I'm an experienced dev (3+ years of wholesome experience + a solid work portfolio) and I could even deal with the rather significant pay cut I'd be taking... but a pay cut + risking not having employment, when I'm already settled in a current job?
No thanks.
But good luck.
This is still "barely out of school, hardly knows what he's doing" stage :)
Edit - downvote me all you want, but if you are to show up on the interview and declare that you are in an "experienced dev (with 3+ years)", the interview will conclude quickly. It's not that you have just three years of experience, it's the fact that you think it's a lot. It's not. This makes you cocky and cockiness can be costly, especially in an otherwise coherent team.
...but that still doesn't negate the fact that expecting anyone worth their salt to give up a current level of security for a 45 day gamble with Buffer is a smart hiring strategy.
But he's still a baby in the crib with recruiters beating down his door left, right, and center, none of whom are expecting him to quit his job for a vague, conditional offer of employment.
This isn't about who deserves what, this is about the market conditions. Right now the market conditions are such that even devs with ~3 years of experience are highly sought after, with likely multiple recruiter contacts per day if they are even half decent at advertising their abilities.
This isn't about whether or not what Buffer expects is "wrong" (for whatever ephemeral notion of right and wrong), it's about what Buffer can get away with. In the current market they most certainly cannot get away with it.
Make sure your summary is well written and keyworded with words that recruiters are looking for (and that apply to you) - Rails, C++, graphics, what have you.
Flesh out your past jobs section. Keyword these descriptions too as relevant (technologies used, major popular frameworks, libraries, etc).
Basically reverse engineer the recruiter's practices - they're using a search tool, searching for keywords relevant to the position they're fielding. This is not very different from SEO. Increase the likelihood of being in a search result and watch the recruiters pile in.
While you're at it, make sure your resume is always up to date and available on your own website (if you don't have a website, get one). Make sure you are high up in Google results for your own name. Keyword your resume the same way you'd do your LinkedIn profile - maybe ~5% of the recruiters that show up end up coming directly via my website through some kind of search.
What I think is going on, having observed from outside for many years, is that a certain subset of companies are fighting over the same small subset of engineers (self confident, type A shameless marketeers who happen to already be located in SV, NYC, or Seattle) and complaining that they can't find people because this subset is too small to satisfy them all.
I have had a LinkedIn profile for almost as long as LinkedIn has been around. I have had a website with my own domain name since 1999. I do not have personal or professional experience in $FLAVOR_OF_THE_WEEK. Despite all the talk here and elsewhere about how its fundamentals that matter and anyone competent can pick up $LANGUAGE or $FRAMEWORK in the time it takes to become familiar with the codebase, everyone still seems to hire based on the buzzwords.
No one ever taught me that I should be treating my resume like an SEO problem. In fact, I have received so much contradictory advice about how to structure my resume over the years that I am almost ready to throw up my hands in disgust. Plus, the idea of keyword-loading my resume and LinkedIn profile makes me feel dirty; hell, SEO in general makes me feel dirty.
You belittle developers who are trying to advance themselves, their knowledge and make a good living with your Type A thing.
Everything starts off as a flavor of the week, Ruby on Rails was just a flavor of the week type deal and then it became huge. Same with Node now and with other stacks before that.
I've done recruiting, and am just finishing up a round for my company and lazy developers who half ass their resumes are frustrating. Trying to search for someone is a pain in the ass and not everyone is a professional developer, some of us are just developers at small companies trying to expand. If more people had well written LinkedIn profiles it would make our lives easier. If not a LinkedIn than you need to find some way to make yourself visible if you want to be headhunted.
That's not to say it's a bad thing, you can be a very well paid very comfortable developer without ever being head hunted, but having a well made portfolio will make your life easier certainly.
> You're not using the technologies that are in demand, you're not writing detailed work histories, and you're not putting key words into your resume, please tell me you do not wonder why you're not being head hunted.
I'm not sure if you are saying this with or without having looked at my information, so I will write the response assuming you have not.
I use what my employers require me to use, plus whatever else I can get away with that is appropriate for the task at hand. I also experiment with new languages in my free time, though I stopped listing those on my resume and LinkedIn profile on the advice that I should only be listing items I was willing to be tested on. If I find something that is better for a task that needs doing, I use it. As for my work history, I have a detailed history, but I tried to control the amount of detail in each entry to avoid making it too long.
> Everything starts off as a flavor of the week, Ruby on Rails was just a flavor of the week type deal and then it became huge. Same with Node now and with other stacks before that.
Absolutely, though most fade away into relative obscurity at some point. The point I was trying to make there is that I frequently see statements about fundamentals being important and specific technologies not being important because technologies can be learned quickly by a competent developer. Yet the laundry lists of technology requirements seems to grow monthly. I'm going to learn new stacks because they are interesting and potentially useful to me, not to pad my resume.
Overall, maybe it was a good thing I shoved my foot in my mouth above. It drove me to think critically about my overall presentation to the outside world. I usually approach it with too much emotional attachment.
I'd recommend listing them, especially if you are interested in jobs that use them. If you are suffering from a deluge of recruiters, by all means, do what you need to do to slow down the flow - but it doesn't seem like that's your problem.
Here's the thing - the people who are going to be interviewing you and ascertaining your technical capabilities are not the same ones looking for you on the internet (LinkedIn and beyond). Don't let a non-technical person say no to you (or worse, never see your profile to begin with).
Put the keyword up, there's no need to be deceptive about it. "Hi, you look like a good fit at our company because of X" "I've used X in my spare time but never professionally, if that's alright with you let's continue the conversation" - you'd be surprised at how many companies are willing to keep talking. The demand is intense.
There's nothing untoward or dishonest happening here. You're listing out the things that you know, you're not lying about anything, you're being entirely upfront - the only extra consideration is writing in such a way that someone searching for you would see you in a search result. Name-drop languages, frameworks, libraries, as appropriate, because those are the primary levers recruiters know to pull when searching.
> "I have a detailed history, but I tried to control the amount of detail in each entry to avoid making it too long."
I'd suggest expanding. We're way past the days where recruiting happened via a pile of resumes on someone's desk, and a long one would make it straight into the rubbish bin without a glance. By the time human eyes hits your profile page it's already gone through a search filter and likely other recruitment filters - it's okay to be a bit verbose since interest is already there. Especially if this verbosity increases your odds of making it past a search filter.
> "I'm going to learn new stacks because they are interesting and potentially useful to me, not to pad my resume."
Right, and my suggestion isn't to pad your resume with useless filler. That does nobody any good - recruiters end up looking at profiles that have nothing to do with the jobs they're looking to fill. The idea is to think about the jobs you want (and are qualified for), think about what their recruiters are searching for, and making sure your profile gets hit when they search for said things.
The goal isn't to appear in more search results in general, it's to appear in more search results relevant to the jobs you're looking to find.
Being as 90% of them can't tell the wheat from the chaff to save their skins, they have no other choice, really.
Filter out cockiness/arrogance that gets in the way of productivity/progress, etc: yes. Tell someone who's simply confident in their abilities that they don't know what they are doing because they only have 3 years of experience: no.
I understand that the prevalence of the so-called "entitled youth" has everyone ruffled these days, but there's a difference between being arrogant and feeling entitled (I'm sure these people exist, but don't they always), and not accepting the old world BS of bowing your head, taking everyone's shit, doing what you're told, then settling for the scraps that get thrown your way (something you should feel so lucky to have happen). In the case of the latter, that world needs to die, and I'm all about progress and moving past such suffocating, stagnating, backward nonsense.
Also, when it comes to programming, after about 5 years everyone evens out (with regards to gains unique/specific to years of experience) and there isn't really much difference. Everything past that is mostly inside knowledge or factual knowledge that you get from happening to work at one company or another (or with some person that happens to know said things). And since the technological landscape (past whatever the latest buzzwords or fads are) changes at least every 5 years, all that specific knowledge loses relevance with time.
My point is: being cocky is always bad. There isn’t any real standards otherwise, but… you need to be aware that using absolutes makes you redeemable to a lot of things.
I understand the problem for Buffer, but this isn't the solution.
I've heard of companies who offer people to consult on weekends for a predetermined total number of hours to accomplish much the same outcome. Annoying, but I'll play ball.
...but really. I seriously doubt any high-end dev talent is willing to take such risks. And if you think this hiring strategy would be successful in attracting high-end dev talent that really cares about Buffer, well you haven't examined the hiring market lately and are likely high off your own supply.
A lot of companies have probation periods though.
That said, it really depends how much they are paying the prospective employee while contracting. If it's enough to make up for that then it might be worth the risk to some people.
I will say this, though— I give them credit for being open about what they really want. A lot of companies don't do that.
The transparency make them one of the better companies out there. Though I'm surprised this trial period isn't mentioned in their job listings in some way.
I'm sure you guys are great to work for, but don't promise to read every email if I'm just gonna get a mail merge reply.
Great point on this. We've recently had a meeting discussing this in detail, I think you're absolutely right, it doesn't make people feel great to get a standard response like the one you've received. We've been trying to come up with a better way to personally respond to people, which has proven quite difficult. There were 2,000+ applicants last month and I think we're still trying to figure out the best work-flow to make each response tailored.
I wanted to assure though that we've read your email (and we do read each and every email, always), even though we sent a standard response (which I totally agree with isn't a great method). Hope that might help and I hope we can come up with a better solution to respond to you and everyone individually in the future. If anyone has had experience on this, would love your thoughts!
That response sounds exactly like the problem. I believe that anything else than:
“Indeed. We f*cked up. I’ve e-mailed you with short answers. Detailed coming soon.
Anyone with a similar issue, please let us know how we can recognize your e-mail.”
would be inappropriate. No one not invited cares about a meeting. Starting by “Great point … absolutely right … doesn’t make people feel great … trying to come up with a better way” and other unnecessary precautions around completely obvious points makes you sound like a politician on SNL. There is no ‘trying to come up with better ways’ to a personal e-mail: there is starting to do it, realising you don’t have the man-power to do it, confessing that you are late on the task. It’s either more important than what you are working on or not, but that shouldn’t take ten lines to figure out.
I love you -- that’s why I tell you how you can be a better version of yourself.
What do you expect me to do with this information?
On a solution: if every email was read, they should be categorised to ascertain whether they require a tailored reply (ie they had questions that aren't answered with a stock response).
Unless the majority of emails had questions not covered in the response that was sent (I can't imagine they did) you would have a much smaller set of emails to tailor replies.
I applied and received a form rejection (which I am actually OK with and totally understand) but when I sent two followup emails I heard no response back. If you really read every email, do you also ignore the questions?
I also asked for just a few sentences of feedback. I expect this from the average company, but not from yours. You have strong values, but don't live up to them.
Good luck!
> Please lead with the location of the position and include
> the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or VISA"I’m sorry to say we couldn’t bring you on board as our next Hacker at this point. I hope you don't take this personally. We were absolutely overwhelmed by the huge volume of people like you who sent in their fantastic experiences and ideas for what they would want to achieve as part of Buffer.
At this stage, we were only looking for a few more people, so the choice was extremely difficult to make and we had to turn away a lot of genuinely amazing people."
It sounds more like a template that was sent across multiple people.
It would appreciate if you only post here if there is genuine opening unless you are just craving for more and more applications(that doesn't make sense).
Question: Did you learn this hard way from your previous companies, or was it suggested by a mentor, or was it obvious to you from the beginning that it is good idea to write them down?
I have a feeling that getting any reply from you will be like a winning a lottery (thus, I've never applied so far).
We're lucky to have a lot of interest and so in some ways I guess it ends up like a lottery. At the same time, we try and share as much as we can around the culture and when it is a good fit. Here's a post about that: http://open.bufferapp.com/how-we-hire/
Let me know if you have any questions :-)
Edit: To answer your question about getting a reply - we reply to every single email, even though it can be tough and can take a couple of weeks or so for us to get to them all.
A couple of questions: 1) what are "Happiness Heroes" and "Weekend Warriors"? What do they do for your company?
2) it seems that Mary is getting screwed, although I don't know how much your equity is worth. Why the disparity between Mary's salary and Adam's? She makes 20% less but only has .045 percent more equity...
Happiness Heroes are the people who help customers with queries via Email, Twitter and Live Chat. Weekend Warriors are people in the team who help with those same things during the weekend (though it's a full-time 5 days a week role, so 3 other days too). We have 6 full-time members of this Happiness team, it's something we make a very high priority. In the last month we answered 92% of emails within 6 hours, 65% within 1 hour, with a volume of around 10,000 emails.
I can definitely see how it seems Mary is getting screwed. Our equity number there is misleading, she has 0.3% (column to the right). Key things to note: Mary lives in Spokane, which has a relatively low cost of living and falls into our "C" bracket in the salary formula. If she moves, her salary will go up by either $6K or $16K depending on where she moves to. Also, Mary chose equity over salary (yay) which is a choice to increase equity by taking $10K less salary. I hope that helps explain things there, let me know if you have any more questions!
I love how you guys went fully transparent but I lost it at this one lol. I was kinda put off by the "we get hundreds of emails" stuff but I guess I'll go ahead and join in the herd. You guys seem pretty cool.
I love that you guys are completely open but would love to know what your engineering interview process is like?
I'm awful at interviewing and would love to know how you guys handle it.
I would cry if I was paid this much.
Edit: Please assess your contributions and value yourself at market value. Having a conversation with your manager about your market value should yield a higher salary that is competitive. If not, move along. As a mobile developer, you could be contracting for much more than 45k.
Depending on where you live, you could easily fetch $20k more, if not even more than that.
How do companies get around having (what I consider to be) a necessary employee for a company of almost any size, especially when you're building your own networks and housing your own infrastructure?
Hah, I thought the mention of Warwickshire would catch your eye. Would be great to join a homegrown tech company.
All the best.
Do you require people to work specific hours?
Like in last month's Who is hiring I wanted to share all our numbers for complete transparency. March just came to a close and Buffer stands at 1.4M total users served by a small 21 person team spread across 14 cities and 5 continents. 130,000 of our users are actively using the product each month. We generated $350,000 in March, and we have $580,000 in the bank. The average salary at the company is $98,000 and our total funding to date is $450,000 which we raised in December 2011, for which we gave up 14% of the company. I'm sharing all of this because one of the highest values we have at Buffer is to be fully transparent, and I'd love for you to be part of the incredible journey we've embarked upon.
At 16% month over month revenue growth on average in the last 6 months, we're seeing increasing demand to build out the product further and help our fast-growing customer base with all their social media problems. To achieve this, we'd love your help with some interesting engineering challenges. Do any of these areas stand out for you? I'd really love to hear from you:
Some of the tech we work with: PHP, Python, MongoDB, AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, Elasticache, SQS), Backbone.js, Grunt.js, Android, iOS). I'll read through emails with our CTO Sunil, I hope yours might be part of that. Send him a quick note at [email protected]. If you'd like you can check out more details about all the areas we need help with at http://jobs.bufferapp.comI'm excited about the chance to work with you. If you have any questions about our culture, product or journey so far, add a reply to this - I'll be checking throughout the day to get back to you :-)
- Joel (Founder/CEO)