Boston Battle for Talent – Performable to Offer $12k Referral Bonus | Hacker News Reader

Boston Battle for Talent – Performable to Offer $12k Referral Bonus

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I know there are many great devs in the world, but sometimes I think these bullet points are a little too narrow. Full stack from CSS to server admin? An extrovert on social media? Also has time to keep up with 20 projects on GitHub?

I know these people exist but most of them devote a significant share of their time (work and free) to the craft to be able to say they qualify for these points. Furthermore, they balance between these activities such that they are learning new tech constantly only to be applying them to someone else's project and then hyping it up on Twitter.

Given the rare combination of talent, passion, and generosity these people engender, 12k is a joke. It's more than a joke, it's a disgrace. I'm paying 12k for a black belt, but I'm paying a million for the guy who trained from an early age in a monastery and has a lifelong dedication to his art.

I don't know, I think all the superlatives I'm seeing in job posts recently is making me a little nuts (to be fair, this one isn't the worst by a long shot). How about "generalist experience in n-tier web apps, likes to learn new things, and is active in the development community." Maybe employers think we're all too vain for such a nonchalant statement to appeal to us.

+1 "generalist experience in n-tier web apps, likes to learn new things, and is active in the development community".

We're a small (5) dev team at the moment and most of us fit your profile. My big requirement is that you are scrappy and can complete a task without requirement too much help from everyone else.

Let me know if that makes the requirements a bit clearer.

The place I worked at last year in Boston's Back Bay (finance) upped their internal referral bonus from $5,000 to $10,000.

There's been a bit of a tug-of-war between financial companies and Kendall/Central/Harvard Square for a while now. The difference between the two camps is Cambridge is more open about it, while Boston (particularly finance) is more hush-hush about it and still stays very defensive in salary negotiations.

Large referrals aren't new to Cambridge though. I'm old enough to remember the Honda S2000s and the Ferrari 355 Ars Digita offered employees for repeat referrals.

I like how the article says you can refer yourself and get the money, and the author goes on to say, hey hit me up and ill refer you and we split the money.... Really, why would I do that honestly; if I am qualified for the position?

Slightly off-topic, but not much: why don't smaller companies look into H1Bs? Despite me running a job-search site and being reasonably informed about the market, I can't do any dog-fooding. I can't apply for any of the listings unless it is some really big company.

Quite often, the reason I'm given is something along the lines of "the company is not big enough to bear the costs of sponsoring a H1B". I'm almost sure that $12k would be enough to cover all legal expenses of going through the visa sponsoring process, and it would benefit everyone in the battle for talent.

> I'm almost sure that $12k would be enough to cover all legal expenses of going through the visa sponsoring process, and it would benefit everyone in the battle for talent.

Money isn't the only cost associated with sponsoring an H1B - there's a time component as well. Since they're trying to spend money to save time....

You're right, but there is a "premium-processing fee", it costs about $1000.00 and it brings down the approval process time down to 2-4 weeks from up to 6 months.

I was unclear. I wasn't referring to the amount of time to get approval, but the amount of time that they'll have to spend doing an H1-B. Yes, they can hire someone to do (some of) that, but "now they have two problems".

That said, adding 2-4 weeks to the hire cycle is another cost.

When companies use recruiters, they will typically pay a fee equal to 15% to 25% of the employee's first year salary. I'm sure HubSpot uses recruiters, and is used to paying $12k plus for top technical talent. The only difference here is that they are allowing non-professional recruiters to collect a fee for referring a candidate.

Is it relevant that third-party recruiting firm fee's are typically 20%, upwards of 30% for "top talent" of the negotiated base salary? 25% is a norm or more "hard science" mechanical / engineering (non CS), while 30% is more of a norm towards confidential financial firms.

"An individual who is active in github, quora, twitter and open source projects."

call me old fashioned but what happened to a portfolio. ever since i saw john resig's tweet about taking a gh log over a resume it seems every other job coming out now wants you spending 95% participating in the community and the other 5% working on your craft. how many uber talented engineers out there are actually spending that much time doing all of this active participation and still finding enough time to do their actual work. unless your job is actively participating in the community i don't think its many that can juggle all these requirements and be productive.

How much do they pay? Why is it war for talent rather than auction for talent? If someone wants to offer their developers $1 million/yr, I doubt they will have trouble finding talent. They will probably get some free PR too. The whole business of model of many tech companies is based upon manipulating developers into working super-cheap. Due to their personalities, developers are often pretty easy to manipulate.

My experience has always been that in fact it's an auction. Top engineers will always have multiple offers and if you really want them you'll have to pay. Of course, we all have limits based on our startup stage and funding and what's the return that developer brings to your company.

However, many times is not about the money but about the environment and challenges you can provide to smart people that makes a company more attractive vs higher salary.

>>A “full-stack programmer” who has created non-trivial applications.

Pardon my ignorance but:

What is a full-stack programmer?

How does one try to get to the levels of a full-stack programmer?

What exactly is a a non-trivial application? Examples?

How does one get started on these non-trivial applications?

I'm assuming they're looking for web developers - in this context full-stack means someone who's perfectly comfortable with all technologies involved in a web app, from front-end (CSS, JavaScript), to backend (Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.), to database work, and anything else that might come up (designing for scalability, working with EC2, etc.)

I thought full stack meant literally the full software stack, from OS-level, native apps, on up through web stuff.

Or is that "software generalist"?

This is what I mean by a full-stack programmer.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/the-full-...

At Performable, full-stack means being capable to build atop Hadoop, HBase, Python/Tornado and HTML/SASS/CoffeeScript.

Of course, you don't have to be the best at either end of the spectrum, but being able to visualize your feature through every layer would be great.

Thanks. That is a nice article.

I'm sorry, but this is just stupid. They would be much better off working with (good) recruiters. $12K is in the ballpark of what good recruiters charge anyway...

Why can't they do both? This doesn't cost them a cent unless they hire someone, and if it's the same price a recruiter would charge, they've nothing to lose by doing both.

We're doing both. But after working with three or more recruiters, I can't sit around and wait for them to find the right candidates.

Besides, recruiters are like realtors, there's not much incentive in finding the best candidate for you and their pay is usually even more than $12K for experienced candidates FYI.

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