from Hacker News

This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job

by allangrant on 9/18/12, 4:34 PM with 67 comments

• by NickLarsen on 9/18/12, 5:38 PM

  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.

• by armored_mammal on 9/18/12, 5:15 PM

  Developer Auction == Silicon Valley farce to recycle Silicon Valley players at the expense of outsiders and newcomers.

  Yes... propagate the myth of 'the hard to find' developer by pretending that only the 'elite' exist by dint of their Alma Mater or current employer...

• by vanni on 9/18/12, 8:51 PM

  "DeveloperAuction.com is currently open only to employees of Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Zynga, and Google as well as Stanford & MIT graduates." [http://developerauction.com/for_developers]

  Meh.

• by asdfprou on 9/18/12, 7:27 PM

  This reminds me of the "fellowship" programs such as those offered by Bain Venture Capital Group (http://www.baincapitalventures.com/startupacademy/) and Greylock Partners Network (http://www.greylock.com/careers).

  For those who haven't heard of either - essentially they allow candidates to apply to a broader "portfolio" of companies that Greylock or Bain represents. Internal recruiters then try to match the candidate skillset and interests with a company from the portfolio for a potential placement.

  So why can't Developer Auction candidates go through a more rigorous selection process? I would assume it is not nearly as easy to scale. But certainly, as many others have echoed, their screening process is a far cry from something that will produce 25x candidates.

  I applaud the effort and look forward to seeing this develop.

• by tocomment on 9/18/12, 5:00 PM

  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.

• by alainbryden on 9/18/12, 5:48 PM

  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.

• by obiefernandez on 9/18/12, 5:06 PM

  It's about time we see some real innovation in this space, but will they be able to avoid the usual stench associated with tech recruiters?

• by dllthomas on 9/18/12, 5:00 PM

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

• by michaelochurch on 9/18/12, 11:39 PM

  Here's the problem with the "25x-programmer" concept. There is such a thing, but it's not just about the programmer. It's about the engineer, the company, project/person fit, the team, the technology stack, and the project itself. I've had months that were worth over $500,000 to my employer easily, but I've also had months close to zero.

  Productivity compounds multiplicatively. Individual ability is certainly a factor, but not the only one. To be able to sustain 10x levels of contribution, you need to be using excellent tools that you know well, on a project that fits your skills and interests, in a position where you can have an impact (and those positions are coveted and usually allocated politically, not on merit) in addition to being a good programmer. I wish these conditions could be reliably obtained, but for most people, they can't.

  That's why the 10-100x programmers aren't banking $1 million and up per year. Companies can't possibly know in advance whether a person is going to have all those other performance-altering variances in place, and they also know from experience that creating conditions in which 10x programmers can thrive is a political mess.

• by rbellio on 9/18/12, 5:05 PM

  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 in a employee that he had to go into a bidding war for? I'm going to imagine a great deal. What happens if the individual just isn't a good fit for the role or the culture of the company?

• by Jabbles on 9/18/12, 5:25 PM

  A 3% bonus? I guess it's better than traditional recruiters, but I think the real (financial) value lies in being offered a larger salary (which could be worth substantially more than 3%).

• by bduerst on 9/18/12, 4:53 PM

  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.

• by NonEUCitizen on 9/18/12, 4:44 PM

  Perhaps they should pay for time spent on interviewing?

• by creativityhurts on 9/18/12, 9:06 PM

  I created a profile out of curiosity although the plain boostrap site didn't give me any confidence but I found it a bit irritating that the phone number was mandatory. I just hope it doesn't fall in the hands of just any recruiter.

• by MortenK on 9/18/12, 4:58 PM

  Fun idea, but it seems extremely sensitive to downswings in the demand for developers.

• by bulibuta on 9/18/12, 6:33 PM

  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?

• by debacle on 9/18/12, 4:48 PM

  Has anyone used this site to success?

• by Evbn on 9/19/12, 1:42 AM

  It's a commission refund, the Redfin of recruiting.