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Attention, Rockstar Developers: Get a Talent Agent
ErichTheRed writes OK, we all know that there are a lot of developers and IT people in the field who shouldn't be, and finding really good people and hanging onto them is very difficult. However, I almost fell out of my chair reading this breathless article suggesting that developers hire agents. I grant the authors that recruiters are sometimes the only way to cut through the HR jungle in some companies, but outside of the hot San Francisco startup market, can you imagine a "10x rockstar developer" swaggering into a job interview with his negotiating team? I'm sure our readers can cite plenty of examples of these types who were only 10x in their own minds...
A little less than three years ago, a friend of mine started YourTalentAgents, a Pittsburgh-based talent agency representing professional IT workers of all sorts (sysadmins, software engineers, hardware folks, etc.). In mid 2014, he merged with another company, Student Intuition, to form Imagine Careers. The talent agency part of the company still exists and has been profitable pretty much since the start. IIRC they've placed something like 85% of the candidates they've worked with, and many of those candidates are referring others to the talent agency. It's flipping the model in favor of excellent technologists looking for a good company, instead of a gaggle of quota-driven headhunters competing to fill a seat with a warm body.
Disclosure: I'm a friend of the CTO of Imagine Careers, who founded YTA, and a currently uncompensated advisor to the company.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
That's not the only model for agents and managers. I have a friend who works on the production side of TV and movies. For a while, he hit the bricks between every project to line up future work. Then he was making enough to afford to pay someone 10% to do that for him so all he had to do was sign a contract and show up at the next gig. Then he got popular enough that the offers were coming in without the agent's effort so now he lines up his own work again but doesn't have to pound the pavement to get offers. Some day, he may be popular enough that he needs an agent again to "filter out the crap".
can you imagine a "10x rockstar developer" swaggering into a job interview with his negotiating team?
Stop. please. just stop. lets take the pretend train to imaginary town and derail it for a minute:
1. the people who sincerely think coders need agents are the people who contribute nothing to the coding process. these are parasites running out of options in a dwindling music and video talent market.
2. the kinds of coders who think they need a talent agent are the kinds of sycophantic cocksuckers that harass employees, alienate managers, fracture teams, and haul companies into sexual harassment lawsuits. they might be bombshell coders, but the truth is even with james bond, 7 martinis and an aston martin makes you a stumbling insurance liability with a gun.
3. we already have a huge problem with recruiting. I cleared 37 voicemail messages from recuiting mills that dont even source their call centers in the US. most of this was for 3 month contract or 6 month contract work, shit that is beneath anyone but that corporations feel like theyre fucking entitled to. I routinely roll out of bed for calls from these shitlords at 2 AM because someone didnt set the callcenter ntp server in india properly.
4. Corporations are another side of the problem. Apply for imgur, facebook, or any other rewarding employment position and you'll be waterboarded with masturbatory inquisition like 'what makes you such a great fit?' and 'what do you looooove about our company?' Motherfuckers I want a job, your work is interesting, and the pay is commensurate. beyond that im still human capital remember?
so for anyone thinking rockstars pornstars or coked up overweight perl jockeys with poor attendance and a penchant for lashing out at coworkers in a 10 am alcohol fueled rage are in need of some kind of dedicated legion of cocksuckers to treat them like a special snowflake, get bent.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You know, giving away 20% of your income in agency fees is ok if you make 20 mln per year, not so much if you make 100K.
I have used recruiters who have been very helpful in finding companies that need someone with my skill sets at my level of expertise. It is much easier than dealing with companies that say they are looking for senior staff but end up only wanting to pay $90k in salary. When I look for work through a recruiter I know the general salary range and a detailed description of the work and company culture before I ever talk with someone at the company. The recruiter generally gets about 20-25% of my first year salary, but that doesn't really come out of my salary (since I don't adjust what I will accept based on if I used a recruiter). The companies pay the fees because now they don't have to waste as much time hiring, which can be very costly.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Guys when you send your resume in and they demand it be in an editable form such as MS Word be prepared to deal with the consequences of a bit of resume padding or stripping by people that do not quite understand what the words in the resume mean or who have a more sinister agenda.
I went to one interview and found that a few years of relevant experience was cut and pasted from my resume onto someone else's applying for the same job via the same agency. I'd brought copies of my resume to hand out at the interview and the interviewers got a bit of a shock comparing it to the ones they had been supplied with. They didn't use that recruiter again.
I'm the submitter -- this one just had to get out there for comment.
I have worked with a few real 10x-ers -- in the systems field, not development. None of them had agents, nor were they particularly flashy people. These are the kind of people who go from contract to contract getting reliable, interesting work. The reason they can do this is because they actually know enough to be a 10x-er. Most of the really talented people are in some sort of IT services role, either an independent consultant or a highly valued veteran employee of a big services shop if they choose not to jump around. People in this category are the kind who can jump in and rip apart a problem until the _real_ root cause is found, no matter how insanely difficult it is to locate. In the systems side of the house, that requires a mix of expert-level talent, troubleshooting skills and enough experience in different environments. Yet, nearly every one of these people has been a pleasure to work with -- they don't treat you like idiots, and if you show an interest, you learn something from them. I imagine any web framework du jour rockstar that felt they needed an agent would not be as nice to work with.
Honestly, I'm not sure what planet the author is living on. Granted, I don't live in Silicon Valley -- my experience is in "boring" industries like airlines, banking and insurance. I know now that hiring is a huge pain in the butt simply because the market is flooded with under-qualified people. It's a mix of dumb luck and leveraging your connections to get a good job. And yes, going into an interview cold with no one on staff who knows you is like playing the lottery...50 people are applying for the same spot sometimes. Beyond the typical recruiter slimeweasels, I can't imagine dealing with someone's agent when hiring for a position.
Maybe the market for phone app developers really is so hot now that people are jumping jobs for 20% raises the way they did in Dotcom Boom #1. I don't know. But on my boring side of the fence, where stuff needs to work reliably all the time, and there's always pressure on costs, the market is a little different. There's constant wage pressure from outsourcers and H1-B shops, and management really needs to be cajoled into spending anything to keep IT running. Enlightened companies keep a few senior, truly good people on staff, but the overall trend is down, both age-wise and salary-wise. The thing that they don't get is that to get to that 10x level, you need to have the experience to see what went wrong the last 20 times you've seen something implemented. Whatever - I don't see myself telling potential employers that they'll need to speak to my agent...