Yep. I will literally pay you $10,000 for referring us a great engineer that we hire (we being Sparkplay Media.) The big caveat is that he/she either be in or willing to move to the San Francisco area, as this is an in-office position.
Yes, it’s that hard to hire good engineers and time is important to us right now, and one of the interesting things about taking venture capital money is that speed gains a lot of importance compared to cost.
The specific positions we’re hiring for can be found on Sparkplay’s website. Broadly though, we’re looking for engineers who:
* Have extensive C++ and/or server-side Java expertise.
* Have at least 2-3 years of experience in 3d games (compensation scales with experience, of course).
* Are into MMOs.
If you’re interested in finding out what our requirements are in more detail, please check out our jobs page.
If you’re referring someone to us, please email me directly at matt -at- sparkplaymedia -dot- com and include a resume as well as your contact information. Please also only send people who fit into one of the job categories on the jobs page.
Terms of the Offer:
If we hire an engineer you referred, we’ll pay you after the engineer has been employed by us for three consecutive months. I’ll edit this post when the offer expires.
Quick way to make $10k if you’ve got engineer friends that you think might like working on an MMO where the staff has complete creative control.
–matt
10 comments
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October 2nd, 2008 at 7:10 am
David McGraw
Impressive. I hope I see more of these offers over the blogosphere when I build a much more experienced network. Good luck with your search!
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:45 am
wowpanda
Damn I missed out on the $10k!! If just a few month early ….
On another note good luck with it. I remember how hard it was to find a good engineer. But that was without any incentives so this could be different
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
rootdown
Looks like you’re all set as far as art talent goes then, huh?
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Matt
Yeah, we’re full on artists/animators I’m afraid.
–matt
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:24 pm
robusticus
Tempting but I’ve got a C++ job and I figure the only reason for it is to make people HAVE to be great engineers and get paid accordingly. More hoping to be a Silverlight kind of guy these days. Not even gonna comment on “server-side Java” as I just refer all that Runecrap to my teenaged son, who is too young to work yet.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Matt
I think you’re not quite understanding what I mean by server-side java. Our entire scalable, distributed server systems are built in Java. Runescape mainly uses client-side Java I believe. I have no idea what their servers run on.
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:41 pm
robusticus
Don’t mind me mainly just commenting on the cost of engineers, cheerfully.
October 3rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
bart
Ummm… that’s nice, but a typical finders fee is at least 25% of the initial annual salary. That would be, what, 3-4 times your referral offer depending on the caliber of the candidate? I’m not saying you have to offer market rates to see any results, but I get a little giggle at “it’s that hard to hire good engineers and time is important to us right now” with a meager number like 10k to support it.
October 3rd, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Matt
The typical contingency recruiter\’s fee is 20% of the initial annual salary (we use multiple contingency recruiters and they\’re all at 20%). Recruiters, of course, go out and find people, conduct pre-interviews, debrief post-interview, sometimes help with salary negotiations, provide guarantees around the candidate, and so on.
When you\’re just referring a friend of yours to a company, the typical \”referral fee\” that you might expect to get from the company is $0, so I\’d say that $10,000 is a hell of a lot better.
–matt
October 3rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Matt
(Sorry, had to edit the comment, and for whatever reason when editing a comment my Wordpress install likes to prepend a \ to all apostrophes or quote marks.)