41–50 of 71 posts
I wonder why all recruiters don't do this? It would really put them at the top of the line for a developer's attention, and with the market being so tight, you'd think we'd be seeing this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that" For consideration. Two counter examples--(1) A great engineer working on a shitty project is not worth much. (2) And a great project can be executed with competent engineers. People are only as "effective" as the problems they solve are potenially valuable. Now imagine another variation: "The top [founde…
I'm not quite catching your point. If a coder is able to do 25x as much in the same time, I am willing to pay him substantially more - I get things done sooner and/or need fewer other coders. Most times, I won't be willing to pay him all of the 25x more (even with perfect information), because there is more risk putting all my eggs in the one basket. In some circumstances, where time is especially critical, I may be…
Consider a situtuation where you don't know the productivity of X and its subject to 25x variance, a project manager is unlikely to structure a project to allow for 25x variance as acceptable. He's eaither at risk of sandbagging or falling massively short. And so upsetting other parts of the business. So, he needs to have more like a 50% [edit: I like chuck's 3x also] plus or minus understanding of what he can deliver. So, its really hard to pay 25x when you are going to constrain his performance to 1.5x. Likewise, its hard to restructure your projects for 25x as the expected case, unless you have really good data. But, most of the data will be 1.5x ceiling (if he is maxing performance under the previous example). So, its still a leap of faith to restructure projects around 25x expected performance from 1.5x data (order of magnitude jump).
But, for a founder this is not so constrained. There it is a lot easlier to structure your work at your peak capacity. With equity, you will benefit from the performance, etc. But this is true wether or not you are an engineer or whatever else expertise. So, one theory might be that the top employees are the ones that allow the founders to do precisely that -- franchise players that allow strategy to be developed around a 10x or 25x performance envelope--but for the market to be efficient, two things need to happen. There needs to be reliable data of 25x performance, and there need to be jobs that can be structured around this expectation. Without upsetting the apple cart of exectution with the rest of the biz guys (marketing/bd/sales/ etc).
And bridging those gaps in the data is the hard part about talent search. And why people will pay a bit for it.
edits.
For those who haven't heard of either - essentially they allow candidates to apply to a broader "portfolio" of companies that Greylock or Bain represents. Internal recruiters then try to match the candidate skillset and interests with a company from the portfolio for a potential placement.
So why can't Developer Auction candidates go through a more rigorous selection process? I would assume it is not nearly as easy to scale. But certainly, as many others have echoed, their screening process is a far cry from something that will produce 25x candidates.
I applaud the effort and look forward to seeing this develop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For multi-day interviews, they should definitely pay. With the current job market, I'm surprised more companies don't.
There are 52 weeks in a year -- minus 2 weeks vacation (USA) and 1 week holidays, yields 49 weeks. 49 * 5 days = 245 days. So if you take one day off to interview, that's 0.4% of your annual pay. So DA should ask the companies to pay the candidate 0.4% of their bid to bring the candidate in for an interview. In the current system, making a bid doesn't mean the company has skin in the game (since they may not make an…
The company who really needs different incentives is the recruiter themselves. They can shotgun their database of candidates at their database of companies and hope something sticks, and waste a lot of candidate and company time in the process. There is no cost to them to make bad recommendations. (OK, eventually they lose the company's recruitment business, but I think that penalty is too tenuous).
So, make somebody pay 0.4% of the candidates salary for the interview, but make it the recruiting company. That will align everyone's incentives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For multi-day interviews, they should definitely pay. With the current job market, I'm surprised more companies don't.
There are 52 weeks in a year -- minus 2 weeks vacation (USA) and 1 week holidays, yields 49 weeks. 49 * 5 days = 245 days. So if you take one day off to interview, that's 0.4% of your annual pay. So DA should ask the companies to pay the candidate 0.4% of their bid to bring the candidate in for an interview. In the current system, making a bid doesn't mean the company has skin in the game (since they may not make an…
Am I the only one looking for a link to the website actually doing that? As a company how do you subscribe to such a feed? As a developer how do you create a profile, update a resume, checkout the companies?
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.
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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
At least from what I have seen, the Valley is much friendlier when it comes to job-hopping than most other markets. Maybe changing jobs every year is a little extreme, but certainly every 2-3 years is not out of the question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not quite catching your point. If a coder is able to do 25x as much in the same time, I am willing to pay him substantially more - I get things done sooner and/or need fewer other coders. Most times, I won't be willing to pay him all of the 25x more (even with perfect information), because there is more risk putting all my eggs in the one basket. In some circumstances, where time is especially critical, I may be…
Just trying to think through the issues at different levels of abstraction. Not sure i have the answers. But just some thoughts. Consider a situtuation where you don't know the productivity of X and its subject to 25x variance, a project manager is unlikely to structure a project to allow for 25x variance as acceptable. He's eaither at risk of sandbagging or falling massively short. And so upsetting other parts of th…