Thank you, your analysis is really compelling and matches what I've seen. It's good to have some realistic numbers about what Developer Auction is offering for talent. What really boggles me is that Developer Auction has an entirely separate hiring track for growing their own team. They don't trust their own vetting process, and instead put candidates through an entirely different screening process. I don't understand this yet.
Their offering to talented developers seems to be somewhat limited. Basically you sign up, spend a while writing out a huge profile (in addition to your resume and public work on github), then they just dump you into the laps of recruiters as part of their normal hiring pipeline. Hey, if I wanted to sit around doing 15 hours of live algorithm screening, I would have just called those companies myself...
This is probably okay for junior developers, but realistically junior developers just need to have a pulse to get hired (and maybe one or two sample projects). As for senior talent, there's few incentives to participate in these antics. Same antics, different names. I got a bunch of offers, but they require a great deal of effort to follow up on everyone and schedule a billion interviews and screens and other things that I am frankly exhausted by.
I would love something like a 1-hour guarantee: receive an initial offer to see if the range is what you have in mind, spend exactly one hour talking with a company before receiving an actual truly real sign-on-the-dotted-line offer. I am just frustrated about the marketing I think, I'll feel better in an hour.
> You probably got busted because you used getclicky.
I got busted because they found me bitbanging some urls. :) Btw, your self-improvement focus is interesting. I often tell people that the most immediately empowering tool they can pick up is programming. After that, there's other projects worth pursuing (both realistic and hypothetical): http://diyhpl.us/wiki/declaration anyway, might not be up your street..
Yeah, I was miffed and mystified by the whole process. Excited to participate but annoyed by the sheer opacity of the pipeline. You're experience went a little further than mine, I got no offers. Ah, what a blow to the ego. ;-)
Regarding the banging on URLs: I don't know if they are becoming more sensitive to that. I did a little digging around via various URLs but never got cautioned on it. You may have gotten a little deeper in to it, or you touched a raw nerve that I didn't stumble upon. :)
I was surprised by how few companies actually viewed my profile. They provide the list at the end of the auction and it was interesting to see how it matched up with my own. Philosophically you have to look at it through a cautionary lens:
How many companies do they have on their list?
How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now?
How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now and looking for the skills I have?
How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now and looking for the skills I have are hiring at the level I am at?
How many companies do they have on their list are hiring for a technical position right now and looking for the skills I have are hiring at the level I am at and making a realistic offer?
I also noted that DeveloperAuction uses Craigslist and LinkedIn to hire their own programmers. Obviously their pipeline is broken or not mature enough and they aren't eating their own dog food.
I sympathise on being dumped in to other companies' generic hiring pipelines once the auction is over. That is a huge disconnect between promises made and the cold, reality of finally getting to a real, sign on the dotted line offer.
Agreed on the Junior developers. There is a fallacy about the tech talent shortage. If you are young, naive, willing to be overworked and underpaid then $100K is a lot of money when you're straight out of college and the only two things you are worried about is whether you will ever have a girlfriend and how much longer can you defer your student loans for.
I think there's only a shortage of tech talent at the lower levels where the machine that has been created by SV and its ilk cannot feed it fast enough with warm, young bodies (that sounds wrong somehow, but you know what I mean.) But this is a discussion for another time and another thread.
The hiring process and pipeline is definitely broken. It is exhausting to go through each company, follow-up, schedule interviews, take time away from work. I am ramping up my “looking for work” efforts right now in anticipation that the start-up I am co-founder of runs out of runway before it can take off. “Dig your well before your thirsty.”
The code on github is never looked at. Not by the “technical recruiters,” not by the hiring managers, not by the engineers and so on. I have sat in an interview and been asked point blank, by the same group of people gathered at once, “do you still code?” “Can you write software?” “Have you ever worked on OpenSource?” and then been told at the end that they felt I “didn’t code enough on a weekly basis to make a significant contribution.” You stand there with your mouth agape at the sheer, unadulterated willful ignorance and lackadaisical interviewing attitude of people some days.
I co-authored slash maintained RGBDS for about 8 years until retiring from active development. During the golden years of GB/GBC/GG development it was the tool to use.
> You're experience went a little further than mine, I got no offers.
Friend of mine (more experience than me, less than you, well known on Hacker News) was in their first round and also got zero offers. Frankly, I think it might be literally random. I don't have enough data to prove this.
> I was surprised by how few companies actually viewed my profile. They provide the list at the end of the auction and it was interesting to see how it matched up with my own.
They didn't notify me about the list at the end, but they did show me a hidden page near the beginning which continued to be populated. I was also able to see about 200 other companies based on logos. I think not every company had logos.
> DeveloperAuction uses Craigslist and LinkedIn to hire their own
also angel.co
> It is exhausting to go through each company, follow-up, schedule interviews
hate this
> The code on github is never looked at.
hate this too; i wish someone would actually read my code for once.
> willful ignorance and lackadaisical interviewing attitude
more hate. The interview process is a terrible experience that I would never wish upon my closest friends or family. I would be absolutely ashamed of admitting I did this to other human beings. There needs to be dramatically more transparency upfront about salary (hell, let me negotiate in advance) and how long the hiring pipeline is. How the company treats people moving through their hiring pipeline is a big indicator for how the hell they treat employees. I want a place that treats me with dignity and respect, and if companies can't offer that, I'll stick with consulting, thanks.
> RGBDS
RGBDS hates me. Thank you for your efforts on RGBDS. It is probably the one tool I regularly use that causes me the most trouble (crashy). I am not sure anyone has run such a large project through it before.
re 10x: I filled out the profile more completely and then emailed one of the founders to say "I'll supply references if we both decide to move forward with this." They said they would be in touch. Not too worried about 10x. I am used to picking up freelance and consultant work and do my own marketing and sales, it would just be nice to have another channel of dealflow to smooth over the feast/famine times.
re No offers: I was wondering if I was to be the first on DeveloperAuction that would receive no offers. Glad to hear I am not the only one. Agreed on the randomness -- if the stars align just right -- and the opacity does not help. I was contacted by one of the founders of DeveloperAuction to ask if they could use my profile in their marketing, but when I pointed out that I was probably not going to receive any offers, should they really be holding up my profile as an example of what to do. I heard nothing back from them after that.
re List of companies: I got the list at the end. I took a screenshot and saved it off.
re Exhausting: I don't think it will ever change really. "This is how it has always been done" and whilst the system is utterly broken, there is a long chain of component people with only a few of those components willing to change.
re Github: "Github is the new resume" is a lot of bollocks. However, it means I can just direct people to the code rather than having to email it. Though I still hear "We don't know how to use github, can you just email me a .zip?" and the best one "What do you mean all of it? No, that's not right, you must have used someone else's code to base this off of" which usually dovetails in to "Oh, you only work on your own projects? Well that's not good, you really need to learn to work in a collaborative environment." You can do nothing but roll your eyes at statements like these.
Whilst I am not volunteering to patch RGBDS, I am surprised it is "crashy" for you. Like all bad customer service: "I am sorry to hear of your plight but there is fuck all I am willing to do to fix it." Or would you prefer I invoke the OpenSource mantra of "You've got the code, you could fix it yourself!" :)
RGBDS has quite a few quirks (it started as a hack because the GG tools sucked big time). I would guess you're probably pushing it to the limits on the Pokemon games. The tool was used to ship hundreds of games but probably not on the magnitude that you are stretching it to with those particular games.
Their offering to talented developers seems to be somewhat limited. Basically you sign up, spend a while writing out a huge profile (in addition to your resume and public work on github), then they just dump you into the laps of recruiters as part of their normal hiring pipeline. Hey, if I wanted to sit around doing 15 hours of live algorithm screening, I would have just called those companies myself...
This is probably okay for junior developers, but realistically junior developers just need to have a pulse to get hired (and maybe one or two sample projects). As for senior talent, there's few incentives to participate in these antics. Same antics, different names. I got a bunch of offers, but they require a great deal of effort to follow up on everyone and schedule a billion interviews and screens and other things that I am frankly exhausted by.
I would love something like a 1-hour guarantee: receive an initial offer to see if the range is what you have in mind, spend exactly one hour talking with a company before receiving an actual truly real sign-on-the-dotted-line offer. I am just frustrated about the marketing I think, I'll feel better in an hour.
> You probably got busted because you used getclicky.
I got busted because they found me bitbanging some urls. :) Btw, your self-improvement focus is interesting. I often tell people that the most immediately empowering tool they can pick up is programming. After that, there's other projects worth pursuing (both realistic and hypothetical): http://diyhpl.us/wiki/declaration anyway, might not be up your street..
... wtf? you use rgbds? There's only like 10 of us in existence. I use it here: https://github.com/kanzure/pokecrystal