

Recruiting the Top 1 Percent (2007) - joeyespo
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html

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illumin8
Interesting article, but isn't $75,000 a year pretty much slave wages in
Manhattan? You could barely afford a small studio apartment for that much, and
most likely need to live outside of downtown and commute in every day.

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jonathanjaeger
You can EASILY live on $75K in a studio in Manhattan. What kind of lavish
lifestyle are you trying to live? You don't need a car in NYC.

Edit: Maybe starting salaries in NYC for tech startups are that high for
programmers, but other positions tend to be in the $35K-$50K range.

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seancoughlin
Second that. I lived for a year in Manhattan (East Village) while working on
my start-up - I had roommates, but I made well under 75k and was just fine.
Was still able to do all the things a 25 yr old guy wanted to do. The idea
that it takes $75k+ to make it work in Manhattan is a farce perpetuated by big
banks selling shitty jobs to naive grads and people who don't know how to
budget/ be thrifty on message boards.

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michaelpinto
But think about the long run: Roommates are great until you hit age 30 or so
and settle down and get married and maybe have kids (no pressure here Sean!).
At that point Manhattan becomes painful unless you are married into money. Now
you could move out to Brooklyn or your startup can avoid older employees
(which is illegal), but if you grow your company to over ten people you can
hit those issues pretty quickly. Also it's a spectrum -- Manhattan on $60 can
work while being in NYC on $25k is a nightmare.

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jonathanjaeger
Yup. But they were talking about starting salaries on the Fog Creek thing.
$75K right out of college for a young adult opens a lot of doors. But I
definitely agree that being 30 with a kid, rather than 22-24, would be a lot
harder on $75K.

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ajross
This probably works well for Fog Creek, who have a small crew and very
talented senior people (who, importantly, did _not_ get recuited out of
school). But I view this as problematic for larger companies. The core problem
of course is that students aren't very good programmers yet. They can hack and
solve problems, and have a handful of favorite technologies, but they won't
have the breadth they need to be really good at things for a few years yet.

The danger is that if you then build a culture where _everyone_ gets recruited
out of school, everyone is swimming in the same pool with equally narrow skill
sets and _no one_ develops the required breadth. So you get "architects" who
know their field really well but can barely write working code on a modern
system.

This works great for the true elite who will learn this stuff on their own, of
course. But even then recruiting from schools tends to incorrectly bias
decisions on things like grades, which correlate at best weakly with hacking
talent. You'll miss some of those targets who were slacking off in class
working on their own projects.

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tedunangst
Actually, some of the biggest of the big guns at Fog Creek did come straight
from school. More than one product was built exclusively by people who never
worked anywhere else. The whole point of the internship recruiting process is
to correct for the high grades only bias.

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iamleppert
I think Joel is giving his company a little too much credit.

Today's students, if they are really good, have much better opportunity than
to work at Fog Creek. They are thinking of companies like Amazon, Facebook,
Apple, Google, LinkedIn, etc. that are actually innovating and working on some
of the most interesting problems and applications. Not creating VNC "Remote
Assistance" clones and help desk software.

Fog Creek does create very good software. But game changing? Or well known?
Most people outside of software development wouldn't be able to name an actual
Fog Creek product.

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doktrin
I have to concur. Their primary claim to fame is Joel himself. I don't mean to
denigrate their products either - and a new grad could certainly do worse -
but there are more "meaningful" and challenging opportunities elsewhere (that
also happen to pay more).

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Shenglong
This is really insightful and a little ahead of its time, and a bunch of
companies have picked up this kind of tactic recently, and not just in the
software industry.

In September recruiting here at Western University, for example, a bunch of
firms host their info sessions at a club, where it's open bar. But students
are getting smarter here, and almost everyone looks for internships in third
year. Thus, the companies have adapted and several have started recruiting
second years. But more than that, firms like KPMG have started running summer
programs, where they fly promising students down to Hollywood for an all
expenses-paid vacation, to _introduce them_ to the firm.

Let's see who's the first to offer to pay for tuition.

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dripton
The US military has been offering ROTC scholarships that completely cover all
college costs (at least at cheaper schools) for a long time. Of course they
also include a multi-year commitment to a job that could include being shot
at.

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davemel37
If only every company developed sales funnels like this intern pipeline, there
would be many more happy customers in the world.

You could probably launch a business in almost every possible field in the
world, charge 50% more than everyone else, not fix a thing about how you do
business... except cloning a sales funnel like the one mentioned in this
article,(overwhelming your "qualified" prospects with a pleasantly surprising
"shock and awe" experience and you would crush the competition, and have
prospects lining up around the block begging you to take their money!

It might cost you an extra buck or two upfront, but it will pay for itself in
spades in the long run, and as the article points out, greatly minimize your
risk by qualifying your prospects before investing in them, and instead spend
the money on attracting the top 1% of customers!!!!

I guess the only real question is... This article is 5 years old, what's
taking you so long to realize your customers just want to feel special and
want an experience they can't resist sharing with everyone out there.

It truly amazes me that there is a guaranteed to work formula here, and yet so
many companies spend their marketing dollars trying to attract everbody or the
wrong-body instead of investing in the right people at the right time, and
making bigger margins, delivering better services and experiences to better
customers, who are very happy to pay premiums.

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seancoughlin
Most important part of the system the article describes: "We use the summer to
decide if we want them full-time. So we give them real work. Hard work."

Too many summer internships (see big law, big finance, etc) fail to give
employers the information they need to know if there's a fit, and, just as
importantly, fail to give top students the information that THEY need to know
if this is where they want to spend 70 hours a week for the next 1-3 years.

~~~
fatman
I agree, this smells a lot like late '00s legal recruiting - throw money,
parties, and interesting work at summer associates, giving them and the firm
almost no information about the actual long-term fit.

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bigbang
75K for top 1%? _Anecdotally_ an average(not top 1%) fresh grad in companies
like Microsoft,Google,FB or (insert any other big co) etc these days get about
80-120K(depending on your negotiation skills,competing offers,school where you
went to etc), not to mention ESPP every year,RSUs/options. If any average grad
at these companies can make so much, shouldn't top 1% be getting much more?

Also more than the offer, Fog Creek is not known to people who don't follow
tech news, read Joel's articles etc. But everyone knows and uses a (insert a
big co)'s product and that reputation definitely stands out.

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kaeluka
"They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job." That's
an unfortunate choice of words ;-)

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ChristianMarks
It is possible to live in Manhattan for $70K/year--with roommates. However you
should not have any financial shocks. You should not, just to name a personal
example, find yourself suddenly needing three dental implants at $2700 each,
not including the cost or surgery. You should avoid cabs and use public
transportation instead. And you should avoid taking advantage of any cultural
activity that isn't free.

One downside of taking lower paying jobs is that employers often decide that
you really are worth the lower salary. Programmers can end up doing system
administration and desktop work. Perhaps that's not too bad in moderation, but
it's very easy to get sucked into an on-call mode. Then again there may be
exceptional people who can program in their heads as if they had an office
with a door they can close, while some administrative assistant is nagging
about corrupted email.

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jiggy2011
Interestingly I do know one guy who's job is both development and IT support
roled into one.

He literally sits at a desk in an open plan office with a headset on while he
writes code.

At any given moment his headset beeps and he has to quickly switch from visual
studio into his ticket logging application.

I have no idea how it would be possible to write half decent software that
way.

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philwelch
The same way anyone gets work done--during the day, he does easy shit, and if
he has something hard to do, he does it at night and at home when he can't be
bothered.

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jiggy2011
When I saw the title of this article I assumed it was about how to recruit the
richest 1%

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mjwalshe
Joel I take it you mean the 1% that apply to you? Small companies (dont take
this persoanly) are neaver going to be the first point of call for the true
top 1%.

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mdkess
This is decidedly not true. While I wouldn't be so vain as to call myself the
top 1% of developers, I've gotten job offers from most major software
companies, but one of my criteria for where I accept a job is "do you have
fewer than 50 people?"

I want to write code all day, and I want to work on interesting and very hard
problems. While this exists at large companies, there are very few jobs at top
tier small companies where this doesn't exist.

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lurker14
That seems backwards. At a big company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft,
engineers code all day and industry-leading problems. At a small company,
there's a lot of setting up servers and customizing UI and evaluating 3rd-
party software packages.

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zeroonetwothree
There's plenty of that at large companies too.

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esrauch
Setting up a server in a back room in your office is a much different task
than setting up a server at Big Co. scale though, they basically aren't even
the same task at all.

