[hashset]

"DeveloperAuction.com is currently open only to employees of Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Zynga, and Google as well as Stanford & MIT graduates. If you'd like to be notified as we expand, please contact us."

Only Stanford and MIT graduates? What about the other 99.9% of tech grads?

[bithive123]

Kind of rude of them not to mention this when you create your profile. Am I supposed to spend my time filling it out only to be rejected because I'm not already part of their club? Message received!

Edit: It seems there is no way to delete my profile either.

[johnbellone]

Agreed, I was very irritated when an elitist is calling me second-rate and couldn't bother to implement a destroy method for me to delete my profile.

[DigitalSea]

How about us ghetto developers who taught ourselves everything and know just as much, perhaps sometimes even more than those who endured years of study? I hate the way society works. Just because someone went to a good university doesn't make them a great engineer/developer. I've encountered numerous developers who went to good universities and knew half as much as I did.

[suresk]

I'm certainly not in the elite ranks that they are targeting and I don't feel too bad about it, but this makes me wonder about the general purported software developer shortage.

How much of it is genuine (some of it certainly is), and how much of it is chasing this same small pool of people (ivy league CS education, worked at Google or Microsoft, or significantly contributions to a major open source project)?

[rpwilcox]

I've had similar thoughts: everyone seems to be chasing the developer with 5 years Rsils experience, worked at Zynga, lives in the Bay Area, went to Stanford, (probably) is willing to take stock options for a reduced salary, and is a JavaScript genius on the front end and server-side.

So, of course you csn't find your rockstar.

It seems in the tech world today, the answer is to not lower your requirements, or find one Ruby person and one JS person, or look at non-Zynga alumni, or (gasp!) look at remote workers, but to LOOK HARDER AND LOUDER for the same thing. Which is, from someone slightly on the outside of, well, the Valley, grating.

[jquery]

You will bow down to the Ivy-League appointed nobility and accept society's <del>educational</del> caste system without complaint.

[NonEUCitizen]

Neither Stanford nor MIT are Ivy-League. Ivy-League alumni are actually disqualified by default, and will have to qualify by some other means like working at Google or Facebook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League

[DigitalSea]

Isn't the only way to get a job at Facebook or Google to be a developer fresh out of college/university with a degree in CS or equivalent anyway? I have a friend who got a job working at Google Australia in Sydney and he had a CS degree, I doubt he would have been hired, let alone got through their strenuous interview process without his education papers in tow.

Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to undertake some kind of degree, I respect that. It's when having a degree is considered the only real entry into Facebook or Google, or any large Internet company which in turn gets you into a service like this, the gaps start to widen. Unless you work for a company that gets acquired by one of these big companies, you need a degree, no ifs or buts.

I don't mind not being a part of the service myself, it's a great idea. I would just love to get in on it though, I think I am a decent developer with a decent list of Github repositories and code contributions to other projects as well as years of experience.

[benreesman]

I work for Facebook on infrastructure and I don't have a degree of any kind.

[DigitalSea]

Wow, really? How did you get an interview and was getting a job at Facebook without a degree any harder than getting a job somewhere else?

[hnwh]

Most big companies won't hire you without your educational papers in tow.. (for the majority of cases)

[Maascamp]

Well, to be fair I went to an Ivy League school and am not eligible to participate either.

[allangrant]

As a fellow self-taught "ghetto" developer, and one of the cofounders of Developer Auction -- believe me, this is a problem we plan to solve. :)

Limiting it to developers from places that already have rigorous selection practices is just a starting point. Any suggestions for how to evaluate talent otherwise? We have a few ideas, but would love to hear yours.

[bithive123]

Maybe you should have called your service Developer Provenance or Developer Pedigree if you want people to delegate their hiring decisions to you based on the rigidity of your screening criteria.

I wouldn't want to work for a place that was so technically strapped that they couldn't evaluate me as a candidate on my own merits. But I do like the idea of a "Developer Auction" where anyone can participate, like in a real market.

It's a shame that after creating a profile I have to go through the trouble of contacting you to be notified if you decide to start offering such a service.

[Bill_Dimm]

Why limit it? Collect all relevant info (like college) as fielded data and allow employers to create whatever filters they want to focus on the type of employee they want.

If the employer got his/her degree from Cornell (for example), he/she might not be too thrilled to find that you've decided that job applicants from Cornell aren't even worth letting into the system.

[bithive123]

Their value proposition is that you don't know how to identify the best candidates but you can outsource the problem to Developer Auction, which applies arbitrary criteria for you because as they admit, they also don't know.

Yeah, I don't get it either.

[waterlesscloud]

How was your talent evaluated? Probably a good starting point.

[johnbellone]

How about you let us solve it for you: let me delete my profile.

[usmanity]

Agreed. I hate how because I don't have a degree, I somehow don't know programming as someone who took english classes for 3 years.

[rcthompson]

My reading was that the choice was more or less arbitrary in order to get a sufficiently small set to use as a test/proof of concept.

Having no knowledge of the founders at all, I would guess that some of the founders graduated from those universities and either worked at or know people who worked at those companies, and so they chose that list to start with because they were familiar with the range of quality they could expect of programmers from those places.

The second sentence in the quote outright tells you that they plan to expand this list. Presumably they could be convinced to advance their expansion schedule if there was a lot of demand from people not fitting their stated starter profile.

Basically, I think commenters here are making a big deal about something that's really just a temporary filter to reduce the volume of applicants until the company is ready to scale up. Maybe I'm being too trusting, but I didn't read anything sinister into it.

[Matt_Mickiewicz]

You hit the nail on the head.

It was/is a temporary filter, it's a band-aid awaiting a better long-term fix. Certainly the list of half a dozen or so companies isn't meant to be all inclusive.

We'd love to hear your suggestions/feedback on how we can avoid being spammed with 100,000+ applications and how we can better determine which candidates will attract job offers & interest from employers.

[phazmatis]

You forgot "notable github profiles". Although their standards are probably extremely high, and anyone who measures up is buried under recruiter emails anyway.

[Matt_Mickiewicz]

Rather than being buried under recruiter emails (who frequently keep their client identities a secret), we hope they'd participate on DeveloperAuction instead in order to be exposed to some cool companies & interesting opportunities in a condensed time-frame.

[jquery]

It's just so they seem exclusive. Also makes launching easier. Two birds with one stone.

[waterlesscloud]

Someone watched The Social Network a few too many times.

[allangrant]

This is just the starting point, because these organizations already have rigorous hiring practices. I know - this sucks. But it's just a starting point.

We're trying to come up with ideas for how to open it up to a wider audience while still keeping up quality. Any ideas?

[ryanmolden]

Non-trivial coding challenges with entries evaluated by existing members. Coming up evaluation/scoring criteria may be tricky, as would enticing the engineers to take the time / effort to do a thorough evaluation of submissions, and a diverse enough set of challenges to appeal to a broad cross-section of candidates.

[myhf]

Presumably the other 99.9% are already being paid what they are worth.