I agree, it is not a hell of a lot. Certainly a drop in the bucket as compared to a developer's salary, even smaller compared to the employee's value to the company.
How many individuals would you interview before a successful hire? Let's say 20. That amounts to a $3,000 headhunting fee.
You can certainly make an argument for developers' time being worth more than $150/hr. Then again, the bottleneck isn't doing interviews, it's finding qualified people in the first place.
Then again, I know I'm not making $150/hr, even after you factor in benefits. (But what about opportunity cost? We can go down this rabbit hole too.)
Finally, at the end of the day, I'm not the one with the checkbook. I'd have to ask my boss. His first question will be "how do you know this will work? Have others had success before? What is your real cost of doing an interview?"
He gets people asking for money every day. So if I'm going to bug him about something - particularly if I'm going to try and chip away at our runway - then I have to have very strong guarantees that it will solve our business problem. And really, I'm not sure I'd be ready to throw my trust behind this concept.
So nothing you are suggesting is incorrect! I think it is an enterprising idea, modulo some of the comments in this thread. I'm offering, however, that for so many of the aforementioned reasons, for our particular company and the constraints I have, I would not pay money for this (since you "Ask HN'd") and there are other parts of the hiring process that are a bigger bottleneck than assessing fizzbuzz or someone's background.
How many individuals would you interview before a successful hire? Let's say 20. That amounts to a $3,000 headhunting fee.
You can certainly make an argument for developers' time being worth more than $150/hr. Then again, the bottleneck isn't doing interviews, it's finding qualified people in the first place.
Then again, I know I'm not making $150/hr, even after you factor in benefits. (But what about opportunity cost? We can go down this rabbit hole too.)
Finally, at the end of the day, I'm not the one with the checkbook. I'd have to ask my boss. His first question will be "how do you know this will work? Have others had success before? What is your real cost of doing an interview?"
He gets people asking for money every day. So if I'm going to bug him about something - particularly if I'm going to try and chip away at our runway - then I have to have very strong guarantees that it will solve our business problem. And really, I'm not sure I'd be ready to throw my trust behind this concept.
So nothing you are suggesting is incorrect! I think it is an enterprising idea, modulo some of the comments in this thread. I'm offering, however, that for so many of the aforementioned reasons, for our particular company and the constraints I have, I would not pay money for this (since you "Ask HN'd") and there are other parts of the hiring process that are a bigger bottleneck than assessing fizzbuzz or someone's background.