$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?"

Comments

Recruiter Commision

[Frankie70]

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.

Re:Recruiter Commision

[FreeUser]

Yep certainly had the Agencies cut taken off my agreed salary for three months before (I did complain). No mention of what Language/ALM they work with. Given that I know hundreds of Devs (Some of whom already live in commuting distance) it would be nice to know what skills they are looking for.

huh!?!

I've worked with recruiters for years, in Chicago, New York, and London to name just three places. I've never, ever, had my pay docked because of the recruiter's fee. Never. And every job I've had beyond the first out of college has been through a recruiter (and they've all been excellent jobs, on both sides of the pond).

The employer should always pay the recruiter's fee. You as an employee/candidate should never see the fee, probably won't know what the fee was, and shouldn't necessarily even be aware of the fee (other than in the most hypothetical sense).

Having your salary docked for three months...that's just crazy. The only instance I know of where that's the norm is with talent agents in the media...a journalist I know at a New York radio station pays n% of his salary to his talent agent, but that's an entirely different can of worms. In technical recruiting, that should never happen. If your employer docked you, I'd say your employer is more than a little suspect and I'd get your CV/resume out. If your recruiter is collecting from you, then you've been suckered into the wrong kind of recruiter.

If I refer myself

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Can I get $30k *and* the job?

Good employees are scarce and may get scarcer

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

one time my apartment complex gave me $50

[decora]

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.

Stay away

[Charliemopps]

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.

Great bonus... have fun collecting

[gatkinso]

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.