Now accepting developers from all work & college backgrounds in the USA | Developer Auction

Today we are making Developer Auction available to a larger group of developers -- including talented self-taught hackers and those interested in relocating within the US.

Asking start-ups to submit indicative offers to engineers (with full compensation details: salary, equity, and benefits), before they had a chance to interview them in person was risky. Would any employers actually do it? To maximize our chances of success with the initial auctions, we wanted to select engineers with easily recognizable pedigrees of technical success.

So how did we do it? We limited the first auction to engineers who had passed rigorous technical screenings at companies like Google and Facebook, and people who graduated with Computer Science degrees from notable Universities like Stanford and MIT. In the second auction, we also included developers with reputable GitHub accounts. While employers would still be able to interview these candidates for cultural & team fit, most felt comfortable that people with these types of backgrounds where strong technically.

On Hacker News, the commenters chided us for being too elitist. We badly wanted to make the auction more accessible, but we knew we had to start somewhere. Now having had over $100 Million in job offers in our first three auctions, we're seeing growing demand from employers. We're excited to be moving past this starting point and expanding our offering.

Developer Auction is different because we are about CURATION, on both the Engineer & Employer side. If you want to work at a VC funded start-up, you don’t necessarily want to hear from Microsoft, Cisco or HP.... and certainly not any incompetent recruiter who works at some random staffing agency.

Why are we changing it now? Besides significantly growing the team and evolving the product, we want to help more engineers get access to Silicon Valley companies where they can be challenged, grow as individuals & professionals, and have the opportunity to make meaningful contributions.

There’s tremendous talent in “Middle America” who are stuck at dead-end consulting gigs or big corporate IT departments — smart, passionate developers who are underpaid but don’t know how to even start looking for a start-up job, even though they are more than willing to relocate to Silicon Valley, Boston, New York and other tech hubs where they can make a bigger impact and fully utilize their skills while pursuing their passion. If you’re one of those, be sure to read Paul Tyma’s How to Get Your Resume Silicon Valley Ready to maximize the chances of your Developer Auction application being approved.

Now we are excited to finally open our platform to help more companies build their teams and help more developers fulfill their dreams.