This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job • Hacker News Board

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#21

Post by NickLarsen » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 5:38 PM UTC

I have my doubts about this. Disclosure, I work for a Careers 2.0, but little of my thoughts are biased by that in this case.

For starters, this doesn't even seem to fix the problem stated, "The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that". So you give a guy $3K pop if he would earn a salary of 100K... great, but that doesn't even address the differences in salary unless he continually changes jobs. I am also not convinced this service raises the average amount developers would make.

From the employers perspective, it's ridiculous to determine how much you'd pay someone without interviewing them first. People develop the longer they spend time at a company, and if you expect them to be worth your original offer in a few years, you are now forced to hire them for your original amount (by over paying for their current skill set) or just decline them an offer. Now if I'm not mistaken, that's encouraging employers to overpay for less productive talent... which is in direct contrast with the goal specified above.

This seems more inline with just increasing the overall salary for developers, and that's laudable, but you cannot build a developer job board claiming to just sell the best talent. When good talent does go on the market, it's generally pretty good at selling itself.

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#22

Post by noahc » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 5:39 PM UTC

columbo wrote: post #14

dllthomas wrote: post #7

Okay, but it's still turning away most of us, right?

Yeah, from a revenue standpoint I can understand why, saying you are from google means you passed the 'google interview' or something. Therefore those candidates are probably easier to place (there's an assumption of excellence). That doesn't make it any less frustrating for those of us not graced with the big names on our resume. In the meantime however I've found places like Angel List is a good place to put your p…

Not that you necessarily feel this way or aren't doing something about it, but I think it's important whenever someone brings up the "us not graced with ..." argument that we point out that at one point and time those graced with it didn't have it either.

So, the logical question to ask is "What are you doing right now so that in 2 years you are graced with it."

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#23

Post by silentific » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 5:45 PM UTC

timdorr wrote: post #5

debacle wrote: post #3

Has anyone used this site to success?

DA was featured a couple weeks ago on TC: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/quora-airbnb-others-made-30... Seems pretty successful to me!

Apparently Mashable even used techcrunch's screenshot..

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#24

Post by dllthomas » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 5:45 PM UTC

lazerwalker wrote: post #18

dean wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They only take " top developers ", who are " 25 times more effective than the average developer ". Which is precisely measured by looking at what school you went to, or what gigantic tech company you have previously worked for.

I can't speak for these guys, but assuming they have good intentions I'd like to think that "went to a brand-name school or worked for a brand-name tech company" is essentially just the MVP of a system for verifying credentials that will eventually get more nuanced and less embarrassingly-biased.

Right. Having a filter of some sort is obviously vital, actually putting in legwork to figure out who is good is expensive, and I agree this is about having something they can quickly implement and not about offending the rest of us. Having said that, it would be a place I would hope they are focusing their efforts, and articles about other changes making things better for the favored few before they've addressed it come off as in poor taste.

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#25

Post by alainbryden » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 5:48 PM UTC

Am I the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to ask for a 15% of annual salary recruitment fee? Why would any reasonable company agree to pay a website $15,000 just because they indexed their new 100k/year hiree's résume?. I think they're way over-valuing the service they provide. A smart recruiter who found someone they really wanted on Developer Auction would simply look them up elsewhere and make them an offer outside of the site.

The site is creative, sophisticated, well built, and could easily charge some sort of monthly service fee akin to a dating site, but the notion that companies would willingly toss 15% of a highly paid employee's salary out of pure laziness boggles me.

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#26

Post by dllthomas » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 5:53 PM UTC

NickLarsen wrote: post #21

I have my doubts about this. Disclosure, I work for a Careers 2.0, but little of my thoughts are biased by that in this case. For starters, this doesn't even seem to fix the problem stated, "The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that". So you give a guy $3K pop if he would earn a salary of 100K... great, but that doesn't even address the difference…

As I understand it, it's the bidding that is meant to change the amount developers are paid, not the bonus. I am not sure what problem the bonus was meant to solve. I can speculate that they had a problem with too few developers accepting the offers. If so, they might want to look at whether underemployment is actually a problem amongst those they are allowing in - I would guess "great in practice, not great on paper" is worth more and paid less than "great on paper, not great in practice", and everyone they are targeting is necessarily great on paper. Those who are both great in practice and great on paper are probably also working on whatever they want to be working on already.

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#27

Post by rbellio » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 6:01 PM UTC

Matt_Mickiewicz wrote: post #12

rbellio wrote: post #10

It's an interesting idea and I wish whoever runs it the absolute best. I can tell the motivation here is to maximize the earning potential for a developer and find a good fit through a novel approach and I commend the thought. I can't help but laugh at the idea of someone being auctioned off, though. Pretty sure they used to do this and you got the manacles with your purchase. How invested is an employer going to be…

It's not a traditional auction in the sense that "highest bidder wins". The goal is to present each software engineer with 5-10 opportunities at cool companies, with numbers attached to them. They can then choose which offers are worth following-up with via phone or in-person interviews based on any number of factors (location, product/service, company stage, who the investors are, equity, salary, etc.). Like you say…

Thanks for clearing this up for me. I do appreciate the response. Hopefully you can clear one other troubling thought up for me: How is this recruitment tool going to avoid falling into the same recruitment spam of sites like Dice et. al.?

One of the greatest finds I've made in recent years was a decent recruiter. This individual not only finds opportunities that I find interesting, but supported and handled the minutiae that is involved in the recruitment process. I don't have to worry about submitting resumes or negotiating meeting times for interviews, he does all those things for me. He knows my salary requirements and I only have to invest a small amount of time into negotiations.

There's obviously some benefit in using a website like this, as it opens up opportunities in other locations that I wouldn't be aware of, but as someone who is content staying in his current area, what other benefits would using the site give me?

Thanks.

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#28

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

NickLarsen wrote: post #21

I have my doubts about this. Disclosure, I work for a Careers 2.0, but little of my thoughts are biased by that in this case. For starters, this doesn't even seem to fix the problem stated, "The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that". So you give a guy $3K pop if he would earn a salary of 100K... great, but that doesn't even address the difference…

That's simple. If you want to hire a $150k developer, you offer $150k. If you want to hire a $60k developer, you offer $60k. You then interview people untill you find somebody with the potential that you are looking for. For the employer, it doesn't change much. They just lose some negotiating power.

Now, from the employee point of view, all the trashy jobs are correctly marked, what will save a lot of his time. Also, he gets a small bonus in negotiation power.

If you are a great developer (say, you are better than 99% of them), just marking what jobs are not fit for you will reduce the time spent on getting a job by orders of magnitude. That's the difference between the job board being useless to being usefull. As a consequence, one can hope (not a certain thing) that great developers will flock into a system like this, so that would become the place to go to get great developers, and as a consequence all the great jobs go there.

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#29

Post by biot » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 6:05 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #4

That's good, but where is the incentive to stay at the job? They should make a requirement that you are at the job for 3-6 months before you get the pay.

The incentive? Having integrity perhaps? Besides, it's not even financially worthwhile to job hop just to get a bonus. The bonus works out to be less than eight days of salary. If you're really a top developer, you're not going to tarnish your reputation for such a paltry sum.

Re: This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

#30

Post by Matt_Mickiewicz » Tue, Sep 18, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #7

Okay, but it's still turning away most of us, right?

We're also approving developers with notable GitHub accounts, Computer Science grads from top Universities, etc. but it's not perfect.

Employer & education are only a rudimentary filter for the time being - some of the best engineers I know are self-taught and work at companies you might not have heard of. It's a big challenge, and we'll get there eventually.

I'd love to get your ideas on how to filter through candidates and then communicate their value to prospective employers in a credible way.