By the way, I think you should limit your field to people who would never work for Zynga, not people who currently work there.
In a sense though, this reminds me of professional sports free agency in a lot of ways. You have the teams/companies that are willing to overpay for names, and you have sort of the moneyball thing going on with groups that are looking for really good bang for their buck and trying to measure undervalued talent. One thing I wonder if this site could have the potential to do is help out the second group, although I don't think the current setup does that.
There is no correlation between the amount of dollars you spend on your education and how educated you are. There is a correlation between having rich parents that can pay for it and going to an expensive school. But I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth about how a great school automatically makes their alumni great. The schools themselves aren't going to do it because expensive fees is what they live on. People who spent that kind of money aren't either because they gain a lot of free and undeserved opportunities from the reputation the school has. But we, the smart techies should know better. George W Bush graduated from Yale for gods sake.
I would have made it Silicon Valley only: either you live there, or you'll move there. (I'm in New York, so it might seem unusual that I'm suggesting excluding my city, but you need to limit inflow and that's the best way to do it, because job markets are pretty local. You add cities once you have traction and are looking to scale.)
Then I would have partnered with a company like Kaggle in order to get access to people who can actually code. I've met a lot of mediocrities with prestigious resumes. One of the biggest problems with hiring is the number of people who have established a great connections <-> great jobs loop but don't know anything.
They focused on the right thing. The target audience isn't the startup that cares about getting the best people, just the ones with the best pedigrees. This would be perfect in finance.
Sure, an excellent engineer employed at $200K with a vast network is unlikely to send his resume to Craigslist ads, but they may use a simple way to find out whether they could get $300K and a $500K signing bonus.
Try to leave your distaste for their business model at the door.
Although if you're prepared to make the sweeping accusation that no-one at Zynga is morally righteous enough to work with you, I won't stop you. That reflects on you, not them.
Not hiring someone from Zynga does nothing to hurt the company, simply the individual who worked there. The idea that one should be discriminated based on past workplaces is a bizarre one to me.
The criteria in the story is what we used for our first auction, we love talented engineers that work at all companies not just the half dozen or so listed in the TechCrunch story.
We'd love your feedback on additional testing/vetting criteria that we could use. At the moment though, if you work at Gilt Group, Intuit, Etsy, Square Space, Microsoft, Amazon or any other number of "big brands" in one of the major cities we'll get you approved in one of our upcoming auctions (but only if you're serious about switching jobs).
If I were shopping for candidates on your site, I'd be pretty upset to be sold a candidate that is a liability due to contract violations (especially at a startup). It might be worth flagging for potential employers that a given company is known to force non-compete agreements on their employees.
Please aspire to a higher standard of discussion.