How to Get a Job at Cloudera

"How to Get a Job" would have been an acceptable title. I also would have accepted "Cloudera Shows Hiring Practices That (Probably) Don't Suck".<p>I'm encouraged to see that at least some companies have sane hiring practices, and Cloudera is effectively communicating "hey, HN reader, it maybe won't suck if you work here". Well played :)

I have worked with Mike Olson. One of the best people I've ever worked with. He's just remarkable. If you have the stuff, you should work at Cloudera.

Hmm.... I know it's just an example, when they talk about about not wanting to go through recruiters, they mention what they'd have to pay on top of an 80K salary... and go on to say that a developer would have to be "astonishingly good" for a 100K price tag. I checked, and this company is in palo alto. are these realistic figures for what cloudera expects to pay for top programming talent?

It's interesting that they give out stock vs. cash as an employee referral bonus. I've never seen companies do that before, I'm not sure why.<p>It's usually either a meaningless amount of cash ($250? Really? For a $100k/yr engineer? At that point just give a non-cash gift), or a substantial amounts of cash (approximately 25-50% of a contingency recruiter's fee).

I get the general gist of the article - Recruiters/Head Hunters are a drain on the industry, and their fees are ridiculous.<p>One thing the author should know is that recruiter commissions are highly negotiable. What started as "1/3rd of first years salary, paid on day 1 regardless of whether the employee works out or not" can easily be negotiated into "We'll pay you a flat rate of $10K after a 6 month probationary period where we determine if the employee is a good fit or not."<p>Recruiters do have a large database of resumes, but more often than not I suppose people are using LinkedIn to find jobs, so recruiters are becoming irrelevant. If you're having a hard time finding someone with the right experience though, a good recruiter can come in handy. It's just hard to find a recruiter that actually knows the industry and isn't a trained monkey that rattles off acronyms.

I can understand why they do it that way. But over time, I fear, people will busy themselves more with managing contacts and promoting themselves than with any deep technology work.<p>I mean you can see it today if you read blog comments. There is a growing share of people spending their day making flattering pseudo insightful comments on other people's blogs.<p>And using open source projects for self promotion is very damaging for those projects. The difficulty for many open source projects is that they need maintainers over many years even when the technology isn't the hype of the day any longer. Having self-promoters pass through a project until they got the job they want is a horrible idea.<p>Also, I'm not sure that it's a smart move on the part of cloudera to actively ask people to hit on their employees. Is that really the best use of their time?

This article is just more of a sign that its not what you know, but who you know that will at least get you in the front door. I really hope you don't have to get an employee referral to be considered for an interview.