

How to Get a Job at Cloudera - tlipcon
http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-get-a-job-at-cloudera/

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maqr
"How to Get a Job" would have been an acceptable title. I also would have
accepted "Cloudera Shows Hiring Practices That (Probably) Don't Suck".

I'm encouraged to see that at least some companies have sane hiring practices,
and Cloudera is effectively communicating "hey, HN reader, it maybe won't suck
if you work here". Well played :)

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sachinag
I have worked with Mike Olson. One of the best people I've ever worked with.
He's just remarkable. If you have the stuff, you should work at Cloudera.

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geebee
Hmm.... I know it's just an example, when they talk about about not wanting to
go through recruiters, they mention what they'd have to pay on top of an 80K
salary... and go on to say that a developer would have to be "astonishingly
good" for a 100K price tag. I checked, and this company is in palo alto. are
these realistic figures for what cloudera expects to pay for top programming
talent?

~~~
aaronblohowiak
That is under-market for top talent, maybe they make up for it in options (if
you're the gambling type.)

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rdl
It's interesting that they give out stock vs. cash as an employee referral
bonus. I've never seen companies do that before, I'm not sure why.

It's usually either a meaningless amount of cash ($250? Really? For a $100k/yr
engineer? At that point just give a non-cash gift), or a substantial amounts
of cash (approximately 25-50% of a contingency recruiter's fee).

~~~
jhammerb
Facebook gave options to employees for referrals early in their history. At
some point we'll switch to cash at Cloudera as well.

~~~
rdl
What's the reason for shifting?

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illumin8
I get the general gist of the article - Recruiters/Head Hunters are a drain on
the industry, and their fees are ridiculous.

One thing the author should know is that recruiter commissions are highly
negotiable. What started as "1/3rd of first years salary, paid on day 1
regardless of whether the employee works out or not" can easily be negotiated
into "We'll pay you a flat rate of $10K after a 6 month probationary period
where we determine if the employee is a good fit or not."

Recruiters do have a large database of resumes, but more often than not I
suppose people are using LinkedIn to find jobs, so recruiters are becoming
irrelevant. If you're having a hard time finding someone with the right
experience though, a good recruiter can come in handy. It's just hard to find
a recruiter that actually knows the industry and isn't a trained monkey that
rattles off acronyms.

~~~
tptacek
How are recruiters a drain on the industry? I've never seen a place that used
recruiters that didn't have a direct path for candidates to get into the
hiring process.

People here seem to be shocked, shocked at the fees recruiters charge
employers. I presume, unfairly perhaps, that those people have never had to
scale hiring. The fully loaded _drag_ of an employee --- including their fully
loaded cost and the lost productivity across the team to ramp them up and the
risk-adjusted cost of lost productivity in the months leading up to you firing
them --- that drag is _huge_. Recruiters are expensive, even in comparison to
that cost, but they're not ridiculous; they're priced roughly where the on-
paper value they bring to the process says they should be.

(We don't use recruiters, but that's not because of ideology).

~~~
notahacker
Recruiters work when the most suitable candidates don't know who you are (or
wouldn't consider applying for any jobs you might have)

Otherwise any value they might bring to the screening process is limited by
their desire to send the number of possibly suitable candidates that maximises
their chances of getting paid (which unless they really know their stuff or
know they're a preferred supplier means lots).

~~~
tptacek
Do I agree that recruiters are usually ineffective? Of course. But that
doesn't necessarily make them a drain.

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fauigerzigerk
I can understand why they do it that way. But over time, I fear, people will
busy themselves more with managing contacts and promoting themselves than with
any deep technology work.

I mean you can see it today if you read blog comments. There is a growing
share of people spending their day making flattering pseudo insightful
comments on other people's blogs.

And using open source projects for self promotion is very damaging for those
projects. The difficulty for many open source projects is that they need
maintainers over many years even when the technology isn't the hype of the day
any longer. Having self-promoters pass through a project until they got the
job they want is a horrible idea.

Also, I'm not sure that it's a smart move on the part of cloudera to actively
ask people to hit on their employees. Is that really the best use of their
time?

~~~
Littleme
If you're doing "deep technology work" in a field that's as relatively new as
Hadoop, chances are your name will start to make it out there -- and that
you'll start to become known to others in the community, including Cloudera
staff, because you're bound to be on IRC, asking questions, submitting
patches, going to conferences, etc etc etc. I agree that there are plenty of
people who don't really know the technology, but who make a habit of
commenting on others' blogs and so on, but those people are pretty easy to
spot as soon as you start really talking to them about the technology.
(Disclaimer: I work at Cloudera.)

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moomba
This article is just more of a sign that its not what you know, but who you
know that will at least get you in the front door. I really hope you don't
have to get an employee referral to be considered for an interview.

