as 10x (at least before this was published), this was lifting-cars-painful to read - not just because they have PR and I don't, but because they (Solomon and Blumberg) _are the inefficiencies they are pretending to eliminate_. Let's take a few parts of the article: >>"The three partners have separate roles. Blumberg handles his and Solomon’s eleven remaining music and entertainment clients, and takes care of back-office matters: “Accounting, invoicing, collection, payouts. Everything that’s the bane of most people’s existence.” Guvench vets new talent. Potential clients have to fill out a questionnaire that one programmer compared to “the most complicated dating Web site ever.” Then Guvench and Solomon conduct interviews, to screen for communication skills. (I heard one potential client say, during a meeting in Solomon’s office, “We don’t want people who just write code and drool.”) Guvench also does code reviews—testing Web sites that aspiring clients have built, and reviewing the programs they’ve written." So... --Blumberg isn't working on the business at all; --Solomon's work isn't even described (except "conducting interviews for communication skills"). So there's one person, Guvench, an ex-engineer, who's actually doing the technical vetting - i.e. 100% of the value so far is coming from one guy. OK, then maybe the others are selling? Nope. >>"10x technologists are working with a variety of customers: Live Nation, a virtual-reality startup, and an N.B.A. player who has an idea for a social-messaging app. Solomon admitted, however, that this list is somewhat random—it consists mostly of people who found 10x through Google, or whom he or his clients know personally. He has hired a salesman, to pitch 10x to companies." OK, so you're closing PR-driven leads and your friends in the entertainment business? That's your sales pipeline? I know a number of agencies with two or three partners running the organization. I don't know a single one of those where there isn't somebody pounding the pavement, hustling, finding clients - and who know the difference between a long-term partner and a sports star with an "idea for a social-messaging app." (We _all_ hear about those.) The other value they're talking about is in the negotiation process. Hey, I'm totally willing to believe that a many-year entertainment agent is a better negotiator than I am, at least in the first-principles department. But this is not some magic skill in what is generally a well-defined and competitive market, and of course you're better at it when you deeply understand the technology and market, the BATNA for the client, etc. Those of us who actually understand the very small markets that one job description might meet are, in fact, pretty darned good at it too. For that matter, I've never told an engineer that you should work with us because we can get you a better deal than you can get for yourself, and if you're dealing with a client who understands the market (which said NBA player may not), that's pure hokum. (P.S. plenty of people on HN provide that coaching for free all day long.) It's ok that the author doesn't really understand this market, and so the competitors she mentions aren't really competitors at all - they're all focused on full-time hiring. I guess it's also OK that the New Yorker's fact-checking department didn't discover that there's no such programming language as "THP" - that should be "PHP." (Maybe it's just a typo.) But to let the reader believe that this approach represents the best this market has to offer - well, I guess that's just really, really great PR. Back to work. (Added later: I realized I commented on these folks 1.5 years ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5527610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5527610. I was feeling nicer then? Maybe? It looks like the participant in that HN thread was the partner who's clearly adding value.)

latch 12y ago

Many companies claim that hiring is a top priority, but do little more than put up a JD in a couple places. They then complain about shortages. You need to actively recruit talent, which means understanding what you're looking for. Building nginx modules? Go through github and see who's built an nginx module before. Do a google search for "nginx module development" and see where that leads. Then send out brief but targeted emails to people you sincerely want to join your team. There's a ton of developers who aren't actively looking, but presented with the opportunity, they'll jump. I don't know a single developer who isn't flattered and intrigued by a sincere cold call for employment from an actual company (they're pretty easy to filter from agencies) Second, money and location are a big deal. "We can't find developers" really means "We can't find developers who want to work for this salary and/or at this location." I remember not too long ago, our startup had a budget for 10 new developers, which we just couldn't fill. Our CTO and CEO 100% refused to get 5 developers and pay them 2x. So instead we stayed 10 people short, for over a year, while "hiring remains a top priority." TL;DR - If hiring is important, spend the necessary time on it, don't just pay it lip service.

Animats 12y ago
Google, in their growth days, had some interesting methods. One day I was looking up a topic in proof of correctness with Google, and there was a Google recruiting ad on it. I was once contacted by a Google recruiter because I'd been posting on "comp.lang.c++".
- latch 12y ago
  My point exactly. That behavior shouldn't be considered special or google-esque. It should be business as usual.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    Yeah I remember seeing those. But now its just the Google recruiters, who don't really have any idea what Google does, or what I do.

einrealist 12y ago

How is the rockstar being evaluated? I mean, if the rockstar sucked at two clients before, is it still 250/hr for the next client, because he co-authored X? Or is the 100% success rate guaranteed in the contract? It is like reading about a homeopathy product.

altay 12y ago
No, we're constantly evaluating people during and after each project. Thankfully we've only had to drop someone in one situation, but we're not afraid to do that if necessary to keep the quality high. Also thankfully, the people we rep tend to bring their A-game to projects because they understand that it's not just their reputation on the line... they're also representing 10x and all of the other consultants that 10x represents.
- einrealist 12y ago
  Thanks. I am biased, because I work as a consultant. I always bring my A-game to my clients, too. But if I ask for 250/hr, my client's procurement will just laugh and close the door. Well, there were some exceptions, when clients were really in need and I was the only person applicable to solve their situation. But that's rarely the case in longer assignments. Usually, those high rates are demanded by specialists, who are hired for 1-2 weeks of a critical product integration phase. In my experience, there is no guarantee that an A-grade technician will perform well in any environment. There are so many (not to say endless) factors, which makes it very difficult to value the performance objectively. So unless you have a very good monitoring in place to monitor your client's satisfaction and be very transparent about it to all clients, I tend to claim that you profit from the "Chivas Regal Effect". And I doubt, that your track record of successful time & material engagements really exceeds those of other firms (e.g. Thoughtworks). From another perspective, you do a great job. Because it is time for many companies to value their staff differently. There are so many IT departments which have not changed much since 20 years.

hackdays 12y ago

We are embarking on a reverse negotiation model for startups as well. Feel free to signup http://250ksalary.com http://250ksalary.com There are lots of areas in life where the cost of acquiring a quality product/service is clearly communicated. Salaries haven't been one of them, which might change. Don't confuse upfront salary negotiations with lack of motivation etc. This just brings more quality candidates to job markets, saves everyone a lot of time and lets you focus on other important parts of hiring process.

hackdays 12y ago

gregjor 12y ago

10X client (freelancer) here. I'm the guy living in Thailand mentioned in the article. Let me add to a few of the comments here. I am not writing on behalf of 10X, these are my own opinions. I would think that people hiring would like potential hires to be unrepresented. An un-represented developer is going to be cheaper. (chrisbennet) Price is just one factor. If I charge twice as much as someone else but I can solve the customer's problem in one-fourth the time, the customer saves money. Customers are usually focused on solving business problems within their budget and schedule, not just on hourly rates. It's not about the technology. It never has been. You're number one mission whenever you get a contract is to understand the business and figure out how you can get them making more money. (aantix) Almost exactly right. It's not always about making more money, though; it may just be to figure out how to make their software do what it is supposed to do. Too many job postings and too many résumés list technologies without addressing business needs or experience. For me, 10X has been good at getting both sides to talk about and describe business requirements and setting clear deliverables and goals. Boy. As someone who actually runs a contracting + project agency, that looks to be of an approximately similar size as 10x (at least before this was published), this was lifting-cars-painful to read - not just because they have PR and I don't, but because they (Solomon and Blumberg) _are the inefficiencies they are pretending to eliminate_. (scottru) The New Yorker article was not an exhaustive description of how 10X works or who does what. Most of my interaction with 10X is with Michael Solomon, so to say he isn't adding any value is just not understanding what he does. Everyone at 10X is adding value for me, and the several 10X customers I work for or have worked for have without exception said only good things about 10X Management. In my experience most projects go wrong due to miscommunication and conflicting expectations. 10X, and specifically Michael, are good at heading those things off before they become problems, and working out solutions that are acceptable to both sides. Yes, 10X has had some great PR. No, they aren't the only good freelancer agency or consulting firm. I've worked for quite a few placement/consulting firms and with many recruiters in my career (35+ years) and for the work I do now and the life I want to live 10X is a great fit. It may not be the right fit for every client (freelancer) or customer, and it may not be the way to go if you want to try to make millions at a startup. A few years ago I decided to concentrate on stalled projects and broken code, the almost-working or somewhat broken stuff left behind when developers fall out with their customer and stop answering their emails. My customers are mostly smaller businesses and non-profits, without the need or resources for their own IT staff, and without the sex appeal of Facebook or Twitter. They have real business problems to solve, they can't throw everything away and start over, and they aren't qualified to recruit and hire technical staff. I found plenty of this work on my own, but when I decided to travel and freelance remotely I worried about finding customers and easing their fears about hiring someone living overseas. 10X has been a good fit for me -- they bring in plenty of customers, they have clients with every technical skill you can think of when I need help, and they are a real US-based company that can assure customers I will deliver no matter where I happen to be. They have also negotiated better rates and more useful contracts that I was doing on my own.

_pmf_ 12y ago

Introducing a clueless additional middleman rarely solves a problems.

ExpiredLink 12y ago

The '10x' super star and other myths debunked: https://leanpub.com/leprechauns/read https://leanpub.com/leprechauns/read

gregjor 12y ago
The 10X productivity thing may be a myth. What I've seen in 35+ years programming is developers fall into three broad categories: 1. Can't get anything done on schedule or in budget. 2. May eventually get something done, late and over budget. 3. Delivers what the customer needs on time and within budget. The first two groups just cost the customer time and money, create uncertainty and stress for the customer, and may or may not deliver something of value. A better developer doesn't have to be 10x better (however that is measured). They only have to deliver what the customer needs within the time and budget parameters. From the customer's point of view the relevant scale is not 1 - 5 - 10 times productivity from the developer. The relevant scale is 0 - 1, where anything much less than 1 means their business problems weren't addressed in a useful way. It doesn't really matter that one programmer had 10x more commits on GitHub than another programmer if the customer can't ship packages because the programmer didn't correctly add shipping charges to the invoice (real example). Anyone who is freelancing, leading a project or team, or calling themselves a ninja, rockstar, wizard, etc. should not be surprised or indignant that customers don't understand their requirements and usually can't communicate their needs in a complete and consistent format. That problem has been known since the 1950s. Blaming the customer is not an option. An effective developer will concentrate on business needs, ask the questions and get the answers, and work with the customer to nail down requirements. When I get involved with a broken/stalled project the first thing I do is ask the customer to make a short list of the problems and missing features in decreasing priority order. What I always get, without exception, are business requirements, not technical glitches. The root cause of a missing business requirement may be technical (e.g. failed PCI compliance audit because of vulnerable PHP code), but all the customer cares about is the business requirement. It doesn't matter if I am 10x faster or smarter than whomever was working on the code before as long as I can fix the problem.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  >...developers fall into three broad categories: 1. Can't get anything done on schedule or in budget. 2. May eventually get something done, late and over budget. 3. Delivers what the customer needs on time and within budget. And since software estimates is a known hard problem[1], the only different between 2 and 3 is often just the fact that 3 has learned to appropriately inflate his/her estimates. I say that as someone who has oscillated between 2 and 3 over my career, although the trend over time is toward 3. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6820547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6820547

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0800899g 12y ago

great comment section i must say

rajacombinator 12y ago

That's some lolworthy PR right there. The "UX designer for Apple's iCloud"??? These headhunters must have no idea how stupid that sounds to anyone who is actually in our industry.

briandear 12y ago
I am not sure I understand. iCloud.com does have a UX, and a nice one at that.

mgkimsal 12y ago

I've been predicting this sort of approach would happen for a while now, and glad to see it taking shape. I would like to see it more prevalent, but living in a somewhat less business-focused area, this approach may not trickle down here for several years.

sort3d 12y ago

Who would hire a firm called 10x (two timers?)

ap22213 12y ago

It's about time that high-end coders are getting the prices that they deserve. Many skilled coders aren't skilled in the art of negotiation, and that ends up bringing down the market price for everyone. I've seen far too many highly-talented people getting roped into five-figure salaries, when they'd be more appropriately priced in the six or even seven figures.

3rd3 12y ago

The rockstar metaphor always strikes me as unprofessional because it seems so incompatible with team work. Why aren’t there any rockstars in other areas of engineering?

zimpenfish 12y ago
It's even sillier when you consider that the average rockstar turns up after many hours of a large team of people setting up a precise controlled environment, does maybe 2 hours of work, then buggers off in luxury whilst the team dismantle, pack, and ship the environment. A true rockstar developer would change one or two lines of code in a finished project (created by a team) immediately before it was committed then move onto the next project.

stuaxo 12y ago

In the US are most jobs offered directly ? In the UK it's all pretty much through agencies ... agents vary immensly, at the top end they can be good, more often they don't know about the technology they are recruiting for, and about 1 in 5 times you will get a bad one that will do things like lie about the rate.

talmand 12y ago
It varies. In the past I have worked with agencies and directly with the company for different positions. Many companies will specifically state in their job postings they don't want candidates from agencies. It's kind of a mixed bag that I feel, in general, hurts everybody involved in some way.

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fecak 12y ago

This conversation about agents has come up here several times. The 'agent' model referred to in this article is not so different from what run-of-the-mill recruiters do for their clients. Client calls saying they need to hire someone, and the recruiter provides a candidate (often an independent consultant). If candidate is hired, recruiter marks up consultant's rate and makes a margin. That margin is the agent/recruiter's take - so the consultant is paying for the broker's service regardless of whether that broker calls itself an agent or recruiter. This isn't new, but using the term 'agent' makes it sound more appealing to all sides. The consultant can say "I have an agent", and the hiring company feels that the level of talent should be higher from an agency than from your everyday recruiting firm. If the talent is vetted better, it could be. Where the concept of agents gets much more interesting is when discussing those in salaried/permanent hire situations. Consultants are generally willing to cede 15% or so of rate in order to use a broker/agent/recruiter's services to find gigs. But will someone seeking a salaried employment role (a 150K software engineering job) pay an agent 5%/10%/15% of their salary in order to find a permanent position? Because most of the tech population works in salaried positions, this is the real question. Independent consultants make up a relatively small portion of the industry, yet this 'agent' conversation really only applies to them at this point. I like the agent concept as it aligns the incentives of the recruiter/agent and candidate much more clearly, as opposed to the current recruiter model where the recruiter is typically considered to be more aligned with the hiring firm. (The real estate agent argument comes up here). In this case, the 'agent' model is mostly just a rebranding of what we currently have in place. If this ever hit the permanent/salaried job market, that will be a bigger story.

michaelochurch 12y ago
The 'agent' model referred to in this article is not so different from what run-of-the-mill recruiters do for their clients. Client calls saying they need to hire someone, and the recruiter provides a candidate (often an independent consultant). If candidate is hired, recruiter marks up consultant's rate and makes a margin. That margin is the agent/recruiter's take - so the consultant is paying for the broker's service regardless of whether that broker calls itself an agent or recruiter. That may be true of this case, but I think that the agent relationship, if done properly, is long-term and involves a lot more trust than exists between a job-searcher and a recruiter. If you get fired (let's say it's not your fault but potentially embarrassing, as most terminations are) and you have rock-solid trust in your agent, you can tell him and he'll tell you what to do next, and he'll know which companies you should be truthful with and which ones you should hide your past around. With a recruiter? You're not going to tell him that you were fired, because you know that he's paid by the employer's side. He might not even call you back if you admit to it. The difference between agents and recruiters is the amount of trust rendered to each. If you have a good agent, you can share your weaknesses and embarrassments and he'll know how to work around them. On the other hand, you're not going to tell a third-party headhunter about such things, because you want him to connect you with his best freight. Your agent can help you with the reputation-management work, but a recruiter is generally going to pipe everything you say back to his clients (i.e. prospective employers).

tptacek 12y ago

“Ballpark, for this role you’re talking a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars an hour.” So, standard market rate?

trose 12y ago
Is this actually common? I'm just curious. I have three years experience out of school and assumed that consulting rates were more like $50-$100/hr
- tptacek 12y ago
  No, 50-100/hr describes unloaded headcount cost for salaried senior developers (and/or developers at extremely rich companies) in the bay area. The rates those agents were talking about seem to me to be approximately what every high-end iOS dev shop charges. Another ballpark estimator: that bill rate wasn't even in the ballpark of my (more specialized, of course) bill rate for the last two years I was consulting. It's nuts out there right now.

sireat 12y ago

When you read the examples given of super programming prowess such as making a function for repetitive tasks and bunching calls to db it gives the illusion that that is all it takes. Hey I do all these best practices, doesn't everybody else? Then you return back to reality of being a lazy 0.1xer and realize that there is a great deal unwritten and glossed over in these kind of general interest pieces.

hkarthik 12y ago

I find this agency model for hiring to be troubling because it's turning software into a hit-driven industry like Music, Movies, or Video Games. Hire a few rockstars, belt out a hit with hockey stick growth, watch it flame out or lose interest over time, and then watch the rockstars move onto their next project. What about the founders who put their heart and souls into building a real sustainable business? What about the customers who took the chance on an unknown solution and may have become dependent on it? What about the developers that might have worked with the rockstars, but are less interested in moving on and more interested in continuing to build great products? I can see why a lot of talented folks got jaded by this industry in the last bubble. And I think it's clearly happening again.

phamilton 12y ago
For founders it's simple. Cash out a few million in the A or B round. Flame out. Repeat. They are well taken care of in today's model.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  And the developers get squat. So if they want their cash up front, more power to them.

yoshiokatsuneo 12y ago

How about finding out from TopCoder, HackerRank, or any coding challengers ?

dreamweapon 12y ago

Hasn't the whole 10x myth been largely discredited, for some time now? How are we to take a company draws its business plan from it seriously?

mynameishere 12y ago
Well, since it's ultimately based on the fact that we evolved with 10 fingers and 10 toes, it's not meant to be taken literally. In fact, some programmers are effectively worth infinitely more than the average. The average programmer isn't even a fraction of Ken Thompson, for instance.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Sam Altman, of Y Combinator, said that, in the small world of Silicon Valley, the very idea of talent agents presents a “negative-selection problem”: “The actual 10x engineers don’t need or want an agent; people quickly discover they’re great, and they end up picking where (and especially with whom) they want to work. In my limited experience, the engineers that get agents are bad.” That may be true now, but programming has a huge reputation management component. Negotiation isn't hard to learn, but it's always better to have an advocate than to negotiate for yourself (note: lawyers retain other lawyers) and detecting trends in technologies and finding work that helps a programmer's career is a full-time job in its own right. By many measures, the star system didn’t work that well for Hollywood: it made moviemaking more expensive, which made studios more risk-averse, which led to inferior creative projects. And programmers are not movie stars—not yet, anyway. “Movie stars have their own brands,” McKinnon, the Okta C.E.O., said. “People will go to see a movie just because it has Tom Cruise in it. But programmers don’t really have that. No one’s going to pay for a product just because James Gosling built it.” (Gosling is one of the inventors of Java.) “Well, geeks like me will. But most people won’t. They pay for a service.” In Hollywood and software both, value delivered is multiplicative rather than additive. A good actor in the lead role might add 10% to revenue. If it's going to be a $5 million film, that's only $500,000. If it's going to be a $250 million film, that's huge: now we're talking about $25 million. Of course, many of these multiplicative variables are latent and unknown until the thing's actually released. Because of this, no one knows what "the base" is, or who contributed what, and there's wide room for negotiation.

penprog 12y ago

This is a parody right?

floody-berry 12y ago
Going off the comments here, "pretentious, over-priced twat" is quite real and worth being.

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prairiedogg 12y ago

"Todd McKinnon, the C.E.O. of Okta, a cloud-computing company, told me that top engineers are worth way more than what we’re paying them.'" Relieved to hear that Todd!