
Work for Pie is Shutting Down - piqufoh
http://blog.workforpie.com/2013/08/02/work-for-pie-is-shutting-down/
======
kintamanimatt
Yet another company I've only heard of because they're shutting down. This
seems to be a recurring theme on HN and I think such companies should be a
kind of cautionary tale to the rest of us. If people are only hearing of you
because you're closing up shop, there was something wrong with your marketing
plan. At least on HN, nobody was talking about them with sufficient
frequency.[-1] [0]

In my humble opinion, this shouldn't be the last month for them. They should
correct what's deficient in their marketing and business plans, and keep the
show going even as a side project until it can sustain them and their
families. To quote Tim Gunn: make it work.

Second point, it's really hard to get to their main site from their blog.
There's no clear link and this is going to almost certainly profoundly
negatively impact conversions. Visitors are lazy; don't make them work.

Lastly, to the founders of Work For Pie, I'm terribly sorry you're closing
down and I truly wish you well. If this is Work For Pie's final month, I
genuinely hope you go on to found new, vastly more successful businesses in
the future and can look back on this as an amazing learning experience.

[-1] [http://i.imgur.com/UDPouuM.png](http://i.imgur.com/UDPouuM.png)

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/UHaEGRu.png](http://i.imgur.com/UHaEGRu.png)

~~~
dubcanada
You can click the logo, but in this case that doesn't make sense as the
"header" is much larger then the logo. But it's still standard practice for a
logo to get you to the homepage.

~~~
bentcorner
I didn't realize the logo until I went back and looked for a link (the first
time I gave up after mousing over a few of the links above the blog header).

The logo looks like a header for the sidebar; having never been to "Work for
Pie" I'm not familiar with their logo.

It would help if:

\- their logo on the sidebar had a solid background

\- their logo was on the tab for the blog instead of the generic WP logo (I
don't know how hard this is to do, but frankly this looks sloppy)

\- they had a small "Work for Pie" \+ logo link above the blog header

------
mark242
(This comment is going to have a lot of HR and Marketing bullshit terms-- I'd
like to apologize for these in advance.)

It's rarely a good thing to read about a company closing its doors, and I hope
that you guys have more luck in your next venture, whatever it may be.

I suspect that you had a really, really tough time getting companies to pay
you for placement (that is where you make your revenue, right? I don't see any
other way). You've created some strange hybrid of, essentially, a gamified
resume', and while the little graph is a neat trick, you probably figured out
pretty quickly that companies with the money to throw at recruiting services
simply do not care one whit about how many internet points a potential new
hire has on some random site.

As a hiring manager, I can tell you what I'm interested in when seeing a
potential new hire: a well-written, concise resume, links to code samples
(whether on Github or elsewhere), and how well they're going to work with the
rest of the team. Work for Pie appears to take the long route around coming up
with an executive summary (of sorts) for just one of these three attributes.
It seems highly impersonal and I'm surprised that you got any developers to
sign up for it even with the promise of free internet points.

Also, I'm sure you found out the hard way about how intensely competitive the
whole third-party-recruiting game is. It is not a market for the weak of
stomach; I cannot tell you the number of phone calls I get as soon as I post
an opening, and nearly all of these calls are extremely, extremely aggressive.
Here's the average phone call: "Hi Mr. M242, I'm Recruiter from ColdCallCorp,
and I saw you had an opening for a developer, I have a person coming out of
JustShutteredStartup and she did X, Y, and Z, which I noticed on your listing,
she has N years of experience and is extremely excited about coming to work
for you, when can I tell her you're free to interview?" (This is without me
saying any words past "Hello".)

~~~
hmsimha
> As a hiring manager, I can tell you what I'm interested in when seeing a
> potential new hire: a well-written, concise resume, links to code samples
> (whether on Github or elsewhere), and how well they're going to work with
> the rest of the team. Work for Pie appears to take the long route around
> coming up with an executive summary (of sorts) for just one of these three
> attributes. It seems highly impersonal and I'm surprised that you got any
> developers to sign up for it even with the promise of free internet points.

Work For Pie actually compiles a score based on StackOverflow scores and
Hacker News karma, in addition to Github and Bitbucket contributions. I would
argue that actually touches on two of those points mentioned, because you
could get a sense of a candidates coding ability, in addition to their
personality from their HN and SO accounts (to be fair, assessing a candidate's
personality and cultural fit is really outside the scope of a third-party
recruiting platform). As a developer who was signed up for WFP and logged in
regularly to see how my score was coming along, I thought it was a fun,
arguably gamified approach to measuring my growth as a developer. It doesn't
cost anything (for developers) so I'm surprised that you're surprised
developers would sign up for it. Logging in for my first time was actually a
huge wakeup call because I realized how disassociated from the development
community I was, as well as how little I had to show besides a CS degree. I
didn't ultimately get a job through WFP (possibly because I stubbornly chose
to move to Portland, and it appears that most of their connections are in
Memphis or SV). But I think their WFP 'score' is a useful and fun metric for
budding developers such as myself (and theoretically it should be for hiring
companies as well)

------
pkfrank
>To both our users and our clients, we’d like to recommend that you give
Coderwall and Pitchbox a try if you haven’t already done so. Despite being a
competitor, Matthew Deiters (founder of both companies) has always been
supportive of and open to us, and we consider him a friend and, more
importantly, someone who shares a similar vision. Coderwall/Pitchbox has a
high degree of respect for developers and puts them first, and they also
happen to be building something that’s pretty close to what we’d hoped Work
for Pie might become.

This is a very classy nod on the way out.

------
jack-r-abbit
I've never understood the idea of ranking a developer based on activity on
Github, Bitbucket, HN etc. I've been writing code for more than 15 years and
don't have a single line of code on an public repo. "Why?", you may ask.
Because everything I have done (besides a couple side projects that were never
meant for release) has been paid work for an employer/client. Nothing to put
in a public repo. And my activity on HN or other boards really has nothing to
do with my coding. I'm sure I would score very poorly if I signed up for
something like this. So I never would. And that now limits your dev pool to
only a certain type of dev... and not necessarily the best ones. So knowing
that and looking at it from that angle, if I was looking to hire a dev, I also
would not use a site like this. "Why?", you may ask. Because I'd be looking
for good devs... not just good devs that happen to release a lot of public
code and/or post a lot on HN.

~~~
bad_user
Nor will you understand it if you keep being a developer that doesn't
contribute anything. The idea that you only did paid work for an employer
being the reason for why you have no activity on GitHub is a false dichotomy.

Seriously, you never wrote any helpers, or maybe a library that you wanted to
reuse across projects?

And in regards to IP, any sane employer would agree that open-sourcing pieces
of code that aren't central to the business logic is OK, since if others find
it useful, you'll get bug fixes for free.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
> _a developer that doesn 't contribute anything_

Excuse me? That is rather rude.

~~~
Greenisus
He means that you don't contribute anything to open source, which is what you
said. I don't think the guy was trying to be rude.

------
dictum
Sorry for the news.

Maybe I'm just not into competition, but I don't feel easy with a badge with a
number that's supposed to tell much I've contributed to git repos, HN threads
and StackOverflow questions, just like I'm uninterested and slightly annoyed
by Klout.

>Work for Pie isn’t generating enough revenue to allow us to continue working
on it full time.

>We failed to secure additional funding to support the company as we built the
business.

I looked around and couldn't find anywhere to, well, put any money. You
weren't charging any money. For instance, there was no way for a company to
pay for privileged access to developers using Work for Pie.

~~~
cliftonmckinney
We made money from matching our job seeking users to companies. We contracted
with companies to do this. If you go to the hiring? link at the top you can
see some of that. Most of our sales outreach was direct though.

------
jgs1
This is unfortunate but hopefully their experience helps them as they get back
into the working world.

In the past 3 months, I signed up and canceled an account. The issue I have
with internet points is that whatever the algorithm is that powers the score
is ultimately arbitrary. A few days ago I noticed my score dropped by ~10
points and I couldn't figure out why so I canceled. Similar situations have
happened on StackOverflow in the past.

This used to upset me until I realized that there's no counter stocked full of
silly putty and plastic frogs where I could redeem my points. In hiring
instances, I definitely see value in SO and Github because they can expose you
to how someone communicates (in both English and code). But I imagine it's a
hard sell to market an aggregated score from unaccredited sources.

------
biot
What was the thinking behind the name? The only association I can make here is
a cardboard sign "Will Work for Food".

~~~
eterpstra
The original intent of the company was to link startup founders with technical
co-founders. In essence, developers could work for 'a slice of the pie'. This
model did not get much traction, so they pivoted into a more traditional job
matching / recruitment service.

------
danso
The metrics used to rank the coders seem a little odd. The top leaders, who
have cumulative scores of 95, have decent github participation (however that's
measured) scores in the 80-range, but have Hacker News scores of 97...which
means HN karma was weighted considerably more than repo participation.

It's a nice looking site but I think ranking coders will require more granular
metrics...and in the end, the coders likely to dominate such metrics will
already have no problem finding suitors.

~~~
cliftonmckinney
HN contributions only amounted to about 5% of the total score. Mostly it was
Github contributions (measured by number of forks and watchers and a couple
other things) and Stack Overflow participation.

------
jrochkind1
what the heck is/was Work For Pie? I can't figure it out from the blog. Or is
that what it was, just a blog?

------
cliftonmckinney
Cofounder here. Since you guys are speculating, I thought I'd jump in and try
to answer a few questions and help where I can.

tl:dr it's a really hard business because matching developers to companies who
are willing to pay for your services to find those developers is extremely
hard work. Mostly the companies have some issue that makes it hard for them to
find people, which is why they hire you in the first place.

First off: mark242, you're right about some of what you say, but not all of
it. The truth is that the "talent war" isn't really as bad as a lot of people
make it out to be. The real problem is that there's a huge disconnect between
what developers want and what companies want. To give one example, a lot of
our really highly talented developers really only want to work remotely. For
some, there are family obligations, and for others it's just preference. But
most SV startups don't really want to hire remote workers. And the ones that
do, well they honestly don't have nearly as hard a time finding people who
want to work for them. And as such you're right, they don't really care to pay
any company 20% of first year salary to do their recruiting for them.

What we'd hoped to accomplish, and fell short on in the end, was a way for
developers with non-traditional backgrounds find gainful employment. In
Silicon Valley, where I suspect you are, this really isn't that big of a deal.
Every company out there is looking at Github before they're looking at, for
instance, college degrees. But here in the middle of the country, this is
still a huge problem. If I'm a developer without a CS degree or significant
experience, it doesn't matter that I've been writing code since I was 8 years
old. So, Open Source contributions were the first logical place for us to look
for a more objective measure of ability. The system was far from perfect, but
it was a start.

So who's paying 20%? Non-sexy companies, or large companies that can't really
handle all of the recruiting work and would rather pay money than spend time,
and companies that have something they're up against--maybe a bad location, or
a specific need, or whatever. This isn't the case always, but it is often
enough to make it a damn hard business.

And who among developers are looking for jobs? Folks with specific needs, or
who are in weird locations, or who have something working against them, like a
lack of experience or a desire to switch technologies or whatever.

So those two things don't link up too well. Developer Auction and other
similar sites will probably figure that out soon enough. So if you're going to
do recruiting for a company you're going to have to reach out to developers
who fit, unsolicited, because those are the ones who match the positions
you're hiring for. Only rarely will your existing pool of mostly misfits match
up with your existing pool of misfit companies. And keep in mind I don't mean
misfit in a derogatory fashion. I mean, literally, that they don't fit very
well.

So that's what's hard, and we just didn't have enough time or traction for
those two things to match up often enough for the business to be sustainable.
Some others, like the ones I recommended, probably do, though I do wonder how
long they'll keep it up. Some, I'm sure, will be making the same announcement
we did very soon.

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Hey Clifton,

Matt here, co-founder of DeveloperAuction.

Great insights in your comments above.

I generally agree that the "Talent War" is largely self-imposed: unwillingness
to interview candidates outside of a 25 mile radius or relocate Engineers,
being slow, disorganized or indecisive in the hiring process, trying to get
Engineers to take massive paycuts from what they are earning at
LinkedIn/SalesForce/Google/VmWare/Facebook, or simply requiring Engineers to
work 80-hour weeks...

Some of the biggest & most successful companies also achieve major talent
lock-in by compensating people really well, making it difficult for cash-
strapped seed stage start-ups to compete with a lower budget.

Interestingly enough, RE: GitHub, we've seen zero positive correlation that
having a GitHub account increases the number of interview requests that
Engineers get on our marketplace when we analyzed our data.

~~~
dpritchett
Github helps technical managers get a feel for an unknown candidate. This
helps when capturing arbitrage opportunities in the talent market. Your
business is built on selling known candidates at a premium, or at least using
the social signals of big name degrees and employers. Someone like daeken has
enough of a track record to not even need those.

------
fellars
between workforpie and path.to [0] shutting down within 2 weeks of eachother,
there is something to be said about new attempts to try to crack the old
recruiting regime turning out to be more difficult than one might think.

[0] [http://blog.path.to/post/six-lessons-that-might-have-
saved-o...](http://blog.path.to/post/six-lessons-that-might-have-saved-our-
business-had-we)

------
piqufoh
Big shame - had had a few chats with them, seemed like honest decent guys.

------
pawrvx
LinkedIn is the future of this space, available already today.

------
AznHisoka
Where is the obligatory link to download all my data in CSV, JSON and text
format?

~~~
freework
wfp doesn't store any user data

