Hounded By Recruiters, Coders Put Themselves Up For Auction

An anonymous reader writes "When Pete London posted a resume on LinkedIn in December 2009, the JavaScript specialist stumbled into a trap of sorts. Shortly after creating a profile he received a message from a recruiter at Google. Just days later, another from Mozilla. Facebook reached out the next month and over the course of the next two years, nearly every big name in tech – attempt to lure him to a new employer. He received 530 messages in all, or one every 40 hours ... the only problem? Pete London didn't exist."

Comments

how many of the jobs didn't exist as well?

[Joe_Dragon]

how many of the jobs didn't exist as well?

or are 3-4 recruiters all going after the same job??

Re:how many of the jobs didn't exist as well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Matt Mickiewicz here, co-founder of DeveloperAuction (which got mentioned in the Forbes article).

I've been at the receiving end of this "recruitment spam" more times than I can count... staffing agencies haven't changed in 30 years... by having VC-funded start-ups put the offer before the interview we're trying to change the status quo. If you have 4 years at Google and a Stanford Computer Science Degree you shouldn't have to deal with a lowly recruitment sourcer who thinks "Rails" is a form of transportation :)

First auction had $30m in job offers on 88 engineers, second auction generated $80m in job offers on 150 engineers. There's a huge need for something better in this space...

Re:how many of the jobs didn't exist as well?

[AK Marc]

My wife is a recruiter, and when I was in college, I took a job as a used car salesman. Both jobs are full of liars. I quit selling cars, as the management was ordering me to lie. Even if I could sell the car telling the truth, they'd rather I lie to do so. For recruiting, the game is about numbers. My wife is now an internal recruiter (hiring people for high-turnover customer service jobs), but her experience with recruitment companies is that they do more to get in the way than to fill positions, to make sure they get their pay. They don't just hand off three good leads, but they hand off one and only one lead and coach the lead to help them get the job, even if that coaching is to explicitly hide weaknesses that might affect performance.

I would consider both professions almost 100% filled with liars. The stereotype got there because it's true.

Re:how many of the jobs didn't exist as well?

[pavera]

So, these companies are really bidding an average of $350-$500k/yr for developers in these auctions?

And isn't your "4 years at google and a *Standford* CS degree" just the same arbitrary requirement as a recruiter that thinks "rails" is a form of transportation?

I have 15 years of software development experience, have run 2 startups (one as CEO, one as CTO), and been a team lead or senior engineer on multiple projects at both startups and established companies. I have extensive experience with C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, Perl, Javascript, SQL, and lots more... And, I'd be just as excluded by you because my CS degree is from the University of Utah, and I haven't worked at Google as I would be by the recruiter who's never written a line of code and doesn't know that someone with my background can learn Ruby and be proficient in a week or 2 at most.

I also went to sign up on DeveloperAuction, and was disappointed that you give so much weight/prominence to github projects. I have many side projects, but not of the public nature, and I chose not to pay someone to host my source code privately when I can do that just fine myself thank you. (What self respecting software developer doesn't have 4-5 servers in their basement to host/play with personal projects?)

Re:how many of the jobs didn't exist as well?

[NotSanguine]

It's a stereotype: Just like used-car salesmen, the majority of recruiters are helpful, knowledgeable and genuinely want to help..

I'll agree with the helpful part. Of course they want to help. That's how they make their living. As for knowledgeable? Not so much. In my 20+ year IT career, I've met exactly two (out of dozens) recruiters who actually had some sort of clue beyond keyword recognition. Many of the interviews arranged for me by recruiters were a complete waste of everyone's time since they didn't understand the job spec or my resume.

But that's not the real problem. The real problem is the *lying*. I've caught recruiters lying *to* me and I've caught recruiters lying *about* me.

On the whole, recruiters make things *more* difficult for those seeking jobs and waste an enormous amount of hiring managers' time. I suppose it's possible that I was just unlucky that the dozens of recruiters I've dealt with are the "bad apples," but that's not so likely.

Re:Click-whoring post. How could this get approved

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright isn't the issue. Quoting from copyrighted content is fair use.

Plagiarism, on the other hand, is trying to pass off someone else's work as your own.

In this case, the summary says "an anonymous reader writes..." when the actual author is not anonymous and not the submitter of the story.

Heck, at the very least put "J.J. Colao writes for Forbes..." That would be honest, but this is just shitty journalism.

Reminds me a contact from Google

[loufoque]

That reminds me a recent exchange I had with Google. Some guy from Google contacted me on linkedin saying Google was interested in my profile.
Since my profile is fairly atypical, I am a researcher, a technical consultant, a CEO of a tech start-up, an open-source enthusiast and member of several major standardization efforts, I was wondering what they had to offer.

I gave the guy my number and he called me. It was apparent that he hadn't even read my resume, and when I explained it he didn't seem to understand what I was saying. He actually expected me to resign from my job, freshen up bachelor's level computer science stuff and then come for an interview. He wouldn't even tell me how much they'd be able to pay me; just that "you know, Google has the best, and everyone there is quite satisfied with their salary".

If you're going to try hiring people randomly with keywords on linkedin, a good idea might be to check who you're pitching to.

Re:Reminds me a contact from Google

[phantomfive]

I've solved that problem by telling all recruiters that my minimum is $160k first thing. If I get it, great. If not, I'm happy where I am.

Re:Reminds me a contact from Google

[swillden]

Almost everything I had to do in the interviews involved stuff you're supposed to learn when studying Computer Science at a university that deserves its name, and I think that's a very good and reasonable thing. I've always been a fan of the "concepts, not implementations/products"-kind-of-education. I think that's especially important at Google - their infrastructure is so vast and powerful and unlike any other in the industry that the overwhelming majority of people who take a position there won't have seen anything even remotely like it in terms of scale, and they will probably find very little there that's overly "familiar" to them

This is very true. Pretty much everything in Google's tech stack is homegrown. Most of it because there is (or was) nothing out there that was capable of doing the job. Some of it because it doesn't even occur to Google engineers to look. Google doesn't sneer at technologies not invented at Google... Google doesn't even notice them. :-)

That's only part of the reason for the CS-heavy interview approach, though. I'm an interviewer at Google (though a relatively inexperienced one, at least in interviewing the Google way), and I'd say the real reason Google asks the sort of questions it does is because it's the only way the company has found to get a handle on what it really wants to find out about candidates: Problem-solving ability. Technical jobs at Google all require people who can think on their feet, who can quickly absorb the salient points of a problem, rapidly identify areas that need to be defined, then define, implement and analyze a solution. That ability could perhaps be tested with other sorts of problems, but CS provides a wealth of potential problems for discussion along with a well-defined common set of concepts and language which both interviewer and candidate are (or should be) intimately familiar with.

Some experienced candidates (like loufoque, apparently), find it insulting to be asked questions a kid straight out of school should be able to answer. They want the interviewer to give due deference to the value of their experience. The problem with that is that experience can be fudged, and it is simply not true that you can judge a candidate's real experience by asking about their previous work. I've met many who can talk the talk with the best of them, but when you start asking them to solve problems on the spot their weaknesses start to become very apparent. I do admit that some people just struggle with the on-the-spot nature, and might be able to devise great solutions given time to go off and think, but such people wouldn't do well in Google's fast-paced technical culture anyway.

But don't think this means Google doesn't value experience. It does, a lot, because of the judgment that comes with experience. But experience can easily be judged by reading the candidate's resume, so there's really no value in spending time in the interview trying to evaluate it.

So, the interview focuses on evaluating ability and cultural fit. CS theory is a useful tool for evaluating the former, and it's not unrelated to the latter. Assuming the candidate does well in the interview, experience becomes relevant later in determining compensation and placement (Google doesn't generally hire for specific positions; Google hires good people, then figures out where to put them).

One final caveat about Google's interviewing approach: It rejects a lot of good people, and everyone at Google knows it. It's broadly accepted among engineers at Google that virtually any one of us could be interviewed again and have maybe a 30% chance of being rejected. Maybe 50%.

This is decidedly sub-optimal.

The problem is that no one knows how to identify top talent accurately other than by hiring them and putting them to work for a few months. Doing exactly that is a big focus of Google's internship program -- it's one of the very best sources of good permanent hires -- but trial peri

Re:seriously? not this again

[pete6677]

Also, if your company wants to hire "top 5% talent" then you need to be a top 5% employer. Top talent does not want to piss away their career in the IT department of Bank of America, for instance. If you're trying to hire top talent but are an average company, then you are the equivalent of an old fat bald dude trying to date young supermodels. It ONLY works if there's a lot of money involved.

Re:Click-whoring post. How could this get approved

[reboot246]

For Pete's sake, people! It's not "cut and paste"; it's "copy and paste"!! The two operations are not the same thing.

You'd think a bunch of geeks would get it right.