Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

(This comment is going to have a lot of HR and Marketing bullshit terms-- I'd like to apologize for these in advance.)

It's rarely a good thing to read about a company closing its doors, and I hope that you guys have more luck in your next venture, whatever it may be.

I suspect that you had a really, really tough time getting companies to pay you for placement (that is where you make your revenue, right? I don't see any other way). You've created some strange hybrid of, essentially, a gamified resume', and while the little graph is a neat trick, you probably figured out pretty quickly that companies with the money to throw at recruiting services simply do not care one whit about how many internet points a potential new hire has on some random site.

As a hiring manager, I can tell you what I'm interested in when seeing a potential new hire: a well-written, concise resume, links to code samples (whether on Github or elsewhere), and how well they're going to work with the rest of the team. Work for Pie appears to take the long route around coming up with an executive summary (of sorts) for just one of these three attributes. It seems highly impersonal and I'm surprised that you got any developers to sign up for it even with the promise of free internet points.

Also, I'm sure you found out the hard way about how intensely competitive the whole third-party-recruiting game is. It is not a market for the weak of stomach; I cannot tell you the number of phone calls I get as soon as I post an opening, and nearly all of these calls are extremely, extremely aggressive. Here's the average phone call: "Hi Mr. M242, I'm Recruiter from ColdCallCorp, and I saw you had an opening for a developer, I have a person coming out of JustShutteredStartup and she did X, Y, and Z, which I noticed on your listing, she has N years of experience and is extremely excited about coming to work for you, when can I tell her you're free to interview?" (This is without me saying any words past "Hello".)

> As a hiring manager, I can tell you what I'm interested in when seeing a potential new hire: a well-written, concise resume, links to code samples (whether on Github or elsewhere), and how well they're going to work with the rest of the team. Work for Pie appears to take the long route around coming up with an executive summary (of sorts) for just one of these three attributes. It seems highly impersonal and I'm surprised that you got any developers to sign up for it even with the promise of free internet points.

Work For Pie actually compiles a score based on StackOverflow scores and Hacker News karma, in addition to Github and Bitbucket contributions. I would argue that actually touches on two of those points mentioned, because you could get a sense of a candidates coding ability, in addition to their personality from their HN and SO accounts (to be fair, assessing a candidate's personality and cultural fit is really outside the scope of a third-party recruiting platform). As a developer who was signed up for WFP and logged in regularly to see how my score was coming along, I thought it was a fun, arguably gamified approach to measuring my growth as a developer. It doesn't cost anything (for developers) so I'm surprised that you're surprised developers would sign up for it. Logging in for my first time was actually a huge wakeup call because I realized how disassociated from the development community I was, as well as how little I had to show besides a CS degree. I didn't ultimately get a job through WFP (possibly because I stubbornly chose to move to Portland, and it appears that most of their connections are in Memphis or SV). But I think their WFP 'score' is a useful and fun metric for budding developers such as myself (and theoretically it should be for hiring companies as well)

Could not agree more. Best of luck to the team, and I hope each finds happiness in their next ventures.

To pile on with the challenges of using these types of metrics to describe the worthiness of a candidate, see a comment from more than a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804389

Usually the best metrics to throw on a dashboard are the hardest to measure, and the easiest to measure (# tweets, # of github commits, # LOC, etc) have the weakest correlation with substance. I believe it's because the easiest to measure are the easiest to game.

Regarding your phone call example. In my experience, most call from unlisted phone numbers, and they will keep trying to engage you in conversation until you hang up.

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