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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
I cashed in 5000 GBP for referral once. At the rate the US dollars are being printed currently, it should be equal to the amount mentioned in the article soon :)
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...
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.
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
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.