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Programmer search engine
- prewett 17y agoI'm too lazy to look at the site, but I'm wondering how they are solving the problem of people forgetting/not bothering to uncheck the "available" option? I suppose if they charge a small fee, people would have an incentive to delist themselves after they find a job.
- ig1 17y agoWon't this have the same problem as linkedin, programmers will delist themselves when they started getting daily calls from desperate recruiters ?
- DougBTX 17y agoThat probably happens with Stack Overflow anyway, but only people with the JobHunting bit set will come up in search results.
- 100k 17y agoStack Overflow charges quite a bit of money for the right to search for candidates (plans range from $500 for one week access to $5000 for a year) so that should limit the number of inquiries. Also, you can easily remove yourself from the search results.
- ig1 17y agoIn the financial sector recruiters can typically make around $50k for placing a single senior dev, paying an annual 5k fee is nothing
- ed 17y agoAh, it's literally a "Search engine for programmers."
- amichail 17y agoSo these are people who are unemployed or risking getting fired by looking for a job in public? Isn't it better to find people who already have a job they like and try to convince them that they would be even happier in your company?
- Vindexus 17y agoWhy would that be better?
- mustpax 17y agoPosting you resume on a jobs site does not necessarily mean you are actively looking for a job. And I highly doubt an employer would fire someone just for having their resume publicly posted. Besides, if you’re employer is that fickle, maybe you should have your resume out there, just in case.
- atamyrat 17y agoActually the story they are pitching is that when you find someone's resume online and email them job offer, they might not be available. They are trying to solve this problem by showing only people actively looking for jobs in search results. It is similar to Github's "I'm available for hire" checkbox announced couple days ago.
- staunch 17y agoWhat would you think if you saw that one of your employees recently started paying money to receive offers for a new job?
- Nogwater 17y agoI would think it's time to have a conversation. If they're worth keeping, find out how. If not, wish them luck.
- jqueryin 17y agoYou can set your CV to private and only searchable by employers. Unless your employer is signed up for SO Careers I don't think you'll have a problem. Anyways, it can simply be thought of as your personal resume. You don't have to actively be seeking a job to fill out a CV.
- nhashem 17y agoI said it before and I'll say it again -- charging people looking for jobs is ridiculous. I don't know who the kid in Houston looking for an OCaml internship is, but how the heck does he have $100 to spend on this?
- truebosko 17y agoTo spend $100 in order to find a better job, I think is worth it. $100 isn't a lot of money, especially when you consider it an investment into your future.
- Hoff 17y ago$100? If nothing else, an entrance fee cuts down the numbers of resumé spammers.
- mustpax 17y agoI believe students get SO careers memberships for free. They only charge non-students. I think they mostly want active job searchers, but $100 does sound a bit high if I just want my resume out there.
- gizmo 17y agoConsidering the job you have has a massive impact on your personal happiness it makes a lot of sense to improve your odds of finding the right company to work for. The cost of careers.stackoverflow is nothing compared to the cost of actually taking an interview (easily 8+ hours). If because of stackoverflow you can get by with one interview less it's easily worth it. Besides, if you have 3 great offers on the table I'm sure you'll be able able to negotiate a $100/year raise to recoup the careers.stackoverflow investment.
- scotch_drinker 17y agoNo matter how many times you say it doesn't make it right. Charging to look for average crappy jobs? Sure, that's ridiculous. Charging to essentially filter the jobs down to a subset with a high likelihood of being above average and excellent jobs? Well worth $100. I can get a crappy job off Dice anytime and spending money to do it would be a waste. Spending $100 to have a chance at a great job where I'm actually happy? That's an investment likely to have pretty good returns.
- benmathes 17y agoYeah, charing for participation is silly. It reduces the number of potential candidates. Headhunters have the equation right: Charge when you actually hook people up. Not sure how you'd solve the problem of people finding each other on Programmer Search and then just emailing each other externally.
- chollida1 17y ago> Yeah, charing for participation is silly. It reduces the number of potential candidates. I'd call that a feature. It cuts down on the resume spam. By charging $100 you create a filter to reduce the noise. It makes the people with jobs happier because they don't get as much crap and you make he job hunters happier as it's now easier for them to find jobs. Everyone wins by charging.
- marcell 17y agoTechnical recruiters make ridiculous amounts of money for moving people between companies. If this is successful it will be very lucrative for FogCreek.
- kqr2 17y agoBut that's because traditional recruiters usually take a % of the person's salary. Stackoverflow only charges a subscription fee for searching the database so they probably won't make as much. If you are a hiring manager, you can test-drive our search interface any time and get an idea of how many matches you'll find. No surprises here. But if you'd like to view candidate details and make contact, you'll need a subscription: * 1 week subscription is $500 * 1 month subscription is $1,000 * 6 month subscription is $3,000 * 1 year subscription is $5,000
- brown9-2 17y agoPerhaps it will be so lucrative because employers will get sick of paying percentages of salaries in recruiter's fees and so many of them will sign up for this more-modest subscription fee?
- clutchski 17y agoRoughly how many points does a recruiter get?
- Quarrelsome 17y ago30 - 40% in my experience in the UK. It's pretty sickening. That's the default. If you're crafty there are ways to force it down over the course of the arrangement.
- brown9-2 17y agoI've heard 10% at my current company.
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- storborg 17y agoHe says, "It would show you CVs right away", but I can't find a way to search candidates without signing up. Am I missing something?
- ojbyrne 17y agoIt's implied by the last paragraph (the bit about test-driving) that you have to sign up to see the actual CVs.
- earle 17y agoThis is interesting Joel is just now discovering this. As the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com, we provided this functionality on the very first version of Hotjobs in 1996, and subsequently ended up purchasing Resumix to provide a very in depth technical solution to allow employers this exact functionality you're describing. Of course, we had tens of millions of resumes in every possible industry imaginable all searchable through a very robust search interface that did all sorts of fancy lexical analysis and data extraction from random resume formats. Over the last 13 years, thousands upon thousands of people have been hired through the exact mechanism you're describing.
- mgrouchy 17y agoNot to take anything away from hotjobs, but I would argue that the real value Stack overflow careers offers is the fact that an employer can not only see your CV, but at least somewhat determine your level of expertise through your stack overflow account/reputation. I imagine Joel believes this has more value then just the data extracted from a resume.
- freetard 17y ago> I would argue that the real value Stack overflow careers offers is the fact that an employer can not only see your CV What stops people from linking to their stackoverflow accounts? Many people already link their CV to their github accounts.
- mgrouchy 17y agonothing at all, but sadly, I know some employers(HR people, etc) probably don't even go through that much trouble in the screening process. If you are paying for stackoverflow to list you you know the employers on the other end are discerning enough to actually care about your stackoverflow rep. This is the same value provided by GitHub's job profile.
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- KirinDave 17y agoIn the spirit of XKCD Explained: Joel Spolsky thinks we should all hire people who regularly use his software. He thinks those people are cool and he really likes how their time, effort and reputation on his site are something they can sell to recruiters for additional revenue. This is literally his dream come true.
- drp 17y agoYou're right. I wonder if this was part of the plan for stack overflow from the beginning. This is an ingenious way to monetize its existing user base while creating incentives for stack overflow users to keep creating valuable content for free.
- codexon 17y agoIt's possible, but people should note he already had a job board at jobs.joelonsoftware.com.
- breck 17y agoSpeaking of, I wonder how many millions an open HN job board could make? The people I'd like to hire are stackoverflow, github, and HN users.
- 3pt14159 17y agoPG can we please do this? We're looking to hire 15+ people right now and we are running out of good people in Toronto.
- nuclear_eclipse 17y agoIf you're willing to work with telecommuters, I'm still looking for a job, with no luck, in the Cincinnati area...
- 3pt14159 17y agoUnfortunately, not yet. What type of work do you do though, I may know some people looking for someone with your skills. See my above comment for my email.
- richcollins 17y agoI would prefer a programmer search engine based on Github, where people write code, to StackOverflow, where people talk about code.
- eugenejen 17y agoWhat happened to people who can write successful products but not yet been open sourced? This happened to John Carmack, Jamie Zawinski. They are probably too busy in making stuffs work then writing answers on Stack Overflow or committing code to GitHub.
- jrockway 17y agoSome people do both. Why gamble on someone who won't show any of his work when you can just pick someone who does?
- eugenejen 17y agoGood point. But if the code has copyrighted issues, then how can I show publicly? I usually have a copy of repository for my past projects and I don't mind to show it to people who interview me. Also I think if I need to put code on GitHub, it has to be some software for more generic tasks.
- nickelplate 17y agoSome people are plenty mentally stimulated at work and don't feel the need to work on their own projects in their spare time. And sometimes your professional accomplishments are significant enough that a side project is not likely to make you a much more attractive candidate. The people who "do both" often don't fall in these categories. Also a lot of companies don't want their employees to write code for anyone else and will actually see open source contributions as a major red flag.
- jrockway 17y agoAlso a lot of companies don't want their employees to write code for anyone else and will actually see open source contributions as a major red flag. FUD. I work for a very large corporation, and open source was definitely not a negative when hiring me. Many very important parts of our business are based on open-source technologies. (And many aren't, FWIW.)
- ct 17y agoWhy would I pay $100 for this instead of using a free website like ComputerJobs.com, Dice.com, Monster.com etc? I'd think the quality of employers would be about the same. So far I see zero benefits for me but lots of moola for JoS.
- benatkin 17y agoI tried the free trial search, that he uses in his OCaml/Houston example. I find it quite hard to believe that there is a Common Lisp programmer in Bagdad, AZ and a Clojure programmer in Window Rock, AZ.
- spolsky 17y agoWell, the OCaml kid is legit, but, no, there are no lisp programmers in Bagdad or Clojure programmers in Window Rock... did someone say there were? Do you need one? Window Rock is a dusty tiny town, seat of the Navajo Nation--I've actually been there, it has one grocery store and a single strip mall. Maybe you did a search that had 1 result, and then you edited your search, and the Ajax refresh didn't come back fast enough so it still showed one?
- benatkin 17y agoNo, I'm not looking for a programmer in either of those cities. I was just testing it out, to see if I could give it anything that wouldn't invite me to sign up and search. I just didn't notice the number to the right, and clicked the "Show Results" button each time. After I read your reply I tried it again, this time looking for AJAX updates across the entire page, and I saw it. I think I would have found it on my own had the "Display Search Results" button been disabled or hidden when no results were found.
- patio11 17y agotry { ... } catch(CodeNotWrittenInTheRightCityException e) { // unreachable }
- benatkin 17y agoHeh. As a telecommuter, I like how it has the telecommuter box checked by default. :)
- dnsworks 17y agoThis site was clearly developed for large companies having problems hiring because of their size. The lack of an even remotely useable demo made me snicker at the minimum $500/week price point.
- tomjen2 17y agoThis seems to be very good from the employers point of view, but if I am to pay to use the site then I expect to be able at least filter who can see my profile to only be the people who match my profile of an acceptable place to work. I am impressed that they have people outside the states though, that seems to indicate that the place is not just a me too copy cat.
- Aegean 17y ago500$/week just to see some 900 CVs is a highly offensive price. He should have started low and increased the price gradually.
- kgrin 17y agoI've heard somewhere (possibly from Joel himself, to be fair) that it typically costs a company around half a year's salary to hire an employee (between recruiting costs, etc.) $500/week is a drop in a very large bucket for most employers - at least the kind that are doing active recruiting. They're probably spending way more than that just in personnel time to review resumes - and in fact, being able to filter a bit better by quality will save them that much more in the screener's time.
- liquidben 17y agoI can't provide episode number, but I can concur anecdotally that this was discussed on the Stack Overflow podcast. It was probably at or around the debut of the jobs subdomain.
- Pistos2 17y agoI think this is one strategy. Start with a high price for something, then iterate lower to find the sweet spot -- particularly if your product is new or beta, and you deliberately want to limit your initial user base.
- jrockway 17y agoThere should be something that can be added to each user's icon that indicates their hire-ability. Perhaps only for users above a certain reputation.