For starters, this doesn't even seem to fix the problem stated, "The top developers are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that". So you give a guy $3K pop if he would earn a salary of 100K... great, but that doesn't even address the differences in salary unless he continually changes jobs. I am also not convinced this service raises the average amount developers would make.

From the employers perspective, it's ridiculous to determine how much you'd pay someone without interviewing them first. People develop the longer they spend time at a company, and if you expect them to be worth your original offer in a few years, you are now forced to hire them for your original amount (by over paying for their current skill set) or just decline them an offer. Now if I'm not mistaken, that's encouraging employers to overpay for less productive talent... which is in direct contrast with the goal specified above.

This seems more inline with just increasing the overall salary for developers, and that's laudable, but you cannot build a developer job board claiming to just sell the best talent. When good talent does go on the market, it's generally pretty good at selling itself.

Now, from the employee point of view, all the trashy jobs are correctly marked, what will save a lot of his time. Also, he gets a small bonus in negotiation power.

If you are a great developer (say, you are better than 99% of them), just marking what jobs are not fit for you will reduce the time spent on getting a job by orders of magnitude. That's the difference between the job board being useless to being usefull. As a consequence, one can hope (not a certain thing) that great developers will flock into a system like this, so that would become the place to go to get great developers, and as a consequence all the great jobs go there.

I suspect it helps address the problem of getting product into the pipeline.

I see the challenge that the 3x guys and gals (not going to inflate that to 25x) don't have a 'job finding' problem or a 'pay' problem. And those are correlated strongly, if an engineer can easily find another job then that engineer and their employer know that they have to pay them enough to keep them around. So these folks don't need a job auction service.

What you can do though is find people who think they are worth a lot more than they are being paid. But they have been unsuccessful in finding another job. Rather than take that as market feedback, they search for other ways to reach out to people who can appreciate what they are worth. This auction site sounds like a really good idea to them.

If you're offering the service you want the people who are really good to use it, so that you can get good quality scores from your customers (employers) so how do you get those folks? You cut them in for a piece of the action.

That's my theory at least.

For consideration. Two counter examples--(1) A great engineer working on a shitty project is not worth much. (2) And a great project can be executed with competent engineers. People are only as "effective" as the problems they solve are potenially valuable.

Now imagine another variation:

"The top [founders] are 25 times more effective than the average developer, but their salaries don’t reflect that"

Is this more or less likely to be true? And does it have anything to do with engineering and or Job titles? or is this phenomena something else altogether?

That they might be more valuable on other projects may be relevant to what I need to pay to retain them, but isn't relevant to what I am willing to pay.

Consider a situtuation where you don't know the productivity of X and its subject to 25x variance, a project manager is unlikely to structure a project to allow for 25x variance as acceptable. He's eaither at risk of sandbagging or falling massively short. And so upsetting other parts of the business. So, he needs to have more like a 50% [edit: I like chuck's 3x also] plus or minus understanding of what he can deliver. So, its really hard to pay 25x when you are going to constrain his performance to 1.5x. Likewise, its hard to restructure your projects for 25x as the expected case, unless you have really good data. But, most of the data will be 1.5x ceiling (if he is maxing performance under the previous example). So, its still a leap of faith to restructure projects around 25x expected performance from 1.5x data (order of magnitude jump).

But, for a founder this is not so constrained. There it is a lot easlier to structure your work at your peak capacity. With equity, you will benefit from the performance, etc. But this is true wether or not you are an engineer or whatever else expertise. So, one theory might be that the top employees are the ones that allow the founders to do precisely that -- franchise players that allow strategy to be developed around a 10x or 25x performance envelope--but for the market to be efficient, two things need to happen. There needs to be reliable data of 25x performance, and there need to be jobs that can be structured around this expectation. Without upsetting the apple cart of exectution with the rest of the biz guys (marketing/bd/sales/ etc).

And bridging those gaps in the data is the hard part about talent search. And why people will pay a bit for it.

edits.

Yes... propagate the myth of 'the hard to find' developer by pretending that only the 'elite' exist by dint of their Alma Mater or current employer...

Meh.

==

Maybe its time to change that piece of copy to be slightly more inclusive.

Employers & education history are only rudimentary filters for the time being, and only part of our vetting process.

For those who haven't heard of either - essentially they allow candidates to apply to a broader "portfolio" of companies that Greylock or Bain represents. Internal recruiters then try to match the candidate skillset and interests with a company from the portfolio for a potential placement.

So why can't Developer Auction candidates go through a more rigorous selection process? I would assume it is not nearly as easy to scale. But certainly, as many others have echoed, their screening process is a far cry from something that will produce 25x candidates.

I applaud the effort and look forward to seeing this develop.

Bad recruiters go for churn: they try to fill positions regardless of fit or the candidate's long-term interests and capacity.

The site is creative, sophisticated, well built, and could easily charge some sort of monthly service fee akin to a dating site, but the notion that companies would willingly toss 15% of a highly paid employee's salary out of pure laziness boggles me.

The cash-back is just one more way we're trying to be different from everybody else in this space.

Employer & education are only a rudimentary filter for the time being - some of the best engineers I know are self-taught and work at companies you might not have heard of. It's a big challenge, and we'll get there eventually.

I'd love to get your ideas on how to filter through candidates and then communicate their value to prospective employers in a credible way.

Have fun with your Ivy League circle jerk.

That doesn't make it any less frustrating for those of us not graced with the big names on our resume. In the meantime however I've found places like Angel List is a good place to put your profile to find out about startups.

So, the logical question to ask is "What are you doing right now so that in 2 years you are graced with it."

I can't help but laugh at the idea of someone being auctioned off, though. Pretty sure they used to do this and you got the manacles with your purchase.

How invested is an employer going to be in a employee that he had to go into a bidding war for? I'm going to imagine a great deal. What happens if the individual just isn't a good fit for the role or the culture of the company?

They can then choose which offers are worth following-up with via phone or in-person interviews based on any number of factors (location, product/service, company stage, who the investors are, equity, salary, etc.).

Like you say, there's much more to a job than a salary but in an environment where the average SF Developer gets recruitment spam every 40-hours, we hope to provide a more efficient way of vetting & comparing opportunities.

One of the greatest finds I've made in recent years was a decent recruiter. This individual not only finds opportunities that I find interesting, but supported and handled the minutiae that is involved in the recruitment process. I don't have to worry about submitting resumes or negotiating meeting times for interviews, he does all those things for me. He knows my salary requirements and I only have to invest a small amount of time into negotiations.

There's obviously some benefit in using a website like this, as it opens up opportunities in other locations that I wouldn't be aware of, but as someone who is content staying in his current area, what other benefits would using the site give me?

Thanks.

We offer a cash-back on our fee (which your recruiter probably doesn't) and we'll present you to a much wider pool of vetted, venture-funded companies than a single recruiter will. And because it's a competitive bidding environment, the offers you get should be the same or higher than you would get through the other process.

And you're right, the real value lies in being offered a larger salary.

The company who really needs different incentives is the recruiter themselves. They can shotgun their database of candidates at their database of companies and hope something sticks, and waste a lot of candidate and company time in the process. There is no cost to them to make bad recommendations. (OK, eventually they lose the company's recruitment business, but I think that penalty is too tenuous).

So, make somebody pay 0.4% of the candidates salary for the interview, but make it the recruiting company. That will align everyone's incentives.

They should make a requirement that you are at the job for 3-6 months before you get the pay.

The phone number will not be disclosed to anybody without your permission. At the end of the auction, you get the select what offers you're interested in and which ones you're not. When you say "yes", we shoot out an intro email.

As a company how do you subscribe to such a feed? As a developer how do you create a profile, update a resume, checkout the companies?

Seems pretty successful to me!

Productivity compounds multiplicatively. Individual ability is certainly a factor, but not the only one. To be able to sustain 10x levels of contribution, you need to be using excellent tools that you know well, on a project that fits your skills and interests, in a position where you can have an impact (and those positions are coveted and usually allocated politically, not on merit) in addition to being a good programmer. I wish these conditions could be reliably obtained, but for most people, they can't.

That's why the 10-100x programmers aren't banking $1 million and up per year. Companies can't possibly know in advance whether a person is going to have all those other performance-altering variances in place, and they also know from experience that creating conditions in which 10x programmers can thrive is a political mess.