cliftonmckinney

fwiw I tend to look at it as a "thank you" and a no-strings "keep up the good work." Same way an actual tip works. That's clearly not the way everyone looks at it though.

Still, donating to an individual for their contributions, rather than to a project with the implied nudge that comes with a donation like that is, imo, the best approach.

So I think you have to look at why external recruiters are successful:

(The following refers to most, but certainly not all)

They're generally loathed by developers for a multitude of reasons, they charge ridiculous rates, they come back and poach their placements, and commit a plenty of other sins. Yet they're still out there, plugging away and jamming my LinkedIn feed...

The only reason they still manage success is because the alternatives have to be even worse. Despite the ridiculous environment we're in right now, there are still folks out there who are interested in leaving their current jobs for greener pastures. But Dice.com isn't getting it done for these folks, and even if it is their resumes are getting buried beneath piles of unqualified candidates and/or getting filtered out by terribly built filtering software or, even worse, HR folks who mistake Java for Javascript.

I think the way you disrupt the recruiting industry is by significantly improving the alternatives. That or providing a completely new alternative that's wildly better.

Word of mouth has always been the better alternative. It works like a charm until networks are exhausted. Maybe that's the place to start.

Possibly. The cache of Harvard/MIT definitely puts it in good shape to be the victor.

But, increasingly, and especially in technical fields, degrees are being supplanted by other talent or qualification indicators. Open source work is a great example. There are significant numbers of folks without CS degrees (or even degrees at all) who have found gainful employment as coders based on their open source work alone. Whether it will be accepted by the Fortune 500 crowd remains to be seen though, and certainly the "show me what you can do" idea doesn't really work for non-technical jobs.

At least in the short term offering a degree for these online courses might help.

I wonder if for the non-technical crowd who can't show what they've learned an online degree will be thought of in the same light as a traditional brick and mortar one. It isn't so far, but that will almost certainly change if that degree comes from some place like MIT or Harvard.

I agree with Danny here. In fact, part of the reason we built Work for Pie is to address this issue.

I also agree with some of the other comments - Github certainly isn't the end all be all. But, we're all trending away from traditional education, and software developers are on the leading edge of this trend. There may be a fairly standard path for "finance guy," but great developers can (and often do) come from any background. Resourceful developers can learn all they need for free via sources outside of a CS degree someplace.

So the question for a company seeking great developers becomes "how do I evaluate these non-traditional folks?" Resumes don't get there, but open source work can work to fill that gap. It's certainly not key for everyone - there are plenty of folks who stand on their own without a public repo in site. But, increasingly, it replaces more traditional indicators of talent like CS degrees.

Just my 2 cents, and I'm admittedly a bit biased.

We've had a similar project live for a little while now. It's opt-in only though.

http://www.workforpie.com/

Memphian here. Bootstrapping (mostly) a startup here in town and working through the funding struggles. I think pg alluded to a lot of this in a recent post:

Here, if you're trying to start a company--and especially a tech company--the general feedback is the quintessentially southern "Oh, that's really nice. So are you going to put it on "Shark Tank" or something?" In other words, the support is minimal from everyday citizens. This is not a town filled with early adopters. There's very little chance of meeting another founder at the local coffee house.

I think Memphis is trying to change this, and they're doing a fine job, but these things take time. There's Emerge Memphis, which right now is just a building. But that building is our little coffee house in the valley. Every time I walk in, without fail, I have an engaging conversation with someone who's completely interested in what I'm doing. It's on a smaller scale, but it's there.

And I think the key is that the building, and its support organization Launch Memphis, are themselves run like a startup. They try something and if it doesn't work out they scrap it and try something else. Minimal bureaucracy, and minimal bs.

And for what it's worth, I don't completely agree that squelchers make that much of a difference. What's missing are champions, all the way up the chain. Champions at the grassroots supporting education and entrepreneurship, champions who commit to funding home grown companies, and champions who support those companies with guidance and advice. I'll take one of those folks for every 100 squelchers. Luckily, Memphis has a few. Not enough though. Not yet.

Thanks for the feedback. I think we can do a better job of telling folks what makes up their score. The exact algorithm does change, but general guidelines about what percentage comes from code, what from Stack Overflow, etc., and maybe what weighs most heavily in the code equation would be a good thing. Working on some tweaks to the "about" section of the site this weekend, so we'll try to incorporate a few of these things.

FYI - Code is king. Most of the score comes from code contributions, and forks and watchers are much more important than followers. :)

Hey thanks! Would love your feedback on http://www.workforpie.com/. It's a resume of sorts, built specifically for software developers, and based primarily on open source contributions to Github and Bitbucket.

I'll leave it wide open, but would especially like to know what feature/features you think might make it useful to you. (survey completed, btw :) )

Less a matter of math and more of culture, IMO.

Large organizations are, for the most part, slow to change, and they tend to treat all "talent" in a similar way. They've been able to get away with this for technical talent for some time because the grass wasn't greener on the other side. Now, and for the foreseeable future, it will be.

Many large organizations (in my limited experience having worked for two non-tech focused Fortune 100s) value years experience over real experience and talent, have a stratified (and slow) system for promotions, are wary of young people making critical decisions, are not meritocracies, and are not really champions of the methodologies/technologies that most of the startup world has adopted for years. Each of these things are working against them in a major way.

In short, it's about more than the paycheck, and in the current environment that's especially true. Large corporations have to be willing to adapt and make the changes necessary to adapt to this fact, but their slow moving and old school cultures won't allow it. It's going to require a change from the ground up, and only the most progressive organizations will embrace this fact. But, then again, if they're progressive, then they're probably one of the few that don't need to worry about this issue.

I have to respectfully disagree with your point re: Mailchimp. They are a company that makes it easier to make email newsletters. Nothing knock your socks off amazing there. But that chimp and the subsequent marketing around it has played a major role in customer loyalty. They recently hit 1M customers and, to celebrate, they gave away plushies, hats, and t-shirts all with the mailchimp theme. And they gave them away quickly. Really says something about customer love and loyalty imo.

http://blog.mailchimp.com/one-meeeellion-users/

Also, they do give you the "non-cheeky" option, so there's that.

Completely agree re: Feedburner. :)

You might consider hitting up Angel List if you haven't done so already. If you're trying to raise for that first store - "proof of concept" before you go after more funds - it seems that might be a good avenue to raise those funds. Good luck to you!

Edit: it will probably help a lot that you've already got a portion committed, btw.

I think--potentially--it matters a lot more if you're not funded and/or if it helps you to get "discovered" by both users and folks who might fund you. We got covered in Mashable very early in our product evolution. It helped us a ton. We're a small startup in Memphis, TN and the coverage gave us some much-needed exposure and, at least partly, an air of legitimacy with VCs. Post-funding there are many more mechanisms for getting the word out about how awesome you are, but before that event happens there's nothing better than a little free advertising from a major tech blog.

And in the end the coverage has helped us become a better company. We have many many more users now than we did before the feature, and the exposure helped us gain quite a few "champion" users whose feedback has been invaluable to us as our product evolves.

Key thing for us was to make sure it was stated explicitly that we were pretty brand new. Huge props to Jolie O'Dell for working with us on that. We got a lot of new users from the article and for the most part they've been patient with us as we improve. And best of all we've started relationships with tech press that will hopefully help us out when we release super awesome feature x, y, and z.

My two cents...

Completely agree. My story is almost exactly the same. Learning enough to speak the language is hugely important and it's one of the reasons, I believe anyway, that my cofounder and I have such a great relationship. I'm mostly hustle--worrying about marketing and having the right relationships, but I can code a mockup in fairly short order when it's needed. I might consider re-naming it "if you're not a technical cofounder then learn to speak the language."

We're doing something with Githib called Work for Pie. It aggregates info from Githib, Stack Overflow, HN, Bitbucket and gives you a score based on activity and participation. Then you get a profile where you can highlight code, languages, etc. Kind of a portfolio for developers. We're still in private beta, but invites will come pretty pretty quickly after you sign up. www.workforpie.com

So let's say that the hit rate for follow-on investments for a TechStars company is somewhere close to 70% (that's fairly accurate). That doesn't necessarily represent success, but it's a start. Y Combinator is probably better than that. Now let's say that a "lesser" accelerator's hit rate is maybe half that. Still a 35% chance of some measure of success. Now maybe there's a 10% chance by going the pure bootstrap route, maybe less. So taking the money--and the guidance--in whatever form, makes you maybe three times more likely to be able to do what you love for a fairly extended period of time. Not to mention the fact that oftentimes the accelerator provides free or discounted services for being a cohort company. Good legal for a deep discount, legal office hours, design consults, dinners with VCs, etc.

I can't speak for what Oxygen is doing, or whether they're providing these services or not. But many accelerators that aren't called Y Combinator or TechStars are, and though there won't be as many successes to come out of those, there no doubt will be some. There may even be one or two who attend, learn a bit, fail, and then come back to apply at one of the big dogs later down the road.

Most job sites do this, including LinkedIn, Dice, Monster, etc., and they charge a lot for it. $1,000/month to start in the case of Dice and about half that for a limited search on LinkedIn. Makes sense from a recruiting standpoint in one sense--if the candidates are truly $100K+ material--but my suspicion in this case is that candidates are more likely folks who want to make $100K+, think there may be an easy way to do it, and are willing to pay for it.

I wrote the post above. I appreciate you thinking highly enough of it to re-post on HN.

Whether or not the job is getting done really remains to be seen. We're a little more than a month deep now and demo day is looming. What happens then and afterward will be the true judge of our success.

I will say this. There's been a lot of conversation on HN and elsewhere lately about accelerators that aren't called YC or TechStars and whether they will be as successful. Again, the answer to that question remains to be seen, but I can say with certainty that the benefit of programs like Seed Hatchery, Jumpstart Foundry in Nashville, and others is that the entire community is involved. There is a tremendous amount of pride in Memphis for the Seed Hatchery program, and our advisors and mentors have really taken all of the cohort companies under their proverbial wings and helped us along. I didn't expect that, to be honest, but I truly believe now that it is the great strength of our program here in Memphis.

No doubt YC is still the NY Giants. They've got access to amazing entrepreneurs and advisors and clearly attract the cream of the crop when it comes to talent, but we're okay with being the Green Bay Packers. There's so much pride in what we're doing here that we can still fill a stadium.

Seconded. The economics probably make sense even if 90% are "Cs." One or two winners per batch is enough given the relatively small investment for the relatively large stake. Keep in mind that these investments typically result in an initial valuation of somewhere around $300 - $500k. 6% of something that size for relatively low cost makes room for quite a few losers. My only advice is to make sure that there's a lot of focus on getting great advisors and mentors for the program. That piece is easily as important as the funding.

I was hoping to see webvan in the mix. Guess their logo belongs to amazon?