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Yeah. I experimented with the jump myself; Some day I will write about my failures as a business person and why I failed as hard as I did. I know a lot of really good technical people, and am pretty good at talking them into taking a job. (I mean, part of this is that these are my friends, mostly, and while I'll bully an unemployed friend into taking a high-paying job near me rather than taking some more time off far away, I'm not the sort of person who'd bully someone out of a good job into another job that is about as good because it would make me a few bucks.) I mean, I'll hire these people for my projects if they get desperate enough to work for the sort of money I can come up with, and I have all the payroll/insurance infrastructure down. that part is pretty easy; it's a matter if what is a pretty small amount of money compared to what you make as a silicon valley nerd. And I do pretty regularly hook these people up with recruiters (usually recruiters who are after me) - I've only gotten paid for doing this once, and it was a $2500 referral fee, which seemed great to me, but was probably a small fraction of what the person who knew the business people got paid. But... that's just background. not the hard part. The hard part is, you know, how you get on the authorized vendors list at a company. Now, paying a referral fee, in that world, seems likely... but bribes are complex - you can't just walk in with a giant wad of cash and say "who do I gotta pay to get on the preferred vendors list" - It's be rude, and I'm pretty sure that it'd be against company policy at the very least, and depending on jurisdiction and details, maybe a criminal issue, too. That's the problem. I mean, clearly, you buy your way into the authorized vendors list; but how do you buy your way into the authorized vendors list? I'm pretty sure I could give someone who wasn't an employee of the company a referral fee or even a cut of my revenues, but as soon as we get to employees of my prospective customer, the people with the power to actually do things, things get shaky. So, even if you decide that you want to be the sort of person who "Monetizes" your "Relationships" - and I am not 100% sure that's really what I want, even then it's a pretty complex sort of thing, and it's a place where my ethical intuition doesn't really work. that might be the hardest part, for me. As a nerd, a technician, an engineer... as someone who builds or maintains a thing, my responsibilities and ethical obligations are very clear. When you shift over to primarily dealing in relationships, this isn't clear at all. |
Example: Let's say you want to get on the preferred vendor list of AT&T. Whenever AT&T hires a contract software developer, they contact the 2-4 recruiters on that list for that specialization.
The CEO could easily put you on the list if he wanted to. Let's say I'm buddies with the CEO, and if I asked my buddy, he wouldn't mind doing that for me. I'd owe him one. How much would that be worth to a recruitment company, maybe $5-10m a year? How much should the person facilitating that be paid? Probably quite a lot, maybe 20-30% of the value of that deal, i.e. $1-3m? How does it get divided if a friend of mine needs a favor from my buddy the CEO?
Now, would you rather put the deal together or go source the people? :)
Replace CEO with some high powered VP - that would work as well. Or a friend of a friend.
Ethics aside of course, because this all gets very grey very fast. Though if you provide quality service, it doesn't matter all that much.