
Boston Battle for Talent – Performable to Offer $12k Referral Bonus - dcancel
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/04/19/a-second-shot-heard-round-the-dev-community-performable-to-offer-12k-talent-referral/
======
netmau5
I know there are many great devs in the world, but sometimes I think these
bullet points are a little too narrow. Full stack from CSS to server admin? An
extrovert on social media? Also has time to keep up with 20 projects on
GitHub?

I know these people exist but most of them devote a significant share of their
time (work and free) to the craft to be able to say they qualify for these
points. Furthermore, they balance between these activities such that they are
learning new tech constantly only to be applying them to someone else's
project and then hyping it up on Twitter.

Given the rare combination of talent, passion, and generosity these people
engender, 12k is a joke. It's more than a joke, it's a disgrace. I'm paying
12k for a black belt, but I'm paying a million for the guy who trained from an
early age in a monastery and has a lifelong dedication to his art.

I don't know, I think all the superlatives I'm seeing in job posts recently is
making me a little nuts (to be fair, this one isn't the worst by a long shot).
How about "generalist experience in n-tier web apps, likes to learn new
things, and is active in the development community." Maybe employers think
we're all too vain for such a nonchalant statement to appeal to us.

~~~
et5000
+1 "generalist experience in n-tier web apps, likes to learn new things, and
is active in the development community".

We're a small (5) dev team at the moment and most of us fit your profile. My
big requirement is that you are scrappy and can complete a task without
requirement too much help from everyone else.

Let me know if that makes the requirements a bit clearer.

------
MrFoof
The place I worked at last year in Boston's Back Bay (finance) upped their
internal referral bonus from $5,000 to $10,000.

There's been a bit of a tug-of-war between financial companies and
Kendall/Central/Harvard Square for a while now. The difference between the two
camps is Cambridge is more open about it, while Boston (particularly finance)
is more hush-hush about it and still stays very defensive in salary
negotiations.

Large referrals aren't new to Cambridge though. I'm old enough to remember the
Honda S2000s and the Ferrari 355 Ars Digita offered employees for repeat
referrals.

------
cabose07
I like how the article says you can refer yourself and get the money, and the
author goes on to say, hey hit me up and ill refer you and we split the
money.... Really, why would I do that honestly; if I am qualified for the
position?

------
rglullis
Slightly off-topic, but not much: why don't smaller companies look into H1Bs?
Despite me running a job-search site and being reasonably informed about the
market, I can't do any dog-fooding. I can't apply for any of the listings
unless it is some really big company.

Quite often, the reason I'm given is something along the lines of "the company
is not big enough to bear the costs of sponsoring a H1B". I'm almost sure that
$12k would be enough to cover all legal expenses of going through the visa
sponsoring process, and it would benefit everyone in the battle for talent.

~~~
anamax
> I'm almost sure that $12k would be enough to cover all legal expenses of
> going through the visa sponsoring process, and it would benefit everyone in
> the battle for talent.

Money isn't the only cost associated with sponsoring an H1B - there's a time
component as well. Since they're trying to spend money to save time....

~~~
rglullis
You're right, but there is a "premium-processing fee", it costs about $1000.00
and it brings down the approval process time down to 2-4 weeks from up to 6
months.

~~~
anamax
I was unclear. I wasn't referring to the amount of time to get approval, but
the amount of time that they'll have to spend doing an H1-B. Yes, they can
hire someone to do (some of) that, but "now they have two problems".

That said, adding 2-4 weeks to the hire cycle is another cost.

------
bostonscott
When companies use recruiters, they will typically pay a fee equal to 15% to
25% of the employee's first year salary. I'm sure HubSpot uses recruiters, and
is used to paying $12k plus for top technical talent. The only difference here
is that they are allowing non-professional recruiters to collect a fee for
referring a candidate.

------
salemh
Is it relevant that third-party recruiting firm fee's are typically 20%,
upwards of 30% for "top talent" of the negotiated base salary? 25% is a norm
or more "hard science" mechanical / engineering (non CS), while 30% is more of
a norm towards confidential financial firms.

------
isfinite
"An individual who is active in github, quora, twitter and open source
projects."

call me old fashioned but what happened to a portfolio. ever since i saw john
resig's tweet about taking a gh log over a resume it seems every other job
coming out now wants you spending 95% participating in the community and the
other 5% working on your craft. how many uber talented engineers out there are
actually spending that much time doing all of this active participation and
still finding enough time to do their actual work. unless your job _is_
actively participating in the community i don't think its many that can juggle
all these requirements and be productive.

------
mrexpensive
How much do they pay? Why is it war for talent rather than auction for talent?
If someone wants to offer their developers $1 million/yr, I doubt they will
have trouble finding talent. They will probably get some free PR too. The
whole business of model of many tech companies is based upon manipulating
developers into working super-cheap. Due to their personalities, developers
are often pretty easy to manipulate.

~~~
et5000
My experience has always been that in fact it's an auction. Top engineers will
always have multiple offers and if you really want them you'll have to pay. Of
course, we all have limits based on our startup stage and funding and what's
the return that developer brings to your company.

However, many times is not about the money but about the environment and
challenges you can provide to smart people that makes a company more
attractive vs higher salary.

------
geekam
>>A “full-stack programmer” who has created non-trivial applications.

Pardon my ignorance but:

What is a full-stack programmer?

How does one try to get to the levels of a full-stack programmer?

What exactly is a a non-trivial application? Examples?

How does one get started on these non-trivial applications?

~~~
et5000
This is what I mean by a full-stack programmer.

[http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-
full-...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-full-stack-
part-i/461505383919)

At Performable, full-stack means being capable to build atop Hadoop, HBase,
Python/Tornado and HTML/SASS/CoffeeScript.

Of course, you don't have to be the best at either end of the spectrum, but
being able to visualize your feature through every layer would be great.

~~~
geekam
Thanks. That is a nice article.

------
zavulon
I'm sorry, but this is just stupid. They would be much better off working with
(good) recruiters. $12K is in the ballpark of what good recruiters charge
anyway...

~~~
et5000
We're doing both. But after working with three or more recruiters, I can't sit
around and wait for them to find the right candidates.

Besides, recruiters are like realtors, there's not much incentive in finding
the best candidate for you and their pay is usually even more than $12K for
experienced candidates FYI.

