

This Site Pays Developers When It Finds Them a Job - allangrant
http://mashable.com/2012/09/18/developer-auction/

======
NickLarsen
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.

~~~
dllthomas
As I understand it, it's the bidding that is meant to change the amount
developers are paid, not the bonus. I am not sure what problem the bonus was
meant to solve. I can speculate that they had a problem with too few
developers accepting the offers. If so, they might want to look at whether
underemployment is actually a problem amongst those they are allowing in - I
would guess "great in practice, not great on paper" is worth more and paid
less than "great on paper, not great in practice", and everyone they are
targeting is necessarily great on paper. Those who are both great in practice
and great on paper are probably also working on whatever they want to be
working on already.

~~~
001sky
_"The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer,
but their salaries don’t reflect that"_

For consideration. Two counter examples--(1) A great engineer working on a
shitty project is not worth much. (2) And a great project can be executed with
competent engineers. People are only as "effective" as the problems they solve
are potenially valuable.

Now imagine another variation:

 _"The top [founders] are 25 times more effective than the average developer,
but their salaries don’t reflect that"_

Is this more or less likely to be true? And does it have anything to do with
engineering and or Job titles? or is this phenomena something else altogether?

~~~
dllthomas
I'm not quite catching your point. If a coder is able to do 25x as much in the
same time, I am willing to pay him substantially more - I get things done
sooner and/or need fewer other coders. Most times, I won't be willing to pay
him all of the 25x more (even with perfect information), because there is more
risk putting all my eggs in the one basket. In some circumstances, where time
is especially critical, I may be willing to pay more than the 25x - Mythical
Man-Month and all that.

That they might be more valuable on other projects may be relevant to what I
_need_ to pay to retain them, but isn't relevant to what I am _willing_ to
pay.

~~~
001sky
Just trying to think through the issues at different levels of abstraction.
Not sure i have the answers. But just some thoughts.

Consider a situtuation where you don't know the productivity of X and its
subject to 25x variance, a project manager is unlikely to structure a project
to allow for 25x variance as acceptable. He's eaither at risk of sandbagging
or falling massively short. And so upsetting other parts of the business. So,
he needs to have more like a 50% [edit: I like chuck's 3x also] plus or minus
understanding of what he can _deliver_. So, its really hard to pay 25x when
you are going to constrain his performance to 1.5x. Likewise, its hard to
restructure your projects for 25x as the expected case, unless you have really
good data. But, most of the data will be 1.5x ceiling (if he is maxing
performance under the previous example). So, its still a leap of faith to
restructure projects around 25x expected performance from 1.5x data (order of
magnitude jump).

But, for a founder this is not so constrained. There it is a lot easlier to
structure your work at your peak capacity. With equity, you will benefit from
the performance, etc. But this is true wether or not you are an engineer or
whatever else expertise. So, one theory might be that the top employees are
the ones that allow the founders to do precisely that -- franchise players
that allow strategy to be developed around a 10x or 25x performance envelope--
but for the market to be efficient, two things need to happen. There needs to
be reliable data of 25x performance, and there need to be jobs that can be
structured around this expectation. Without upsetting the apple cart of
exectution with the rest of the biz guys (marketing/bd/sales/ etc).

And bridging those gaps in the data is the hard part about talent search. And
why people will pay a bit for it.

edits.

~~~
dllthomas
Yeah, asymmetric and unreliable information plays a huge roll, for sure. That
it plays out differently for founders vs. employees is an interesting
elaboration.

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armored_mammal
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...

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vanni
_"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.

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
We're actually accepting a broader base of applicants than our site suggests,
we're vetting every application manually, so if you've got some impressive
stuff to show to us (and potential employers), go ahead and register.

Employers & education history are only rudimentary filters for the time being,
and only part of our vetting process.

~~~
meaydinli
How long does the vetting process usually take? (My profile has been waiting
for approval for some time now and I haven't received an email saying I was
accepted or rejected.)

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Next auction is launching towards the end of September. If you send me an
email -- matt@sitename I'm happy to have a closer look at your profile.

------
asdfprou
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.

------
tocomment
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.

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Because they are stuck in their old ways. We're trying to shake things up.

------
alainbryden
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.

~~~
kolya3
If an employer is smart they'll calculate the hours wasted interviewing
candidates * avg hourly pay and likely realize that this cost is far greater
than the $15K fee they'd pay a recruiter. Not to mention the delays in your
projects as a result of your best engineers being distracted with interviewing
candidates.

~~~
lhc-
Even if your recruiter suggested some potentially strong candidate, you still
have to interview them to be sure they are a good fit and to be sure they
actually have the skills they claim. I'm not sure how this saves you time in
that respect.

------
obiefernandez
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?

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
I hope so!

The cash-back is just one more way we're trying to be different from everybody
else in this space.

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

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
We're also approving developers with notable GitHub accounts, Computer Science
grads from top Universities, etc. but it's not perfect.

Employer & education are only a rudimentary filter for the time being - some
of the best engineers I know are self-taught and work at companies you might
not have heard of. It's a big challenge, and we'll get there eventually.

I'd love to get your ideas on how to filter through candidates and then
communicate their value to prospective employers in a credible way.

~~~
dllthomas
The best way of assessing someone's value in this kind of work is to work with
them. Extracting that second hand, through recommendations and such, seems to
be substantially less reliable but perhaps there's some way to engineer around
that? I wonder what you'd get if 1) recommendations were public, and 2) they
were explicitly a statement that "I have worked with this person and they are
better than me at X".

~~~
im3w1l
Working directly with every candidate would be extremely time consuming.

~~~
dllthomas
Yes, that's obviously impractical. But there are people who have that
knowledge, having worked with the various candidates. If you can come up with
a reliable way of getting that information out of their heads and into your
database it would be hugely valuable. I recognize (and mentioned) that it's
not a trivial problem.

------
michaelochurch
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.

------
rbellio
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?

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
It's not a traditional auction in the sense that "highest bidder wins". The
goal is to present each software engineer with 5-10 opportunities at cool
companies, with numbers attached to them.

They can then choose which offers are worth following-up with via phone or in-
person interviews based on any number of factors (location, product/service,
company stage, who the investors are, equity, salary, etc.).

Like you say, there's much more to a job than a salary but in an environment
where the average SF Developer gets recruitment spam every 40-hours, we hope
to provide a more efficient way of vetting & comparing opportunities.

~~~
rbellio
Thanks for clearing this up for me. I do appreciate the response. Hopefully
you can clear one other troubling thought up for me: How is this recruitment
tool going to avoid falling into the same recruitment spam of sites like Dice
et. al.?

One of the greatest finds I've made in recent years was a decent recruiter.
This individual not only finds opportunities that I find interesting, but
supported and handled the minutiae that is involved in the recruitment
process. I don't have to worry about submitting resumes or negotiating meeting
times for interviews, he does all those things for me. He knows my salary
requirements and I only have to invest a small amount of time into
negotiations.

There's obviously some benefit in using a website like this, as it opens up
opportunities in other locations that I wouldn't be aware of, but as someone
who is content staying in his current area, what other benefits would using
the site give me?

Thanks.

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Good question -- we're basically trying to fulfill the role of your recruiter,
but at-scale. Auctions only last 14 days, so the turn around is really quick.
After that, your profile is yanked from the site. We're only approving
candidates who intend to switch jobs in the near future.

We offer a cash-back on our fee (which your recruiter probably doesn't) and
we'll present you to a much wider pool of vetted, venture-funded companies
than a single recruiter will. And because it's a competitive bidding
environment, the offers you get should be the same or higher than you would
get through the other process.

------
Jabbles
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%).

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Yeah, it's not massive, but a few grand is nothing to sneeze at either. We're
just trying to think differently, and act differently, from everybody else in
the space.

And you're right, the real value lies in being offered a larger salary.

------
bduerst
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.

~~~
biot
The incentive? Having integrity perhaps? Besides, it's not even financially
worthwhile to job hop just to get a bonus. The bonus works out to be less than
eight days of salary. If you're really a top developer, you're not going to
tarnish your reputation for such a paltry sum.

~~~
asdfprou
At least from what I have seen, the Valley is much friendlier when it comes to
job-hopping than most other markets. Maybe changing jobs every year is a
little extreme, but certainly every 2-3 years is not out of the question.

~~~
biot
You're talking about something different. The comment I replied to asked what
the incentive was to prevent the employee leaving soon after starting the job,
such that implementing a policy of only paying out the bonus after 3 - 6
months would curtail such an issue.

------
NonEUCitizen
Perhaps they should pay for time spent on interviewing?

~~~
learc83
For multi-day interviews, they should definitely pay. With the current job
market, I'm surprised more companies don't.

~~~
NonEUCitizen
There are 52 weeks in a year -- minus 2 weeks vacation (USA) and 1 week
holidays, yields 49 weeks. 49 * 5 days = 245 days. So if you take one day off
to interview, that's 0.4% of your annual pay. So DA should ask the companies
to pay the candidate 0.4% of their bid to bring the candidate in for an
interview. In the current system, making a bid doesn't mean the company has
skin in the game (since they may not make an offer), but it costs the
candidate a lot to take a day off.

~~~
pdx
I like where you're going, but let me tweak it.

The company who really needs different incentives is the recruiter themselves.
They can shotgun their database of candidates at their database of companies
and hope something sticks, and waste a lot of candidate and company time in
the process. There is no cost to them to make bad recommendations. (OK,
eventually they lose the company's recruitment business, but I think that
penalty is too tenuous).

So, make somebody pay 0.4% of the candidates salary for the interview, but
make it the recruiting company. That will align everyone's incentives.

------
creativityhurts
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.

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Thanks.

The phone number will not be disclosed to anybody without your permission. At
the end of the auction, you get the select what offers you're interested in
and which ones you're not. When you say "yes", we shoot out an intro email.

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

------
bulibuta
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?

~~~
asdfprou
You mean www.developerauction.com?

------
debacle
Has anyone used this site to success?

~~~
timdorr
DA was featured a couple weeks ago on TC:
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/quora-airbnb-others-
made-30...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/quora-airbnb-others-made-30m-in-
job-offers-to-engineers-in-first-2-weeks-of-developerauction/)

Seems pretty successful to me!

~~~
asdfprou
I like that they have the ability for one employer to ask a question and have
that question answered in public for all other auction-goers to see. Seems
like they have put a lot of thought into the website design.

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
It's essentially a crowdsourced interview, and a way for employers to engage
with candidates while remaining anonymous, before they submit their offer.

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

