"How to Get a Job" would have been an acceptable title. I also would have accepted "Cloudera Shows Hiring Practices That (Probably) Don't Suck".

I'm encouraged to see that at least some companies have sane hiring practices, and Cloudera is effectively communicating "hey, HN reader, it maybe won't suck if you work here". Well played :)

I have worked with Mike Olson. One of the best people I've ever worked with. He's just remarkable. If you have the stuff, you should work at Cloudera.

Hmm.... I know it's just an example, when they talk about about not wanting to go through recruiters, they mention what they'd have to pay on top of an 80K salary... and go on to say that a developer would have to be "astonishingly good" for a 100K price tag. I checked, and this company is in palo alto. are these realistic figures for what cloudera expects to pay for top programming talent?

That is under-market for top talent, maybe they make up for it in options (if you're the gambling type.)

It's interesting that they give out stock vs. cash as an employee referral bonus. I've never seen companies do that before, I'm not sure why.

It's usually either a meaningless amount of cash ($250? Really? For a $100k/yr engineer? At that point just give a non-cash gift), or a substantial amounts of cash (approximately 25-50% of a contingency recruiter's fee).

Facebook gave options to employees for referrals early in their history. At some point we'll switch to cash at Cloudera as well.

What's the reason for shifting?

Most companies I've been at/seen have at least $5k referral bonuses. At one company I knew of one employee who had gotten $25k in one year: definitely nothing to balk at.

$250 sounds very low. I've generally seen $1000-2000.

I get the general gist of the article - Recruiters/Head Hunters are a drain on the industry, and their fees are ridiculous.

One thing the author should know is that recruiter commissions are highly negotiable. What started as "1/3rd of first years salary, paid on day 1 regardless of whether the employee works out or not" can easily be negotiated into "We'll pay you a flat rate of $10K after a 6 month probationary period where we determine if the employee is a good fit or not."

Recruiters do have a large database of resumes, but more often than not I suppose people are using LinkedIn to find jobs, so recruiters are becoming irrelevant. If you're having a hard time finding someone with the right experience though, a good recruiter can come in handy. It's just hard to find a recruiter that actually knows the industry and isn't a trained monkey that rattles off acronyms.

How are recruiters a drain on the industry? I've never seen a place that used recruiters that didn't have a direct path for candidates to get into the hiring process.

People here seem to be shocked, shocked at the fees recruiters charge employers. I presume, unfairly perhaps, that those people have never had to scale hiring. The fully loaded drag of an employee --- including their fully loaded cost and the lost productivity across the team to ramp them up and the risk-adjusted cost of lost productivity in the months leading up to you firing them --- that drag is huge. Recruiters are expensive, even in comparison to that cost, but they're not ridiculous; they're priced roughly where the on-paper value they bring to the process says they should be.

(We don't use recruiters, but that's not because of ideology).

Recruiters work when the most suitable candidates don't know who you are (or wouldn't consider applying for any jobs you might have)

Otherwise any value they might bring to the screening process is limited by their desire to send the number of possibly suitable candidates that maximises their chances of getting paid (which unless they really know their stuff or know they're a preferred supplier means lots).

Do I agree that recruiters are usually ineffective? Of course. But that doesn't necessarily make them a drain.

I really like the idea of LinkedIn and other forms of social media (and, honestly self-promotion) making recruiters less relevant, if not entirely irrelevant.

I can understand why they do it that way. But over time, I fear, people will busy themselves more with managing contacts and promoting themselves than with any deep technology work.

I mean you can see it today if you read blog comments. There is a growing share of people spending their day making flattering pseudo insightful comments on other people's blogs.

And using open source projects for self promotion is very damaging for those projects. The difficulty for many open source projects is that they need maintainers over many years even when the technology isn't the hype of the day any longer. Having self-promoters pass through a project until they got the job they want is a horrible idea.

Also, I'm not sure that it's a smart move on the part of cloudera to actively ask people to hit on their employees. Is that really the best use of their time?

If you're doing "deep technology work" in a field that's as relatively new as Hadoop, chances are your name will start to make it out there -- and that you'll start to become known to others in the community, including Cloudera staff, because you're bound to be on IRC, asking questions, submitting patches, going to conferences, etc etc etc. I agree that there are plenty of people who don't really know the technology, but who make a habit of commenting on others' blogs and so on, but those people are pretty easy to spot as soon as you start really talking to them about the technology. (Disclaimer: I work at Cloudera.)

This article is just more of a sign that its not what you know, but who you know that will at least get you in the front door. I really hope you don't have to get an employee referral to be considered for an interview.