Developer Auction raises $2.7M for exactly what you’d think | Hacker News Reader

Developer Auction raises $2.7M for exactly what you’d think

venturebeat.com

55 pointsallangrant48 comments

I was a developer in the most recent auction and it was a great experience.

As a developer it appeared the only required field for employers was salary. Often equity, vacation days and perks were listed but sometimes they were listed as negotiable. All but one of the offers I received were for significant raises above my previous salary. And the offers included some from high profile companies.

Once you receive an offer you have the choice to either interview with the company or decline to interview. I actually chose to decline three of the six interview offers I received because one company looked like a horrible fit off the bat, one company offered a small raise but required moving to the bay area (which I was open to for the right circumstances but not that one) and one company offered me a salary below my current salary (Developer Auction allows you to set a minimum salary it would require for you to consider moving to another company, I actually listed my minimum as below my current salary to try to leave open the possibility of moving to an early stage company).

If you choose to interview with a company the process proceeds as it would normally and you may have still have to go through a rigorous hiring process. The purpose of the site is less to create an actual auction and more to shift the power in the hiring process toward the employee. It really helps you do a comprehensive job search with a lot of companies in a short amount of time. It solves the job search problem of accepting an offer and wondering if something else is out there that's a better fit. All in all it was a great way to look for new opportunities and I ended up accepting an offer from one of the companies I interviewed with.

Sounds like you had a great experience.

Thank you for sharing your story.

You mentioned you declined 3 of the 6 offers but did you end up accepting one?

Yup maybe I buried the lede a bit. I put that detail in the last sentence.

I ended up accepting an offer that I think is a better culture fit than my old position and a significant raise.

Co-founder of Work for Pie (the other company mentioned in the article) here. I will say I'm glad that these guys expanded from their original, pretty elitist degree and/or experience requirements.

There are companies that do it right--like Github and Etsy--and there are companies that do it wrong. The big problem is that doing it right probably takes more time. Supporting the local developer ecosystem, presenting at conferences and meetups, mentoring others, open sourcing projects, writing blogs that help others, etc. are all great recruiting strategies (and just darn nice things to do overall), but they all take a lot of time (and none are guaranteed to bring you new employees).

I think the fact that these guys are successful tells me that a fair number of companies are saying "my time is more valuable than $xx." I'm not sure how I feel about that. I completely understand it--especially when you're a part of a super-small team--but I still kinda wish it didn't have to be that way. And fwiw I'm not sure how well cultural fit is addressed by this platform, but maybe the companies figure all that out in interviews.

I'm biased, but I think giving developers the chance to discover the one company (among as many options as possible) that fits them best is the way to really improve recruiting. That forces companies to actually be worth a damn--not just have deep pockets--to recruit successfully.

..and now for the shameless plug. It's free to set up a company page on Work for Pie, and you can post up to two jobs for free too. Tell our thousands of developers how awesome you are: https://workforpie.com/companies/join/

Work for Pie sounds like a great company too, I had never heard of you before this thread. Best of luck to you.

A friendly warning to fellow developers. While Dev Auction is a great idea, there's no way to ensure that your current employer doesn't know you're on the site. I wasn't given the option of returning to my job after my employers found out i was on Dev Auction. Matt was pretty callous about it ultimately ignoring my emails.

[reposted from disqus comments]

From the T&C:

"You are expressly prohibited from accessing DEVAUCT through a virtual private network or by proxy;"

WTF?

a) unenforcable. b) breaks IronKey Secure Sessions. c) breaks compressing mobile browsers eg. Opera Mobile etc. d) don't tell me what I can and can't do with my network.

sounds like some boilerplate we weren't aware of. thanks for bringing this up! will check it out and probably remove it. seems totally irrelevant, and i agree with your comments.

I was aware that customers reading the ToS is a little white lie, but I thought at least the company would take the time!

It's just c.y.a. copypasta. https://www.google.com/search?q=You+are+expressly+prohibited...

I doubt any early stage startup spends meaningful time crafting their own T&Cs. And if they do, they should probably reconsider their priorities.

A job seems like the last thing I would want to leave up to be "sold to the highest bidder." From an employee's perspective there are so many other factors outside of compensation that are relevant to whether I would want to work somewhere. From an employer's perspective if you are hiring mercenaries willing to work for the highest bidder, what do you do when company X is willing to pay more than you can afford?

The bids aren't binding. You still interview and both parties have to say yes. The auction is simply for what your starting salary would be if the interview goes well.

On their website it says "No obligation to accept the highest offer — or any offer at all"

it's not about "highest bidder" - it's about efficiency and transparency.. in two weeks, developers have 5-20 detailed offers to pick from, and can then choose where to interview based on what companies look interesting, with all things considered. we're considering new names right now that make this clearer :)

Forgive me, I hadn't heard of the company before this article. The name suggests and the article flatly states that the developer is "sold to the highest bidder." If there is really nothing binding about the bids and the highest bidder doesn't necessarily end up with the candidate, is this a relatively standard recruiting website that puts an early emphasis on a position's salary?

If I call any recruiting agency in the Bay Area, I will be offered interviews with at least 3 companies, along with promises that I would be offered a salary of 20% above market. The interviews would be conducted in the recruiter's offices and the salary figures will quickly decline once actually speaking to a company representative.

I feel like I'm still not seeing the additional value that Developer Auction brings to the table. Am I missing something or are they just offering an air of exclusivity?

I found there to be two advantages:

1. I get contacted by tons of recruiters over linkedin, but I have no idea which of them actually have relationships with great companies. Lots of them make big promises and introduce you to terrible uninspiring companies. Through Developer Auction I got interviews at some really interesting companies.

2. You the developer get a cut of the recruiter fee if you are hired through developer auction.

Let me add one more thing. I once had the experience where I was working with a recruiter who made promises about introductions and ended up introducing me to just one company that was a bad technology fit over 2-3 weeks. While at the same time I was able to land myself multiple interviews just by talking with people. Some recruiters aren't very good at their jobs and you don't find that out until you waste time working with them.

Developer Auction requires the companies to actually offer what they say they will. If someone offers you 120k, that number won't go down after you interview on-campus.

What's crazy is that this reminds me of how slaves used to be sold. Round up a few folks who can do hard work, put them on a podium and then sell them to the highest bidder.

Not a perfect analogy by any stretch, although it is interesting.

That's ridiculous. It's a resemblance in name only. The format is actually a tremendous shift of power towards the employee and the developer gets a portion of the total recruitment fee.

And obviously no one is literally auctioned off, employees and employers both have a say in the matter.

Also what slaves got auctioned off to make six figures in loft offices of hip cities?

The name remains awful, but they seem committed to stick with it. For better or worse.

A key difference is that the slaves didn't have a choice about which bids to accepts, they just went to the highest bidder, nor did they keep the proceeds.

With this, they aren't really bids in the strictest sense, they're non-binding offers of an interview.

I was half expecting that some developer was auctioned off for a $2.7M signing bonus just like in the good old days.

Correct, and that is "exactly what [I would] think". So, title was wrong, ironically.

B) AirBnB for oil tankers

Is it just me or does this actually sound quite interesting?

One of these days someone is going to make a parody "X for Y" site that randomly generates similar such things.

  * AirBnB for oil tankers
  * Dropbox for cars
  * Uber for soft drinks
  * Exec for music
  * Github for food
  * Twitter for fashion

I think the startup world already does this well enough to negate any need for parody.

Github for food (recipes) seems like it would work pretty well, really.

https://www.google.com/search?q=github+for+recipes

The rest seem less useful...

Dropbox for cars makes no sense. Do you mean a garage?

Twitter for fashion - already exists! Just follow people who talk about fashion on twitter already.

Wasn't there a HN'er who ran a site called "Fork the Cookbook"? I seem to remember him posting in the Google Reader thread recently.

edit: here it is! http://forkthecookbook.com/

http://www.badstartupidea.com/

http://itsthisforthat.com/

I always wanted to build a Github for guitar tabs, where people could fork the tab for a song and improve it and contribute it back.

http://orteil.dashnet.org/gamegen

http://lab.sodaware.net/idea-head/

I thought the same! Seems the problem would be credibility though - I imagine nobody with an oil tanker is going to rely on a new startup to supply their docking with the costs involved in a belly full of oil!

Maybe you could start off small and make an AirBnB for fishing boats or something. I'm sure most fishermen would be pretty happy if they could get a small berth a bit out of town at half the price? I'm no fisherman though.

Well maybe Cargo ships would work better than oil tankers since they can carry a variety of things in the container (and since I think they take loads by container, the "container owner" can be the AirBnB-like host)

You could do it for cargo ships of all kinds. Something astounding like 35% of the Maersk fleet sits idle at any given time.

Great! I've always wanted to be treated like a consumer good sold on ebay. Are we going to have the accompanying site - CEOauction?

The FAQ says "Our primary focus is the SF Bay Area, LA and NYC. We accept great engineers from Seattle, Boston, Boulder/Denver, Chicago and Washington DC as well."

Does this mean that DeveloperAuction will only accept developers residing in these specific cities? What about non-US residents (e.g. Canada)?

> Does this mean that DeveloperAuction will only accept developers residing in these specific cities?

They probably only accept developers who want to work in one of those specific areas. Those are probably the only cities where they have connections with enough companies to get bids. The whole thing would be pointless if no one was bidding. I would imagine that if they are successful, they will expand to other areas.

I just signed up and am pretty dismayed by the "thanks" email I got. I honestly wish I didn't take the time to sign up for this

-------------------

Thanks so much for your application! We will thoroughly review it and if your application is approved, you'll be sent a second confirmation email 72 hours before an auction launches with an opt-in link to confirm your participation.

We've been very excited to receive thousands of applications to participate in each of our auctions, but unfortunately we can only let in a select pool of candidates. We will be judging applications based on:

1.) Location. We are primarily focused on the SF Bay Area, NYC, Boston, and LA though select Engineers from Austin, Denver, Seattle, and developers that are willing to relocate are also let onto the platform.

2.) Likelyhood to attract offers from employers. For example, Python and Rails Developers are much more in-demand among start-ups than .NET Programmers

3.) Education History & Open-source contributions. We favour Engineers from the likes of MIT, UC Berkeley and Stanford as well as Engineers who have notable GitHub accounts.

4.) Notable accomplishments & achievements. Make sure your profile is complete!

I like work for pie better. This just seems creepy.

I wonder if the auction includes benefits like vacation time, signing bonuses, parental leave, work hardware etc?

It is salary and stock options, that is all.

Its more than just base and stock - employers can also offer a bonus (sign-on, relocation, or end of year guarantee) and it does describe the benefits (vacation, health, etc) for each employer. The offer is as complex as the employer needs it to be in order to attract talent.

This is great! Curious to see how many HackerNews folks are registered at Developer Auction.

Would be nice if the site offered a valid SSL certificate. Maybe they should bid on a better sysadmin?

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