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Bid for Geeks?
Ant wrote in to sent
us a Wired story about engineers forsale on ebay.
The summary is that 16 guys are willing to quit their jobs
at a major valley ISP and work for you. And the bidding starts
at over $3 million. It looks interesting, and with techies
in demand these days, it might work, although I don't think
thats how I would try to get a job (well, maybe if you guys
started bidding like crazy *grin*)
I'll start bidding for Taco at US $2.00
:)
That's a yearly salary right?
Wow, are salaries really that low on the west coast? On the east coast, you're working *way* below market if you're under six figures for a top level sysadmin.
:)
I'm staying here I guess.
were they the ebay tech team?
Bah, paying $100k for a sysadmin to babysit machines is insane. If they know how to do their job decently they'll be spending the majority of their time reading slashdot and usenet anyway!
And to think, I just called Discover and they raised my limit so I could place a bid.
*snap* Guess I'll have to wait for the next set-o-geeks to bid on.
The figure I saw was 3.14 million - a nice, geekly
number. I wonder if the actual figure was closer
to $3,141,159.26
Mark Edwards
Well if they are 16 hard working good people why not go and start up there own company?
Just curious!
When people begin to be considered as saleable goods, I begin to fear for our future. Anybody who has ever played any 'cyberpunk' RPG knows what I'm talking about.
Here is the homepage of the current high bidder. It is sad really. Hope the idiot does get the high bid, then they will see how people on ebay don't take kindly to fake bidders.
Well, if it is, that wouldn't surprise me.
Exodus is the worst ISP in the industry.
Exodus is so bad. NANOG rips on them. BBN,
AT&T, and Sprint choose not to peer with them
(for good reasons). They are the biggest
farce in the whole entire industry, especially
around Silicon Valley.
I would assume working for them would be next
to nothing but terrible, horror-filled trauma.
I am surprised that the smart folks at Exodus
(e.g. Sharif Torpis, http://www.grift.com/ and
Mark Tripod, author of a new Cisco book from
New Riders) don't go and form their own company.
But the Ebay thing was a great idea. Oh yeah,
and Ebay does colo at Exodus. That could be
where this rumour came from.
As of 12:30pst the auction is back up on ebay:
Entire ISP Management and Engineering team
Reproduced here:
Entire ISP Management and Engineering team
Team of 16 employees from major ISP willing to leave as a group. 1 Director ($200k) 2 Managers ($180k) 3 Senior Engineers ($190k) 5 Administrators ($150k) Possibly more. Implemented major NT and UNIX web presence. Approx. 2000-3000 servers. Programming and Systems Engineering experience. Massive scalability experience, Fault tolerance, Fortune 500 clients, Large scale Data Center capacity planning and construction. Group formed major ISP presence in Silicon Valley/US and is now looking for other challenges and requires an opportunity with a major player. Requires 20k signing bonus, 401k, stock, and company should be based in Silicon Valley. Total minimum bid would be: $320,000 (signing bonus) $200,000 (director) $540,000 (managers) $1,330,000 (engineers) $750,000 (administrators) --- $3,140,000 Total minimum bid cash bid plus benefits. See the story at: http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/1935
I remember that Cool Site of the Year award was going pretty crazily. I checked it when it first appeared on Slashdot, and it was up to like $500. By about 4:00pm it was over $10,000. I wonder what it finally went for and whether they actually paid money for it.
Caught that on inet-access yesterday.. I wonder if someone actually won a bid for them or if ebay closed the auction.
Yeah, we all want more money. But Microsoft could offer me 3.14 million a year and I wouldn't take it. (Maybe if I had a family and had stupidly placed myself in dept this would chance) I have no need to work for any company. If you want my 40 hours a week, you need to pay me, AND treat me right.
PS, anyone who is considering taking me up on a better offer has to beat my salery, plus donuts tommorow morning, and lunch friday. Add in lots of other great people to work with. (Although above my boss's boss management sucks, my boss is a good guy, and the engineers are fun)
Why bother with messy contract negotiations and arbitration?! Just put your self up for sale.
Werd.
I think they are trying to shut down phony auctions quicker. It's perfectly within their rights to do so, in my opinion. Can you imagine what kind of trouble they'd get in if somebody actually WAS able to buy a classroom full of japanese schoolchildren?
However, I think this auction was legit, and creative. It should have stayed. I know I'd like to see how much they actually went for.
If CmdrTaco wouldn't be willing to go that far to find a job, surely a few other people wouldn't be willing either, unless there was a real surplus of engineers.
doesn't work like that. these days, sysadmin and programming skills are largely commoditized, especially since CASE and code generation tools are becoming mature. The real skills are in analysis and project management.
I'm not sure it would be a good idea...
Think of it, a member of the inappropriate sex (depending of your preference) may win the bid...
I'll consider a lots of things before biding myself on eBay or other services...
There's a couple of quotes from the guys who are auctioning themselves at timedigital.com.
Specifically,
http://cgi.pathfi nder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,23744,00.html
less talk, more synthohol
Is there anything you can't sell at eBay? Any day now we'll probably be bidding on illegally imported cases of Cuban cigars. Crazy.
;)
All you need is a seller in Canada, and they won't be illegally imported.
Until you buy them of course
A real geek would have bid at least $433.39 more than the figure you quote.
- Sam Ruby
How unusual...people in silicon valley pimping themselves out to the highest bidder? What next? Maybe we'll start seeing internet companies with high stock prices that have never made a profit...oh...wait...
- Dan
There were only (I think) 5 actual engineers. The rest were managers and project lead types.
I don't know. I think a lot of people go to
eBay looking for a great deal.
I don't think paying 16 engineers $187,500
each, on average, sight unseen, is a bargain.
And since the bidding only lasts 7 days, I
don't think they have a chance.
-Augie
Is there anything you can't sell at eBay? Any day now we'll probably be bidding on illegally imported cases of Cuban cigars. Crazy.
Bwahahahaha. That made my day a just a bit brighter. Although, I prefer King Cobra.
HMM great idea.. I wonder if I could pimp myself off on ebay. Single eligable male geek 20 FSU student. Only $2000
I'm hereby offering to sell my programming/sysadmin services for a carton of fresh (they're stale and you're DEAD) Marlboro Reds and a case of Olde E 40s a week.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Are you kidding? Those are insane wages. They're asking 150K apiece for the administrators -- a top level sysadmin in the valley is going to be just pushing six figures, plus stock options.
16 top engineers worth at least 16 million? Not in terms of the salaries they're getting! I wouldn't mind getting a million bucks a year, nope.
Certainly the value of a good sysadmin is more than 150K a year, but these guys are asking for that as salaries. Not likely.
Not unless you're working in the financial field. (In which case, yeah, you want to be making around 100K minimum, cause Wall Street pays like that. I've considered it, but I like my stock options too much.)
Look at http://www.datamasters.com/dm/survey.html. The median salary for a senior sysadmin is $74,200. The high median is $88K. They're not just making this up...
I'd have no problem paying 100K and up for a system administrator who was able to lead a group of sysadmins or do project management stuff. But that's not what we're talking about here; the EBay auction was asking for 150K for people described simply as "admins." They were looking for much more money for managerial staff.
This is a rumor, obviously; take it as seriously as you'd take any rumor on the Internet.
But my fairly reliable source sez: these guys were the IS department of DIGEX West.
http://cgi.ebay.com
Maybe their employer actually offered them more than the $3mil they were asking to stay at their current jobs?
Shya right. That'd be the day.
Ian.
is on the list of things you explicitly
can't sell. guns, heroin and otehr less
interesting things as well
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
It's a poorly-kept secret on certain routing-related IRC channels that the team in question is from Exodus.
Seems alot to me. What is it you think these Administrators will be doing?
I think they are either trying to jump a sinking ship or have already been laid off. The fact that
there are 5 administrators in a team of 16 points
to me that they are trying to leavage the skills of the technical side to pull jobs for the administrators (who while very good at their jobs, do not have the same job opportunities as the technical guys)
I know I've been in a similar situation. When a previous company was shaky everyone, started sending their cvs out. Pretty soon the employment agencies catched on and twigged that someone could get a full team (v. important word) for the same price as 16 indivuduals (spooky coincidence that the numbers are the same). This is what actual happened. A small company looking to increase there presence in the internet world stepped in and saved the day buying the office, desks, machines etc etc, plus giving the employees
employment (with better salary). The office that
they took over is now the main office for the new company. So this can happen.
good luck with the auction
At some Valley web companies, thats the aggregate value of just a few (three or less) engineers.
I know $3 million sounds like a big number, but its fairly low for 16 employees. I doubt they're very good or they'd realize that 16 top engineers are worth at least $16 million to any tech company.
them, as 16 engineers. So, allow me to answer a
few questions for the masses:
The item you requested (96369441) is invalid. Please check the number and try again. If this message persists, the item has expired and is no longer available.
This is kinda suspicious... everytime something "interesting" is posted on eBay... they take it down completely... like that web-site selling for $3 million...
Do you think eBay is quietly trying to curtail these activities?
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BlackNova Traders