Joel Spolsky is a legend in the programming world. His blog—Joel on Software—is the most popular and well-known programming blog. In mid-2008, Joel and Jeff Atwood—of Coding Horror fame—launched Stackoverflow, a free site for asking programming questions.
Stackoverflow is clearly a success but the sister sites haven’t fared nearly as well. Recently Jeff and Joel launched Stackoverflow Careers, a site for programmers to find jobs and employers to find programmers.
Stackoverflow Careers may just be a bridge too far.
Let’s Talk About… Joel
Joel on Software was the first blog I ever read. I read it before anyone really knew what a blog was. Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy was one of those things I read that completely changed my perspective. How Microsoft Lost the API War I consider to be almost prophetic in its predictions regarding the then-Longhorn now-Vista boondoggle and desktop bloodletting by Web applications.
But something isn’t right in the Land of Joel.
In the late 90s during a brief flirtation with strenuous physical activity, I learnt to SCUBA dive. I went to one of these courses that was an evening of instruction of the evils of nitrogen, a weekend in the pool and then a weekend in the ocean. This was a PADI course and is very much the consumer-grade diving education and I state that as a simple observation not a judgement or accusation. At the other end of the spectrum is NAUI.
PADI is all about selling you stuff—gear, courses, whatever. A friend remarked to me that PADI stood for Put Another Dollar In.
NAUI on the other hand is much more highly regarded but less prolific. It is a not-for-profit organisation. Whereas some accuse PADI of dumbing down SCUBA training, nothing of the sort is levelled against NAUI. That same friend said NAUI stands for Not Another Untrained Idiot.
What does this have to do with Joel? Whereas Joel was once the NAUI-like font of wisdom, now it just seems like he’s trying to sell me stuff.
Jumping the Shark
Of course I’m not the first to articulate this.
In recent times Joel has taken quite a bashing, for example Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman and Sten Anderson’s I Heart Joel on Software.
Sten’s comments are particularly interesting because what he says is true: all Joel’s endless talk about great programmers is thinly disguised disdain for the 99% of us that didn’t go to MIT, Stanford, UW, Yale, Harvard or UPenn.
Amusingly, Jeff Atwood posted several years ago Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark? going so far as to say:
I reject this new, highly illogical Joel Spolsky. I demand the immediate return of the sage, sane, wise Joel Spolsky of years past. But maybe it's like wishing for a long-running television show to return to its previous glories.
I guess he got over it.
Side note: Jeff was responding to Language Wars (emphasis added by Jeff):
FogBugzis written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.
I admit it: I love a good rant. And not just ranting for ranting’s sake but a rant with a message, an essential kernel of truth, a pearl of wisdom. It’s hard to forget Zed Shaw’s now-infamous (albeit retracted) Rails is a Ghetto rant of nearly two years ago. Yesterday I read Giles Bowkett’s Blogs are Godless Communist Bullshit. It’s long but entertaining and absolutely worth reading.
But is all this criticism justified?
Firstly, some background.
IT Recruitment
In Europe and Australia programmers (and other IT professionals) are found in three ways:
- Direct recruitment by the employer. This usually means big employers who have dedicated HR departments to filter out CVs, book interviews and so on. Such candidates will most likely become salaried employees of the company;
- Word of mouth; and
- Through recruitment agencies.
In my experience recruitment agents are loathed by IT workers (eg Why is IT recruitment so bad?). Most of the time they’re utterly clueless (I have in all seriousness been asked “I see you have 7 years of Java experience but do you have any J2SE experience?”). Horror stories are legion. IT recruitment in London in particular is a soul-destroying experience.
Recruiters will fill positions on a permanent (salaried) or contract (paid by the hour, day, week or month) basis.
The recruiter will earn a fee that is typically around 10-15% of the candidate’s annual salary upon successfully filling the position. If the employee leaves in the probationary period (typically three months) some or all of that will be refunded.
With contractors the recruiter will typically earn a margin of 10-25% (or even higher) on top of the contractor’s rate either for a fixed term (eg it scales down after a year) or in perpetuity. Expat contractors typically have criminally high margins put on top of what they earn, at least initially.
So recruitment is expensive.
Compare that to placing ads on job boards will typically cost hundreds of dollars (eg jobs.joelonsoftware.com FAQ and Monster Job Posting) and last weeks. One ad can potentially fill multiple positions. Employers will typically keep CVs on file and getting contacted some time after applying is not uncommon. So ads can be effective although there can be a lot of chaff.
IT recruitment is broken so there’s definitely room for a solution.
Stackoverflow Careers
Careers is another site hoping to capitalize on the success of Stackoverflow. Programmers routinely demonstrate the ability to self-organize, which I think explains—at least in part—its success. Computer science is also a centuries-old. Yes I said “centuries old”. So before some reddit lurker points out computers were born in the mid-twentieth century, I suggest you consult the Timeline of computing 2400 BC–1949 and the work of Charles Babbage and others.
The latest money-making venture is Stackoverflow Careers, heavily cross-promoted by Jeff Atwood (Introducing Stack Overflow Careers and Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome) and Joel (Upgrade your career and Programmer search engine) as well as echoes in the blogosphere.
Despite the success in terms of audience size (Joel in his Google Tech Talk claims a ~30% programmer share, which is huge if true), programmers are a hard bunch to monetize (see Our Amazon Advertising Experiment). Careers is the latest incarnation.
It’s free to have a public CV but having a private CV costs money (allegedly $99/year after 31st December but don’t be surprised if that changes). The private CV is searchable by employers and allows (as Jeff/Joel put it) “deep” integration with Stackoverflow.
The employers are paying too anywhere from $500 for a week to $5,000 for a year (see the FAQ).
Not cheap. So what are we getting for our money?
The Hollywood Analogy
Joel claims:
In Hollywood, studios who need talent browse through portfolios, find two or three possible candidates, and make them great offers. And then they all try to outdo each other providing plush work environments and great benefits.
Make no mistake: you’re being sold something here. The allure of stardom is deliberate bait. Giles succinctly sums this up:
This last part is laugh-out-loud funny. That's not how Hollywood works. I'm an actor, I've been studying acting for years, and I know award-winning actors who still have to go out on auditions like everybody else. You might wonder how a newbie like me, with nothing but Cop #3 in a student film to his credit, can claim to know award-winning, seasoned professionals. It's simple: because they have to go on auditions like everybody else.
I will take one issue with what Giles said:
Robert Downey Jr. had to fight like hell to get the lead role in Iron Man.
Yes, but there’s a reason for that. He had a serious drug problem and any studio is going to balk at betting a billion dollar franchise on a cokehead.
But I digress.
Here’s another difference: actors are basically the most flexible labour market in the world. They go where the work is. The film shoots for 40 weeks in Siberia? Fine, no problem. Actors go where the films are.
Programmers on the other hand are not nearly as flexible. Programmers are regular workers. We have families, friends, mortgages and so on. Sure we might move from St Louis to San Francisco for a job but we also might not. I think it’s safe to say that more often than not, we’re not looking to move across country. Hell, we’ll even turn down a job if it’s in the wrong part of the same city.
Imagine how far you’d get as an actor if you said “I’ve love to work on your TV show but the studio is in Burbank and commute from Radondo Beach is a bitch so i think I’ll pass.” (only knowing LA to change planes I make no apologies for any gross errors in LA geography I may have just made).
So instead of there being a handful of job markets for actors there are probably 100 or more for programmers.
So What’s In It For Me?
From the FAQ:
If you are seeking employment, we do require a modest annual payment to file your CV. Filing your CV makes it eligible to appear in searches by hiring managers via our private search interface. This fee allows us to ensure employers that everyone they find is actively looking for a job.
Isn’t the fact that I’ve filled out a CV and ticked a box that says I’m looking for work sufficient? Apparently not.
Consider Finding Great Developers:
The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.
So the target market seems to be those developers who think they’re great developers but actually aren’t. If they were they wouldn’t be looking. I get it: everyone is better than average.
Giles sums this up:
The number one rule of the con: you can't con an honest man … Try to get something for nothing, just because Joel Spolsky said you could? You're going to get burned.
I should point out that I signed up in the beta. I was under no illusions however (then again, who ever thinks they are?). The chances of an employer looking in my remote backwater are next to nil but I figured at $30, at worst I was out two lunches from Nando's.
And If I’m A Hiring Manager?
Approximately 6,500 Stackoverflow users have 1,000 reputation or more. This is an arbitrary number choice but the point is this: integration with Stackoverflow only adds value if you’ve contributed a sufficiently large number of answers to mine. Go up to 2,000 rep and you’re down to less than 3,200 users. And so on.
Let’s be optimistic and say the potential audience for whom Stackoverflow will add value to their CV is 10,000. A number of these can be eliminated as being students, retired, incapable of working (eg disability or serious prolonged injury) or simply not looking for work.
Joel claims:
But Stack Overflow Careers doesn’t have to be massive. It’s not for the 5.2 million people who visit Stack Overflow; it’s for the top 25,000 developers who participate actively.
Want to know what the 25,000th user looks like?
I mean no disrespect to these people but “participate actively”?
Take careful note of the language too: 25,000 from 5.2 million? Hell, you’re already the top half of one percent! You’re elite, positively l33t! Uh huh.
Crunching the Numbers
There are at least 100 distinct geographical job markets for an employer. If you’re lucky 10% of the pool is accessible to you either by being in the right place or willing to relocate.
Of those 10%, maybe 10% have the right skills. The importance of programming languages is definitely overstated by (typically clueless) HR departments and recruiters. It’s also true that good developers can program in anything (given sufficient time) but not all languages are interchangeable in all situations. I would consider a Java Web developer to be largely interchangeable with an ASP.NET C# Web developer (in that there is sufficient crossover to enable a sufficiently speedy transition) but I wouldn’t hire a Ruby programmer to do C programming for microcontrollers and embedded devices. The transition from unmanaged (eg C/C++) to managed (eg C#/.Net) code can be steep enough.
Of this reduced pool, how many have the right experience? The more experienced you get as a developer, generally the more important domain knowledge becomes. I wouldn’t hire a mobile telephony architect to design a system for market-making options on commodities futures because you’d spend 6 months explaining bid/ask, spreads, what a future is, what an option is, in-the-money, out-the-money, out-the-money, short, long, contango, volatility, Black-Scholes… the list goes on.
Of the remaining few who has the right amount of experience? You wouldn’t hire a fresh college grad to mentor junior developers.
Now you’ve got a short list (“short” being the operative word) consider how many are available?
And you haven’t even interviewed anybody yet!
So if you optimistically assume that 10,000 people sign up for Careers, chances are you’re down to less than five. Of those, how many are seriously looking? They’re paying by the year so why not have your CV out there just in case?
Don’t be fooled, paying to file your CV doesn’t ensure you’re seriously looking. The only thing it ensures is that you’re a revenue stream.
Critical Mass
Matching candidates to employers is low probability. The number who fit the profile is probably 1 in 1,000 or even less.
So of the 10 to 25 thousand relevant potential candidates, some percentage will actually be looking for work. Of that percentage, a smaller percentage will pay to be seen by employers, less than might otherwise be seen if the service was free (for job seekers). I expect that number to be 2,000 or less and that number is, in my opinion, inflated by the cheap beta registration.
So an employer is going to pay big bucks—much more than a typical job ad—to reach a much smaller target audience?
People will pay money if they are getting value for money. Paying $15,000 to a recruiter to find you a programmer is cheap because the recruiter is doing most of the legwork and assuming a large part of the risk (in that they don’t typically get paid if you don’t find someone you like). Job ads are cheap because they may reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of candidates.
It’s like Careers is charging as if it’s already a proven success.
Things like this work on the principle of critical mass. Take eBay. People buy on eBay because there are things to be bought. People sell on eBay because people will buy them. Without either group the site fails. A job board is no different. People go to them because they have jobs they want. Companies advertise on them because they reach the right audience.
So what job board—and let’s be honest; that’s what it is—is going to survive by restricting itself to 10 to 25 thousand candidates globally? Perhaps Jeff and Joel are thinking that it will be so successful that everyone else will just have to sign up anyway.
Good luck with that business strategy.
Is It Legal?
I have to wonder if anyone has bothered to ask this yet. Consider Job seekers are hit by illegal fees. Not just in the United Arab Emirates is it illegal to charge job seekers. Also, How job seekers can best use recruitment agencies (emphasis added):
Recruitment agencies make their money by charging employers a fee for a permanent hire or an hourly or daily margin on a temporary placement. It is illegal to charge job seekers a fee for finding them work.
That’s for Australia. The point here is that Jeff and Joel probably need to be very careful about how they define the Careers site if they don’t want to run afoul of laws set up to protect the unemployed from unscrupulous practices.
Smoke and Mirrors
From the FAQ:
If you are seeking employment, we do require a modest annual payment to file your CV. Filing your CV makes it eligible to appear in searches by hiring managers via our private search interface. This fee allows us to ensure employers that everyone they find is actively looking for a job.
We’re being sold something here.
Also consider Upgrade your career:
Employers can see how good you are at communicating, …
OK
… how well you explain things, …
OK
… how well you understand the tools that you’re using, …
Er… OK.
… and generally, if you’re a great developer or not.
Whoa. Sorry, but the fact that I know how that parsing HTML with regular expressions is retarded, I can explain how to add a jQuery click() handler and that not sanitizing user input to SQL statements is idiotic doesn’t make me a great developer. It means anything from I like teaching to I’m narcissistic enough to like hearing the sound of my own voice (virtually speaking), perhaps both.
And let’s not forget that all of this can be established by simply including a URL to your Stackoverflow profile on your CV.
Conclusion
The numbers just don’t add up on this one. My only question is how long it’ll be before that sinks in and the model changes. With so much free choice, its just not viable to charge job seekers while severely limiting the candidate pool for employers while charging them an arm and a leg for information they can get from a URL.
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