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$30,000 For a Developer Referral?
itwbennett writes "Are good developers really that hard to find? Cambridge, MA-based inbound marketing company HubSpot seems to think so. The company has upped its developer referral bonus from $10,000 to $30,000 — and you don't have to be an employee to get in on the deal. Beats a free puppy. What has your experience been with referral bonuses?"
If the company goes through a recruiter, they pay around 20-25% of the employee's annual salary to the recruiter (if the employee sticks around for 'x' months). So this may be reasonable for the company for a job which pays 100K to 150K annually.
Can I get $30k *and* the job?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
My company just dropped its referral bonus from $2,000 to $500.
Needless to say, if I find a good developer I'm referring them to HubSpot.
Never seen them awarded. Baked air, most of the time. YMMV, though.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Maybe they've loaded the contractual clauses with fine print to help them avoid paying out $30k. Maybe the only bonus is $30k, which might be cheaper than any other headhunter's usual contract. Someone at HubSpot should think about contracting out to Bengaluru or Mumbai.
And I have been in the situation where projects/orders had to to be refused because there just weren't enough people to handle it. If you have a choice between paying 30k so you can accept a 300k project... that is pretty easy.
Mind you, as others have noted, getting these bonuses is usually impossible. Personally I think it is red flag. It is not like developers are impossible to find but the good people tend to avoid the bad companies. If they got to offer this much, just how much do they suck to work for? I betcha a google doesn't have to do this kinda of stuff.
The conclusion repeatedly reached by academic researchers in software engineering is that there is an 'order of magnitude' difference among good and mediocre developers, and good developers are perenially in short supply.
So the answer is yes, it's absolutely worth the money.
Yes, good developers are hard to find. Ditto good sysadmins, business analysts, project managers, architects, etc. In larger corporations there's a strong movement to work around that scarcity by compartimentalizing the jobs, turning the whole into an assembly line, also because good people are not only hard to find but harder to manage as well. Not that the people themselves are difficult, but in most cases a group of excellent people will not have a uniform set of skills, so making the most of them requires individual talent management and more complex work planning.
What they end up with is sometimes called "predictable mediocrity". Just like having a mechanical assembly line, you'll have more control, easier planning and a predictable quality, at the expense of flexibility, innovation, sometimes cost, and excellence (your quality will be more predictable but I've rarely seen the average go up or even remain the same). What is also does is breed excellence out of the workplace: experts will be too expensive, they will not enjoy the nature of the work, and you will find it hard to offer a viable career path to talented workers. So I expect real talent to become even scarcer and more expensive.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"Beats a free puppy."
Seriously, who writes this shit?!
for referring my buddy dave.
turns out dave was doing a shake-n-bake meth lab in the back of his pickup. one night it exploded right there in the parking lot. a huge fireball lit the sky. my next door neighbor, doreen, thought iit was jesus come back for the rapture.
anyways. they wanted the $50 back. i said, i already spent it. i took the ex-inlaw's to the Golden Corral buffet, and at ten dollars a head, well, that money is clean gone.
they said, damnit, that sumbitch dave blew a hole in the parking lot.
i said no problem. i know a guy, ronnie earl, who works on the pothole truck for the city. ronnie knew how to get the hole fixed. he filed a pothole report but he used the name of his rich uncle as the report filer. his uncle, you see, owns 5 chevrolet dealerships and is the richest sumbitch this side of caw valley. (we used to call it squaw valley, until my brother bobby went and married that indian girl... it wouldnt be nice to call it that no more)
anyways. when it comes to referrals, you better get yourself some kinda papers saying they cant get it back if you accidentally misjudge someone's character. like ol' shake-and-bake dave.
In my experience, they offer a large referral bonus when they have a bad reputation. The bonus is designed to bribe at least 1 person to say good things about them.
I worked for a place that had a great referral bonus (cough cough... BAE Systems... cough). Operation Eagle Eye they called it.
Well I found a developer that fit all the criteria. Filled out the paper work, got him interviewed and hired.... then all of a sudden email went quiet on the issue. Repeated emails to HR went unanswered. So finally I went down there in person to ask about the referral bonus. We'll get back to you. I got back to them (in person). Excuses: oh this facility doesn't participate in that program (so I went into the hall and pulled the poster off the wall and showed it to the HR rep). Oh your hire doesn't fulfill the requirements (so I got the requirements off the intranet site and checked them off). Oh that's right we didn't end up hiring him (he sits in the office next to mine). Finally I subtlety hinted that I would quit.
They then sent me half the advertised bonus... four months after I was supposed to get it... and withheld over half of it in taxes AND deducted my 401K percentage contribution from it (oh sorry that was an error by finance we can cut you a new check on 60 days).
So. Beware if this crap.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Some would say that if you spend 30-60 minutes per day actively learning, that's the equalivent useful knowledge of adding a new postdoc degree every few years. I could see such a person easily producing twice as much value per hour.
How many times have you had to completely rewrite someone else's code, or spent so much time on it that you might as have rewritten it? The "typical" developer creates enough future problems by poorly thought out systems that their net productivity approaches zero. It's not that hard to be twice as productive as the guy whose code only survives a year or two. Just learn to build systems that a) actually work b) for at least four years between major overhauls.
Funny thing is that most of the "all-star" developers I've worked with actually suck.
I don't think companies should be free to beat puppies in order to convince employees to join their company. I mean, that's like extortion, "If you don't scrum with us, we'll beat these puppies senseless!"
http://www.beanleafpress.com
You find three people in a year, and then you have to do nothing else?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Yet again, I get endless emails from lazy recruiters via LinkedIn begging me to refer my friends for their worthless jobs. Hey, how about you do your own job.
Ahahahahahaha!
No, seriously, that was a good one.....As if any company is willing to give bonuses to their employees these days. I'd just kill for a reasonable paycheck.
My company offers a referral bonus ($3k for any full-time exempt position that is listed on the career site), but they have 100 different ways they can get out of paying it. Just getting eligible for it is a nightmare in and of itself - the candidate has to apply online, and enter your information in the box, and it has to be spelled correctly, and have your correct email and phone - any typos and you lose eligibility. Then, you have to take a vacation day the day the candidate interviews, to ensure you have no contact with them or the interviewers on the day of the interview. Then, if the candidate is hired, there is a 90 day evaluation, which they have to score better than 4.0/5 on (and hardly anyone ever does).
Then, if all of those hoops-of-fire are jumped through, the referrer is invited to submit documentation that they were actually a personal acquaintance of the candidate. If HR is not convinced you actually had a personal relationship with the candidate, you lose eligibility.
I can't speak for companies, but my experience in the UK is that recruitment agents NEVER come good on promises of referral bonuses. I know the idea that "recruitment agents are all liars and cheats" won't come as news to anyone but it's always worth repeating.
For a marketing company they lack imagination.
All they need to do is give my firm a call and we'll put a whole team together for them.
But noooo, they like all of their ilk want little drones to commute into their little offices so the CEO can feel "dynamic".
And guess what, not everyone lives in (or wants to live in) Boston or Dublin.
For solutions they need only look to themselves.
> Personally a big red flag for me is when a dev says "I have to completely rewrite this persons code."
> Not saying it doesn't happen, but a decent developer should be able to deal with other peoples work.
Indeed there is a big difference between "I have to" (because I don't understand the pattern or idioms) versus "It would be best to rewrite" (because the architecture or data structures are wrong).
Atzanteol mentioned another common case "if the original is confusing or buggy" and in that case a refactor is likely the best option.
I've done major refactoring of my predecessor's code of the type where I didn't attempt to understand the code confusing, buggy code until much of the refactoring was done. Just by mechanically breaking up the 200-line functions with variables like $bob and $fred into 15-line functions with variables named $radius and $scrollheight, the code was made much less confusing and the solutions to bugs were then obvious. That mechanical refactoring process ensured that it continued to work the same way, though, so I wasn't rewriting any logic, only reorganizing it to be more maintainable.
Did anyone else read that as "$30,000 For a Developer Funeral"?
they may get some recruiter BS and or fake people / resume padding.
Some recruiters do edit people resumes / pad them out.
I left a great job for a lousy one because of a former co-worker at the new place who was singing the new companies praises -- just to get the referral bonus.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Heree I am, send me to the west coast!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You guys are easy to game. This company is just an SEO magnet and you gave it a fresh link for a two-year-old referral program. (It made the news for being $10k back then.)
Care to hazard some guesses why, despite their profile, they have to throw this much money (and have had to throw five figures for years) to get developers? Try asking any of them who were pushed out or fired, including nearly every Ruby dev they had--it's a bubble-era clusterfuck of management, retention (namely getting stock options instead of salary in a company who keeps threatening to IPO but never does), and decision-making issues.
The best thing you can do with these fools is game them for the $30k.
So where you work, bad code that appears to work isn't accepted? Where is that? Are you hiring?
I thought I worked at such a company once, where I was the one deciding what was accepted and what was not (as well as doing most of the software architecture).
Over time, I had to work on code I'd approved or even written 5-10 years before. I'd learned enough then to know that what I once thought was good was actually pretty awful.
That said, while all of the COMPANIES I know produce some pretty gnarly code, I've worked on a couple of open source projects which have fairly high standards.
The Linux kernel, of course (my names is in changelog exactly ONCE), the Apache web server, and parts of Moodle. It takes three rewrites to get accepted by one of the Moodle maintainers.
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5.25% state income tax (the last time I checked) vs. 0% for Texas,
I've mostly seen referral bonuses in the range of $1000 - $5000, rarely above that.
> The whole industry is plagued by this idea that ... the people who do the bulk of the grunt work are mediocre
Which is true by definition:
me·di·o·cre [mee-dee-oh-ker]
adjective
1. of only ordinary or moderate quality; n
Indeed, the bulk of the grunts are "of only ordinary or moderate quality". "The bulk of" and "ordinary" mean pretty much the same thing, don't they?
The mediocre generally know enough to do the task, badly. They screw things up pretty badly by making it "work" just enough so that on the surface, it appears to work most of the time. If your car crashed once a week, that would be the worst car ever made. An operating system that crashed once a week became the market leader, and by a large margin.
The quality of "professional" software shows us that the ordinary, average (mediocre) developer is, unfortunately, not quite competent. There's a huge productivity difference between mediocre developers and competent developers, much greater than the difference in their salary cost. That's where "The whole industry is plagued by this idea that only the superstars are any good" comes from. What you call "superstars" are those fully competent people who make stuff that actually works, reliably and robustly. Because they cost only 20% more than the mediocre ones, only those people are a good hire. Hiring a mediocre person for 20% less is almost always a bad decision.
There is only one thing that is worst, hiring mediocre developer with a "superstar" salary. Yes, it sound ridiculous, but yes, it is the norm these days.
I think your bar for mediocrity is far too low. The majority of "competent" developers are mediocre. This is what they are if they are not outright incompetent or a superstar.
And thank you for perpetuating the myth that on superstars are good programmers. You're exactly the kind of person I was addressing.
Spending 30-60 minutes per day learning so you become competent yourself works a lot better then whining about people knowing that you're not very good yet. So does finding where your talent lies, if programing isn't something you can learn to do well.
I am in process of learning myself. I would like to be a competent kernel programer and competent to code on world class projects like Apache. So far, I'm a competent business applications programmer.
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