21 ms·

10% unemployment yet every startup in NYC struggling to hire

116 points by jonsteinberg 16y ago

ThomPete 16y ago
Every startups is struggling because very few of those 10% live in NYC and have the relevant education or background.
- jonsteinberg 16y ago
  Yes. You're right about that
BrianMatch 16y ago
Part of the issue is that the 10% unemployment rate is not equally distributed across all demographics. If we generalize the desired startup labor pool as college-educated adults over the age of 25, the national unemployment rate drops to 5.1% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm). I can't find a great source, but I'd also wager that when you factor location (NY metro) and industry (technology), the unemployment rate drops even further--almost to the point of natural unemployment. If you fit this profile you shouldn't have a difficult time finding work, and hence we have a "war for talent" in the face of high, national unemployment.
kls 16y ago
I still say, the tech market reigniting and the quantitative easing are strangely well timed. I have to wonder if the tech market is being inflated, because it is the one market that has not suffered decades of neglect. It could be a good thing, as the world does need investment in technology if we are going to hit the next whatever revolution now that the information age looks to be at the least maturing, investments in science seem to be the natural course to bring on the advancements for the next age. Unfortunately some of those ages dawned with investment in science for less than peaceful purposes. So if the industry is being inflated, then I supposes it is better than massive investment in military spending to bring about the next age.
deleted 16y ago
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OzzyB 16y ago
"There's a massive misalignment between the labor pool and the job pool, and I blame our undergraduate institutions" I don't, I just think the Rent Is Too Damn High. http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/ http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/
- huangm 16y ago
  Actually, the price of good engineers being high + high unemployment speaks precisely to a misalignment of supply/demand.
itg 16y ago
The skills he mentions in the article should be taught on the job, not in college. The other problem I noticed, especially when it comes to fresh undergrads, is some companies want people who already have some exact skillset yet don't want to do any training of their own.
- _delirium 16y ago
  This is one of the things big engineering firms in other areas do better, I think (though they do some things worse). A company like Boeing doesn't expect you to come out of college having exactly the skills needed to design a 787 or run a wind-tunnel test. Partly this is out of necessity, because they use a lot of in-house software packages, equipment, and proprietary methods that your university couldn't teach you even if they wanted to. So they focus more on whether college graduates have a solid grounding in engineering principles, rather than whether they know how to work exactly the stuff Boeing is going to want them to do. Similar story at petrochemical firms; my dad is a process engineer mainly for PTA- and polyethylene-manufacturing units, and they surely don't expect most incoming hires to know how the PTA synthesis process works, or even necessarily to know what PTA is (it's a chemical used to make polyester). They just expect a general chemical-engineering background; they don't want to have to teach the entirety of what engineering means, what process modeling is and how you might use it, what debottlenecking is, etc., but they don't expect incoming knowledge to be very specific.
  - krschultz 16y ago
    Working for one of the big defense contractors at the moment, they definitely prefer to hire fresh grads. They will burn 6 months of you being completely unproductive on their dime to train you in the blink of an eye. Thats $50k to them before you even did anything. Plus they have a process for everything and have experienced guys holding your hand and checking your work. They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on. So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them. Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.
jrockway 16y ago
It's because "every startup" is lazy and afraid to take risks. In the programming world, for example, everyone wants to hire someone who has 150 years of experience with each of C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, and node.js. Problem is, that is not possible. So the position goes unfilled. If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with English degrees and teach them programming, they would probably do really, really well. But nobody is willing to do that, so college grads go without jobs and startups go without employees. (Also, startups expect you to really drink that Kool-Aid. They want you to work 12 hour days, skip weekends, not take vacation, and "be loyal" to the company. Why would anyone do that when they can work 9-5 for 4x as much money at an investment bank? Ironically, even the investment banks can't hire anyone, but that is for other reasons.)
- deleted 16y ago
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- mgkimsal 16y ago
  That's another really good point. There's not much in the way of apprenticeship in software. Companies will often pay for relo expenses for someone, providing they stay for X years (else they repay the relo money back). Companies could do something similar with education, whether it's local college classes, inhouse training, etc. If you leave within the first year, you pay the company back those expenses. Or... have retention bonuses for people for staying past 1 year, and invest in education for people at lower wages. Many companies would find some real gems out there, waiting to be discovered, and would engender far more loyalty than most currently get.
  - sleight42 16y ago
    There are small startups that will hire entry-level people. However, I agree, the relationships with the entry level people are not necessarily of the mentor-apprentice variety.
  - robak 16y ago
    It is illegal under the US law for an employee to pay money to his Employer. As this could be a backdoor for slavery and actually is regulated by anti-slavery laws in the US. I know this from my attorney when I asked if I should be worried about $5k I was supposed to pay back to my company as I quit before 12 months project ended. I quit, nothing happened. It was over 5 years ago and this company still exists and does business in Northern Virginia area and I know that they still require their prospect employees to sign this. Signature on this has no legal value whatsoever.
mgkimsal 16y ago
Could it have anything to do with most of them likely only wanting to hire people geographically in (or near) NYC? And hand-in-hand with that, the startups don't really want to pay something adequate for someone with the necessary experience to live modestly within commuting distance? I know more people who have offshored engineering/dev work to India and the like than send work to developers in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, etc. Then they complain about the less than stellar work, with timezone diffs, English proficiency, cultural differences and so on. There's a pretty large pool of people who are willing to work remote and - gasp - even travel to your main office sometimes, but who simply aren't going to uproot and live in NYC to make $100k. For someone raising a family, they could make $75k in Omaha or Tupelo and have a much better quality of life. http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc 9400 Java jobs in NYC, but only 900 are estimated at $150k or higher. Cost of living between Omaha (at 75k) and NYC: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=53137000&city2=53651000 http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=531370... Cost of living between Nashville (at 80k) and NYC: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=54752006&city2=53651000 http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=547520... You need roughly $150k in NYC to have an approximate lifestyle. Yet only 10% of the jobs pay that. The concept of 'hiring' itself may be due for a makeover, and a 'JIT' approach to company development may be in the cards for companies struggling to hire the right people (which they'll likely lay off the moment things go south again).
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  Adding on: We've also had a housing crisis which is keeping many people chained to their current regions due to underwater mortgages and no housing sales. 5 years ago people could move their families across country for a good job. Even if they want to now, they can't. This is just not acknowledged by most companies. I was approached a couple years ago by a company that was starting up - 'ex google founders' and all that. The product/service was pitched to me as a collaboration/communication tool to help remote teams work more effectively. Sounded great, but I was not allowed to work remote. I had to upsticks and move to SF. To work on a remote collaboration tool. WTF?
steele 16y ago
Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science & engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes (or exercise balls, yoga mats, etc) at a startup is completely off base. The job market is rough for recent graduates who were all but promised that the world is hungry for the skills their universities have tried to imbue upon them for an extremely large sum of money. Perhaps a small startup run by the campus Business School "idea guys & girls" less than a decade out of undergraduate school themselves is not the most secure option for someone whose student loan interest clock just started ticking. Should anyone be surprised that a senior or recent graduate might rather wait the several months to hear back from a large consulting company (who are also in hiring mode due to layoff too many people in 09 & are feeling client pushback on their broken offshore/onsite models)? The talent pool isn't as shallow as you would think. Startups buzz about "how to interview and retain a rockstar gurus" and end up looking for a walk-on-water engineer to work long nights for beans & equity with no guarantees for success. Smart kids are malleable, and even if they leave college learning Ruby, Common Lisp, or whatever the flavor of the week is, they will need to grow on the job. Take a chance, offer competitive or better-than-market compensation, and grow your talent from eager minds that buy into your vision enough to feel financially comfortable and invested in the success of the organization.
- pyre 16y ago
  > Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science & > engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes More to the point, blaming higher education isn't filling the cubes right now. How is ranting about higher education going to solve your business's immediate needs? Even in a perfect scenario, where higher ed. is the problem, and even if a solution to the problem was implemented, how long would it take to see results? Are you going to just let your business languish until then? (Note: 'you' is a generic you, not the poster. My comment was just inspired by misreading his first sentence on first glance.)
  - steele 16y ago
    generic you. Story of my life, haha. I agree with your point completely. Outside of the present day situation, perhaps startups can do more for their campus & recruiting presence by incenting their engineers to host technology sessions and exposing students to topics not covered in their curriculum. This would be a huge benefit for smaller companies that find it hard to compete for mindshare with large, established organizations during campus job fairs. Even companies outside of the boutique category just completely rule out great schools with talented engineers because they can't justify the recruiting budget spend considering the amount of competition for talent during those career fairs.
maxawaytoolong 16y ago
If kids in the NYC metro area don't have an opportunity to learn programming in grade school it's because the schools suck. Perhaps if parents cared about their children's education, they could just relocate to a more forward-thinking part of the country. I was tutoring AP Computer Science to the kids of Vietnamese immigrants in the midwest 12 years ago. I took "C" and "Hypercard" class in junior high school 20 years ago and I lived in a farming town in the middle of nowhere. The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office, most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work. "...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.
- krschultz 16y ago
  I don't know if teaching code in school really matters at all. I never took a class in programming in elementary, middle, or high school. I didn't take a class in programming until junior year of college. I got my first job at a startup writing code when I was a freshman in college. I was an engineering major, and I taught myself how to program in middle school, but never did I ever take a class on it. Of all the various things I have learned, learning programming has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any. I really think it is a waste of money to focus on it in school. Most of the kids that I knew who took AP Comp Sci were ruined by it. A multiple choice test for basic programming? Yuck.
  - nhangen 16y ago
    I think it helps. Being introduced at least, could make a difference. For example, I was a computer kid, but I didn't really know that programming existed. Had I been introduced to it in my teens, I likely would've at least toyed around in my spare time. Alas, I learned too late, and am trying to play catch up.
  - maxawaytoolong 16y ago
    AP CS is heinous, yes. I disagree with the rest, though. I would agree if I thought the other classes were worthwhile, but about 70% of my junior high and high school was filler at best. At least if there had been programming classes I could have taken those instead of truly pointless stuff like the JV girls volleyball coach teaching "social studies" via VHS tapes.
waterlesscloud 16y ago
How many startups really need rockstar ninjas? I mean really need them? As in the business will succeed if you have them and fail if you don't. I bet that number is actually very small. But everyone thinks they're the special case.
- aaronblohowiak 16y ago
  Businesses fail to get traction for product reasons, business fail to grow/thrive because the mis-managed complexity makes changing the system too expensive. Ex: well, i'd love to build you that feature, but then i'd have to change x, y and z and there are no tests for y or z because we thought it would unnecessarily slow us down.. so it will take 3 months instead of the 3 weeks that hotshot rails dev you just hired said it should.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Having worked at two startups that died either because they could never attract skilled senior engineers or because they lost them, I think the number is quite large. There're lots of ways for a startup to die and relatively few for it to succeed. The value of having a skilled senior engineer (or "rockstar ninja" as you put it, though that term has connotations that don't really describe the type of early engineers you want) is that they can see many of those failure modes ahead of time and avoid them. And when they do end up in a dead-end, they can quickly backtrack and fix the problem instead of wondering "what do we do now?"
- bugsy 16y ago
  Few companies need the 0.001% that is a "Rock star ninja" such as Larry Wall or Dennis Ritchie. However, to succeed you do need to be able to hire the 0.5% of developers that is competent and capable of bringing value.
chailatte 16y ago
Let's see....bad weather, high rent, high cost of living, lots of wall street jackasses, too many damn tourists, and plenty of terrorist threats. And we haven't even started talking about silicon valley's tech culture and close proximity to Asia.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  While I agree with some of your other points I can't fathom how a rational person could choose to not live/work somewhere because a few percentage points of the city's occupants are "wall street jackasses". You're going to let other people make your living decisions for you?
  - bugsy 16y ago
    Speaking for myself I know what NYC is like and it's a basically a shithole filled with narcissists, psychopaths and useless welfare recipients. There are also some rich artist media types, but it's not like developers get invited to their parties. What is there for developers? Almost nothing, plus high costs. The Bay area has way better restaurants, culture, diversity and intellectuals plus nearby beaches, mountains, wineries, skiing, it goes on and on.
    - sedachv 16y ago
      Hahaha, I grew up in Brooklyn, and visit NY frequently to see friends. No desire to move back there, agree with you 100%.
- maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  Silicon Valley is a lot closer to New York than it is to Asia.
  - WildUtah 16y ago
    Not a lot closer. Tokyo to SFO on a jet is 9 hours. New York City to SFO is six and a half hours.
Tichy 16y ago
Then again, maybe the cranberry farmers and beer shippers are the people who are really running the world.
rmc 16y ago
Programming is a rare and economically valuable skill. It's hard to train people to be programmers.
maxawaytoolong 16y ago
Perhaps the reason startups are struggling to hire in NYC is not because there are too few hackers but because there are too many startups. Most hackers simply do not have aspirations to work 80 hours a week to make some MBA jackass rich off of his website which promises to revolutionize the world for apartment brokers, attempt to make print media relevant online, or sell last year's handbags at a discount.
- clofresh 16y ago
  I worked at a profitable, medium size company with a startup-like hacker culture and it was still very difficult to hire talented programmers despite being able to offer interesting work that provided a net benefit to society, normal hours, free soda and career development. We'd have to go through many, many candidates who looked good on paper (lots of experience, top tier education) but were awful once you presented them with basic programming problems. It was actually pretty demoralizing to have to reject the volume of people that we did. I do agree that there are a lot of silly startups these days, but it doesn't mean that there isn't also a shortage of quality hackers.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    Wow free soda! I can't imagine why top talent wasn't beating a path to your door!
    - icefox 16y ago
      free soda is typically an indication of a place that has not yet become institutionalized. Most startups have this perk and at some point some manager comes in and kills it off for <insert reason of the week>. It is a sign that things are changing which often coincides with top talent moving off. A canary in a coal mine if you will that there might be good developers there.
      - clofresh 16y ago
        Yup, exactly. See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750
d2viant 16y ago
That 10% is the broader unemployment rate and includes all occupations. I believe the latest stats from the BLS peg unemployment among software developers at about 4%. Most good developers are gainfully employed, it's up to you to entice them away from what they're currently doing.
- bugsy 16y ago
  "Most good developers are gainfully employed" I agree, but I'd say that all good developers who want to be employed are employed. Companies bring up 10% unemployment because they think "Gosh with all this unemployment there will be lots of 'hungry' developers and we should be able to hire top talent for $80k or some other piddling sum." The fact is that unemployment among competent developers (and marketers and sales) is 0%, so if a company wants to hire one they've have to pay more than the other guy and offer better working conditions. The incompetently run companies don't comprehend this, they are much too "bargain" oriented on non-commodity products.
pdelgallego 16y ago
Are you sure startups in NYC are struggling to hire? A years ago, I was in the states under a F1 visa. I was looking forward to do an internship in NYC. I couldn't even get an interview. I spoke with at least twenty recruiters. I was at that time an active OS contributor, I had commit access in projects like Rubinius or in Sputnik Tests (Google conformance test suite to test V8). I had also two years of commercial java programming experience, and personal projects in rails, sinatra and django. This was just after I finished a internship at Google. What compensation was I asking for? Enough money two rent a room and buy food.
- mikecane 16y ago
  Oh god, recruiters. They will kill your dreams every time. They have zero ability to judge skill. They are basically car salesmen. If your resume doesn't fit their template, you will never, ever get work, and you could be a damned genius with recommendations from others too.
ig1 16y ago
Yes there's a mismatch between the jobs available and the skills of the unemployed. But the rest of the article is pretty much wrong. Plenty of people aren't cut out for programming or just don't like it. Trying to force them into jobs where there not a good fit isn't good for anyone. Business schools should teach a wide range of case studies from a range of sectors. Yes that includes farming and food logistics. The beer company InBev ships $36 billion dollars a year of beer. That's more than market cap of Facebook. The Beer industry is probably worth more than the combined value of every startup featured on Techcrunch in the last year. Let's not exaggerate the importance of our industry in the wider scheme of things.
mmaunder 16y ago
NYC startups are struggling to hire because there is a real shortage of skilled labor in the country including technology labor. The 10% unemployment reflects a surplus of labor that would normally be taken up by manufacturing jobs which we don't have since we became a service economy. The 08 crash was an excuse to fire legacy employees. We will never get the jobs back that we've lost.
jorgeortiz85 16y ago
I agree with the author that programming (not just "tech") literacy should be part of every curriculum, I don't think this will solve the unemployment problem. Technology is very good at creating value, but not very good at creating jobs. All 72 tech companies in the S&P 500 combined employ about 2.3m people [1], whereas just Wal-mart employes about 2.1m people. Those numbers are worldwide employment, but for reference, the US had 15m unemployed in November. Even the breakout, unimaginable success that is Google only employs about 28,000 people. And I'm sure that for every hire Google has made, they've displaced many more people that used to depend on print advertising. (To be clear, I'm not saying that technology is net bad for the economy. Technology creates a lot of value for the individuals that work and invest in it, and for the economy as a whole. However, technology is not a massive creator of jobs.) So unless startups become a multiple of the size of the entire S&P 500 technology sector, they're not going to make a noticeable dent on unemployment. [1] I compiled a spreadsheet (https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEtYWUJjcTRNNkxMRS1YZGRrd0E&hl=en&authkey=CJflxN0N https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEt...) based on information available on Wikipedia[2] and through Google searches [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies and individual company pages
- jonsteinberg 16y ago
  Jorge this is a fair point. However, over time I have to believe that the shift to post-industrial will create more jobs. You're right that this doesn't absorb anything close to 10% in the short or medium term. Also, I wasn't arguing in my post that this was a solution to 10%; just that in my world and sector there's lots of jobs despite this big unemployment number. And we need more technical literacy (not just programming skills as some commenters have misinterpreted) throughout our education system. For example, every business class I took as recently as 2003 involved products in boxes and shipping.
- rorrr 16y ago
  Yeah, but walmart people will soon be replaced by robots. More and more automation will create more and more unemployment among uneducated. It's pretty fucking hard to automate programming. Heck, we can't even solve voice and character recognition.
phillijw 16y ago
Maybe the startups need to try somewhere else besides NYC or Silicon Valley where the markets are already saturated with startups. There are a lot of other places to find employees.
charlesju 16y ago
http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617 http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617 High School dropouts are 15.7% unemployed. College grads are at 5.1%, basically full employment given job changes. http://bit.ly/3FWnbX http://bit.ly/3FWnbX
- phil 16y ago
  That's not "basically full employment" -- it's the highest unemployment rate among college grads in the last 2 decades. Here's a BLS report that shows that more clearly: http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=get_data&reformat=true&from_results_page=true&from_year=1992&to_year=2010&Go.x=2&Go.y=9&initial_request=false&data_tool=surveymost&series_id=LNS14027659&&series_id=LNS14027660series_id=LNS14027689&series_id=LNS14027662&output_type=default&original_output_type=default http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_...
  - charlesju 16y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment "The idea that the full-employment unemployment rate (NAIRU) is not a unique number has been seen in recent empirical research. Staiger, Stock, and Watson found that the range of possible values of the NAIRU (from 4.3 to 7.3% unemployment) was too large to be useful to macroeconomic policy-makers. Robert Eisner suggested that for 1956-95 there was a zone from about 5% to about 10% unemployment between the low-unemployment realm of accelerating inflation and the high-unemployment realm of disinflation. In between, he found that inflation falls with falling unemployment."
    - achompas 16y ago
      You can't take the American labor force's NAIRU and apply it to college grads--historically, they have lower unemployment.
KevinMS 16y ago
Good, let them struggle. Maybe someday they will learn that the only developers aren't young and just out of college. There are plenty of good developers that are self taught, and there are also plenty of good developers who aren't in their 20's, but if you every look at the "about us" of these startups, and they have pictures, what do you see?
lkrubner 16y ago
Responding to previous comments, I would advise against using an Indian firm for a startup. I think overseas firms can do well when assigned routine work, like putting in a CMS where all the requirements are straightforward, or handling inventory and accounting. For exceptional circumstances (which is what a startup faces) you want people who can meet everyday in the same room. Geographical distance is a major problem for small startups. I worked on a project last year where the project manager was thrilled at the idea that he could hire Indian programmers for $10 an hour. I was in New York City, we had another programmer in North Carolina and another in Europe. The "CEO" was an investor who attended meetings 2 or 3 times a month. The project manager was basically the CEO, but he had no real power, since everything needed to be decided by the CEO. Myself and the project manager would have 3 hour conversations and decide on something, but then need to explain it to the CEO, whom we only saw a few times a month. The project went nowhere. From this, I conclude, it is best to have small team working in the same room, when doing a startup. The team in India was unusually bad. Every time they committed code to Subversion, something broke and I would have to fix it.
- gnufied 16y ago
  Duh, You are right; if someone wants to hire lots of cheap Indian labour for $10 an hour, you will get bad programmers. I think, at that rate you will get bad programmers anywhere in the world. I am building (http://solaro.com http://solaro.com) and we just launched our application out of beta. Development happens from India and surely there are kinks and warts, but at the end of day it works. I think there are lot of things people get wrong when doing outsourcing: 1. Going cheap. Good programmers are costly. In India you will have to fight with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and likes for the talent, you can't pay cheap and expect good programmers.So, please do not come to India, if goal is to stay cheap. 2. Not involving the team. You will have to bring down your walls and involve everyone intellectually. This is real, if people aren't involved with the product, you are going to get crappy result. I am saying nothing new, but what already Jim McCarthy said in Dynamics of software development. But this is more true for projects, where your team is spread across different geographical locations. 3. Iterate. Short iterations, deliver, continuous integration and continuous deployment. Do not sleep on the project. 4. Small teams, do not build a large team just because it is cheap. I know I am saying the obvious here, but I have seen people getting it wrong too often. 5. If the client (or product owner) is located in different geographical location, he/she has to work harder than everyone else.
lkrubner 16y ago
So far, on Hacker News, the conversation has focused on hiring programmers, but the original article is broader than that: "Despite all this unemployment, every startup I know needs to hire not only engineers, but also sales and operations team members. And this is not just bubble seed startup dollars at work." In 2008 I tried to find a good marketer to work with a client of mine. This is a difficult task. There are many people who claim they understand online marketing. Finding anyone who is any good is very difficult. The noise to signal ratio is amazing. Likewise when it comes to fundraising, pitching to investors, etc. It is tough to find the few people who are good. Possibly part of the problem is that, even in this economy, the folks who are truly good are making really good money and don't want to invest time with a startup. No doubt there are many folks out there who will one day prove their talent but they have not yet had the chance. The question then becomes, how to find them?
deleted 16y ago
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iskander 16y ago
I've hired a few technical employees in the Chicago area, and I found that it's almost impossible to find someone with basic reasoning skills. Most people I interviewed had very poor eyes for details, had a hard time spotting or understanding their own mistakes, making sense of novel situations, thinking abstractly or generalizing from specifics etc... This was true even among CS graduates from schools with decent reputations. I don't know why the pool is so bad or if it has always been this way.
- bugsy 16y ago
  How much do you pay, what relocation is offered, what interviewing expenses do you cover, what benefits are paid, what severance package is offered, and do you provide engineers with all the tools, books and training they request. You don't need to answer me, just answer these honestly to yourself and that will tell you why you can't find anyone competent.
  - iskander 16y ago
    If qualified applicant need assurance of all these things before even applying, that confirms in my mind that such applicants have the privilege of scarcity. Has your hiring experience been substantially different from mine?
    - bugsy 16y ago
      From what you describe yes. I am able to hire talent I need, but I do offer competitive pay and benefits in line with what other places that are able to hire are doing. It's standard for serious firms to cover interview expenses for example. We also do recruiting rather than just tossing ads out and hoping for the best, which is ineffective since the vast majority of job seekers in IT are looking for a job because they don't have one. The ones who are not seeking but who are open to change are the ones to look for. I meet them on blogs, at conferences, and by contacting them after reading articles they have published. Hiring a very good developer is like hiring a very good actor, which doesn't come for peanuts and which will be worth much more than their salary, whereas hiring an average one will be worth less than their salary. 7/8 of the people that get CS degrees in the US are not fit to develop software at all. Of the remaining 1/8, nearly all of them have found a place they like and are not looking to move without incentive. But that doesn't mean there's a shortage. It just means you have to pay market rate and treat them respectfully and make sure all hygienic issues are dealt with. Low pay is poor hygiene. Lack of full relocation is poor hygiene (Why should the new employee subsidize the cost of coming to work for you? They shouldn't.) Absurd contractual terms such as claiming ownership of things they do on their own time is poor hygiene. An office full of dimwits is poor hygiene. Clueless management is poor hygiene. Not providing proper tools is poor hygiene. Hygiene issues are ones that need to be taken care just to not be a lousy place to work. Get all this taken care of and then one can start thinking of actually making it a good place to work. Having a good reputation as a place to work is hard to get, easy to screw up, and is worth a lot to convince someone with skills that it is worth the massive risk to uproot their life, leave a job they like and come work for a new venture.
Supermighty 16y ago
From my view the real problem is how valuable will English majors be at my startup. How long will it take them to get up to speed where someone doesn't have to hold their hand anymore. I am really weary of hiring someone with zero programming experience. But not as apprehensive about hiring a programmer with little experience but some experience. I'd be more likely to hire someone who was a self starter when it comes to learning programing over and English major who just couldn't find a job.
gunmetal 16y ago
The resume/interview hiring process is severely broken in US. It is not the schools, it's the companies hiring, they are looking for some perfect holy grail but really need to just start hiring people and pick through the chaff. These startups deserve what they get making it impossible to even find their 'perfect employee'.
itsnotvalid 16y ago
TL;DR version of anything like that: Those people aren't the ones that startups want to hire right now.
puredemo 16y ago
Because those 10% of unemployed folks are definitely highly-skilled programmers. Right.
danbmil99 16y ago
1) because all us smart NYC programmers got the hell out of there during the "Silicon Alley" days. 2) Practically anyone who lives within 100 miles of Wall Street and can program, and isn't a completely dysfunctional human (and many who are), is doing something in the financial sector. It's a huge brain drain, and it's practically impossible to compete with on the basis of salary. To boot, you can't easily motivate these folks with options because A) NY doesn't have a reputation for churning out tech winners and B) these same people study finance for a living, so when you offer them some options or founder's stock, suddenly you're into a discussion of volatility premiums and Black/Scholes analysis of the present-day value of said stock/options. It's just not a suitable place for a vibrant startup community.
rick888 16y ago
I've noticed that many startups want people that are: a senior developer in new technology X, is good at Photoshop, and can design customer facing webpages. They also want to pay you well below market wages (because you should be happy to work for a fun company that has a fooseball table) and give you company equity in place of sub-market wages (which is a joke, because most startups are out of business within 5 years).
rwhitman 16y ago
To those hiring in NYC - I just relocated to the east coast from CA and am looking for opportunities in NYC. Feel free to reach out.
known 16y ago
They prefer to hire a highly skilled wage slave.
cafard 16y ago
I know a number of quite proficient programmers with degrees or backgrounds in the classics. Some, to be sure, are of the generation where 8th-grade programming class wasn't really an option. I'd much rather see the primary and secondary schools teach human languages and mathematics than see them try to teach coding.

116 points by jonsteinberg 16y ago

ThomPete 16y ago

Every startups is struggling because very few of those 10% live in NYC and have the relevant education or background.

jonsteinberg 16y ago
Yes. You're right about that

BrianMatch 16y ago

Part of the issue is that the 10% unemployment rate is not equally distributed across all demographics. If we generalize the desired startup labor pool as college-educated adults over the age of 25, the national unemployment rate drops to 5.1% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm). I can't find a great source, but I'd also wager that when you factor location (NY metro) and industry (technology), the unemployment rate drops even further--almost to the point of natural unemployment. If you fit this profile you shouldn't have a difficult time finding work, and hence we have a "war for talent" in the face of high, national unemployment.

kls 16y ago

I still say, the tech market reigniting and the quantitative easing are strangely well timed. I have to wonder if the tech market is being inflated, because it is the one market that has not suffered decades of neglect. It could be a good thing, as the world does need investment in technology if we are going to hit the next whatever revolution now that the information age looks to be at the least maturing, investments in science seem to be the natural course to bring on the advancements for the next age. Unfortunately some of those ages dawned with investment in science for less than peaceful purposes. So if the industry is being inflated, then I supposes it is better than massive investment in military spending to bring about the next age.

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OzzyB 16y ago

"There's a massive misalignment between the labor pool and the job pool, and I blame our undergraduate institutions" I don't, I just think the Rent Is Too Damn High. http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/ http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/

huangm 16y ago
Actually, the price of good engineers being high + high unemployment speaks precisely to a misalignment of supply/demand.

itg 16y ago

The skills he mentions in the article should be taught on the job, not in college. The other problem I noticed, especially when it comes to fresh undergrads, is some companies want people who already have some exact skillset yet don't want to do any training of their own.

_delirium 16y ago
This is one of the things big engineering firms in other areas do better, I think (though they do some things worse). A company like Boeing doesn't expect you to come out of college having exactly the skills needed to design a 787 or run a wind-tunnel test. Partly this is out of necessity, because they use a lot of in-house software packages, equipment, and proprietary methods that your university couldn't teach you even if they wanted to. So they focus more on whether college graduates have a solid grounding in engineering principles, rather than whether they know how to work exactly the stuff Boeing is going to want them to do. Similar story at petrochemical firms; my dad is a process engineer mainly for PTA- and polyethylene-manufacturing units, and they surely don't expect most incoming hires to know how the PTA synthesis process works, or even necessarily to know what PTA is (it's a chemical used to make polyester). They just expect a general chemical-engineering background; they don't want to have to teach the entirety of what engineering means, what process modeling is and how you might use it, what debottlenecking is, etc., but they don't expect incoming knowledge to be very specific.
- krschultz 16y ago
  Working for one of the big defense contractors at the moment, they definitely prefer to hire fresh grads. They will burn 6 months of you being completely unproductive on their dime to train you in the blink of an eye. Thats $50k to them before you even did anything. Plus they have a process for everything and have experienced guys holding your hand and checking your work. They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on. So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them. Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.

jrockway 16y ago

It's because "every startup" is lazy and afraid to take risks. In the programming world, for example, everyone wants to hire someone who has 150 years of experience with each of C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, and node.js. Problem is, that is not possible. So the position goes unfilled. If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with English degrees and teach them programming, they would probably do really, really well. But nobody is willing to do that, so college grads go without jobs and startups go without employees. (Also, startups expect you to really drink that Kool-Aid. They want you to work 12 hour days, skip weekends, not take vacation, and "be loyal" to the company. Why would anyone do that when they can work 9-5 for 4x as much money at an investment bank? Ironically, even the investment banks can't hire anyone, but that is for other reasons.)

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mgkimsal 16y ago
That's another really good point. There's not much in the way of apprenticeship in software. Companies will often pay for relo expenses for someone, providing they stay for X years (else they repay the relo money back). Companies could do something similar with education, whether it's local college classes, inhouse training, etc. If you leave within the first year, you pay the company back those expenses. Or... have retention bonuses for people for staying past 1 year, and invest in education for people at lower wages. Many companies would find some real gems out there, waiting to be discovered, and would engender far more loyalty than most currently get.
- sleight42 16y ago
  There are small startups that will hire entry-level people. However, I agree, the relationships with the entry level people are not necessarily of the mentor-apprentice variety.
- robak 16y ago
  It is illegal under the US law for an employee to pay money to his Employer. As this could be a backdoor for slavery and actually is regulated by anti-slavery laws in the US. I know this from my attorney when I asked if I should be worried about $5k I was supposed to pay back to my company as I quit before 12 months project ended. I quit, nothing happened. It was over 5 years ago and this company still exists and does business in Northern Virginia area and I know that they still require their prospect employees to sign this. Signature on this has no legal value whatsoever.

mgkimsal 16y ago

Could it have anything to do with most of them likely only wanting to hire people geographically in (or near) NYC? And hand-in-hand with that, the startups don't really want to pay something adequate for someone with the necessary experience to live modestly within commuting distance? I know more people who have offshored engineering/dev work to India and the like than send work to developers in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, etc. Then they complain about the less than stellar work, with timezone diffs, English proficiency, cultural differences and so on. There's a pretty large pool of people who are willing to work remote and - gasp - even travel to your main office sometimes, but who simply aren't going to uproot and live in NYC to make $100k. For someone raising a family, they could make $75k in Omaha or Tupelo and have a much better quality of life. http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc 9400 Java jobs in NYC, but only 900 are estimated at $150k or higher. Cost of living between Omaha (at 75k) and NYC: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=53137000&city2=53651000 http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=531370... Cost of living between Nashville (at 80k) and NYC: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=54752006&city2=53651000 http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=547520... You need roughly $150k in NYC to have an approximate lifestyle. Yet only 10% of the jobs pay that. The concept of 'hiring' itself may be due for a makeover, and a 'JIT' approach to company development may be in the cards for companies struggling to hire the right people (which they'll likely lay off the moment things go south again).

mgkimsal 16y ago
Adding on: We've also had a housing crisis which is keeping many people chained to their current regions due to underwater mortgages and no housing sales. 5 years ago people could move their families across country for a good job. Even if they want to now, they can't. This is just not acknowledged by most companies. I was approached a couple years ago by a company that was starting up - 'ex google founders' and all that. The product/service was pitched to me as a collaboration/communication tool to help remote teams work more effectively. Sounded great, but I was not allowed to work remote. I had to upsticks and move to SF. To work on a remote collaboration tool. WTF?

steele 16y ago

Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science & engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes (or exercise balls, yoga mats, etc) at a startup is completely off base. The job market is rough for recent graduates who were all but promised that the world is hungry for the skills their universities have tried to imbue upon them for an extremely large sum of money. Perhaps a small startup run by the campus Business School "idea guys & girls" less than a decade out of undergraduate school themselves is not the most secure option for someone whose student loan interest clock just started ticking. Should anyone be surprised that a senior or recent graduate might rather wait the several months to hear back from a large consulting company (who are also in hiring mode due to layoff too many people in 09 & are feeling client pushback on their broken offshore/onsite models)? The talent pool isn't as shallow as you would think. Startups buzz about "how to interview and retain a rockstar gurus" and end up looking for a walk-on-water engineer to work long nights for beans & equity with no guarantees for success. Smart kids are malleable, and even if they leave college learning Ruby, Common Lisp, or whatever the flavor of the week is, they will need to grow on the job. Take a chance, offer competitive or better-than-market compensation, and grow your talent from eager minds that buy into your vision enough to feel financially comfortable and invested in the success of the organization.

pyre 16y ago
> Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science & > engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes More to the point, blaming higher education isn't filling the cubes right now. How is ranting about higher education going to solve your business's immediate needs? Even in a perfect scenario, where higher ed. is the problem, and even if a solution to the problem was implemented, how long would it take to see results? Are you going to just let your business languish until then? (Note: 'you' is a generic you, not the poster. My comment was just inspired by misreading his first sentence on first glance.)
- steele 16y ago
  generic you. Story of my life, haha. I agree with your point completely. Outside of the present day situation, perhaps startups can do more for their campus & recruiting presence by incenting their engineers to host technology sessions and exposing students to topics not covered in their curriculum. This would be a huge benefit for smaller companies that find it hard to compete for mindshare with large, established organizations during campus job fairs. Even companies outside of the boutique category just completely rule out great schools with talented engineers because they can't justify the recruiting budget spend considering the amount of competition for talent during those career fairs.

maxawaytoolong 16y ago

If kids in the NYC metro area don't have an opportunity to learn programming in grade school it's because the schools suck. Perhaps if parents cared about their children's education, they could just relocate to a more forward-thinking part of the country. I was tutoring AP Computer Science to the kids of Vietnamese immigrants in the midwest 12 years ago. I took "C" and "Hypercard" class in junior high school 20 years ago and I lived in a farming town in the middle of nowhere. The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office, most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work. "...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.

krschultz 16y ago
I don't know if teaching code in school really matters at all. I never took a class in programming in elementary, middle, or high school. I didn't take a class in programming until junior year of college. I got my first job at a startup writing code when I was a freshman in college. I was an engineering major, and I taught myself how to program in middle school, but never did I ever take a class on it. Of all the various things I have learned, learning programming has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any. I really think it is a waste of money to focus on it in school. Most of the kids that I knew who took AP Comp Sci were ruined by it. A multiple choice test for basic programming? Yuck.
- nhangen 16y ago
  I think it helps. Being introduced at least, could make a difference. For example, I was a computer kid, but I didn't really know that programming existed. Had I been introduced to it in my teens, I likely would've at least toyed around in my spare time. Alas, I learned too late, and am trying to play catch up.
- maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  AP CS is heinous, yes. I disagree with the rest, though. I would agree if I thought the other classes were worthwhile, but about 70% of my junior high and high school was filler at best. At least if there had been programming classes I could have taken those instead of truly pointless stuff like the JV girls volleyball coach teaching "social studies" via VHS tapes.

waterlesscloud 16y ago

How many startups really need rockstar ninjas? I mean really need them? As in the business will succeed if you have them and fail if you don't. I bet that number is actually very small. But everyone thinks they're the special case.

aaronblohowiak 16y ago
Businesses fail to get traction for product reasons, business fail to grow/thrive because the mis-managed complexity makes changing the system too expensive. Ex: well, i'd love to build you that feature, but then i'd have to change x, y and z and there are no tests for y or z because we thought it would unnecessarily slow us down.. so it will take 3 months instead of the 3 weeks that hotshot rails dev you just hired said it should.
nostrademons 16y ago
Having worked at two startups that died either because they could never attract skilled senior engineers or because they lost them, I think the number is quite large. There're lots of ways for a startup to die and relatively few for it to succeed. The value of having a skilled senior engineer (or "rockstar ninja" as you put it, though that term has connotations that don't really describe the type of early engineers you want) is that they can see many of those failure modes ahead of time and avoid them. And when they do end up in a dead-end, they can quickly backtrack and fix the problem instead of wondering "what do we do now?"
bugsy 16y ago
Few companies need the 0.001% that is a "Rock star ninja" such as Larry Wall or Dennis Ritchie. However, to succeed you do need to be able to hire the 0.5% of developers that is competent and capable of bringing value.

chailatte 16y ago

Let's see....bad weather, high rent, high cost of living, lots of wall street jackasses, too many damn tourists, and plenty of terrorist threats. And we haven't even started talking about silicon valley's tech culture and close proximity to Asia.

brown9-2 16y ago
While I agree with some of your other points I can't fathom how a rational person could choose to not live/work somewhere because a few percentage points of the city's occupants are "wall street jackasses". You're going to let other people make your living decisions for you?
- bugsy 16y ago
  Speaking for myself I know what NYC is like and it's a basically a shithole filled with narcissists, psychopaths and useless welfare recipients. There are also some rich artist media types, but it's not like developers get invited to their parties. What is there for developers? Almost nothing, plus high costs. The Bay area has way better restaurants, culture, diversity and intellectuals plus nearby beaches, mountains, wineries, skiing, it goes on and on.
  - sedachv 16y ago
    Hahaha, I grew up in Brooklyn, and visit NY frequently to see friends. No desire to move back there, agree with you 100%.
maxawaytoolong 16y ago
Silicon Valley is a lot closer to New York than it is to Asia.
- WildUtah 16y ago
  Not a lot closer. Tokyo to SFO on a jet is 9 hours. New York City to SFO is six and a half hours.

Tichy 16y ago

Then again, maybe the cranberry farmers and beer shippers are the people who are really running the world.

rmc 16y ago

Programming is a rare and economically valuable skill. It's hard to train people to be programmers.

maxawaytoolong 16y ago

Perhaps the reason startups are struggling to hire in NYC is not because there are too few hackers but because there are too many startups. Most hackers simply do not have aspirations to work 80 hours a week to make some MBA jackass rich off of his website which promises to revolutionize the world for apartment brokers, attempt to make print media relevant online, or sell last year's handbags at a discount.

clofresh 16y ago
I worked at a profitable, medium size company with a startup-like hacker culture and it was still very difficult to hire talented programmers despite being able to offer interesting work that provided a net benefit to society, normal hours, free soda and career development. We'd have to go through many, many candidates who looked good on paper (lots of experience, top tier education) but were awful once you presented them with basic programming problems. It was actually pretty demoralizing to have to reject the volume of people that we did. I do agree that there are a lot of silly startups these days, but it doesn't mean that there isn't also a shortage of quality hackers.
- bugsy 16y ago
  Wow free soda! I can't imagine why top talent wasn't beating a path to your door!
  - icefox 16y ago
    free soda is typically an indication of a place that has not yet become institutionalized. Most startups have this perk and at some point some manager comes in and kills it off for <insert reason of the week>. It is a sign that things are changing which often coincides with top talent moving off. A canary in a coal mine if you will that there might be good developers there.
    - clofresh 16y ago
      Yup, exactly. See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750

d2viant 16y ago

That 10% is the broader unemployment rate and includes all occupations. I believe the latest stats from the BLS peg unemployment among software developers at about 4%. Most good developers are gainfully employed, it's up to you to entice them away from what they're currently doing.

bugsy 16y ago
"Most good developers are gainfully employed" I agree, but I'd say that all good developers who want to be employed are employed. Companies bring up 10% unemployment because they think "Gosh with all this unemployment there will be lots of 'hungry' developers and we should be able to hire top talent for $80k or some other piddling sum." The fact is that unemployment among competent developers (and marketers and sales) is 0%, so if a company wants to hire one they've have to pay more than the other guy and offer better working conditions. The incompetently run companies don't comprehend this, they are much too "bargain" oriented on non-commodity products.

pdelgallego 16y ago

Are you sure startups in NYC are struggling to hire? A years ago, I was in the states under a F1 visa. I was looking forward to do an internship in NYC. I couldn't even get an interview. I spoke with at least twenty recruiters. I was at that time an active OS contributor, I had commit access in projects like Rubinius or in Sputnik Tests (Google conformance test suite to test V8). I had also two years of commercial java programming experience, and personal projects in rails, sinatra and django. This was just after I finished a internship at Google. What compensation was I asking for? Enough money two rent a room and buy food.

mikecane 16y ago
Oh god, recruiters. They will kill your dreams every time. They have zero ability to judge skill. They are basically car salesmen. If your resume doesn't fit their template, you will never, ever get work, and you could be a damned genius with recommendations from others too.

ig1 16y ago

Yes there's a mismatch between the jobs available and the skills of the unemployed. But the rest of the article is pretty much wrong. Plenty of people aren't cut out for programming or just don't like it. Trying to force them into jobs where there not a good fit isn't good for anyone. Business schools should teach a wide range of case studies from a range of sectors. Yes that includes farming and food logistics. The beer company InBev ships $36 billion dollars a year of beer. That's more than market cap of Facebook. The Beer industry is probably worth more than the combined value of every startup featured on Techcrunch in the last year. Let's not exaggerate the importance of our industry in the wider scheme of things.

mmaunder 16y ago

NYC startups are struggling to hire because there is a real shortage of skilled labor in the country including technology labor. The 10% unemployment reflects a surplus of labor that would normally be taken up by manufacturing jobs which we don't have since we became a service economy. The 08 crash was an excuse to fire legacy employees. We will never get the jobs back that we've lost.

jorgeortiz85 16y ago

I agree with the author that programming (not just "tech") literacy should be part of every curriculum, I don't think this will solve the unemployment problem. Technology is very good at creating value, but not very good at creating jobs. All 72 tech companies in the S&P 500 combined employ about 2.3m people [1], whereas just Wal-mart employes about 2.1m people. Those numbers are worldwide employment, but for reference, the US had 15m unemployed in November. Even the breakout, unimaginable success that is Google only employs about 28,000 people. And I'm sure that for every hire Google has made, they've displaced many more people that used to depend on print advertising. (To be clear, I'm not saying that technology is net bad for the economy. Technology creates a lot of value for the individuals that work and invest in it, and for the economy as a whole. However, technology is not a massive creator of jobs.) So unless startups become a multiple of the size of the entire S&P 500 technology sector, they're not going to make a noticeable dent on unemployment. [1] I compiled a spreadsheet (https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEtYWUJjcTRNNkxMRS1YZGRrd0E&hl=en&authkey=CJflxN0N https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEt...) based on information available on Wikipedia[2] and through Google searches [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies and individual company pages

jonsteinberg 16y ago
Jorge this is a fair point. However, over time I have to believe that the shift to post-industrial will create more jobs. You're right that this doesn't absorb anything close to 10% in the short or medium term. Also, I wasn't arguing in my post that this was a solution to 10%; just that in my world and sector there's lots of jobs despite this big unemployment number. And we need more technical literacy (not just programming skills as some commenters have misinterpreted) throughout our education system. For example, every business class I took as recently as 2003 involved products in boxes and shipping.
rorrr 16y ago
Yeah, but walmart people will soon be replaced by robots. More and more automation will create more and more unemployment among uneducated. It's pretty fucking hard to automate programming. Heck, we can't even solve voice and character recognition.

phillijw 16y ago

Maybe the startups need to try somewhere else besides NYC or Silicon Valley where the markets are already saturated with startups. There are a lot of other places to find employees.

charlesju 16y ago

http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617 http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617 High School dropouts are 15.7% unemployed. College grads are at 5.1%, basically full employment given job changes. http://bit.ly/3FWnbX http://bit.ly/3FWnbX

phil 16y ago
That's not "basically full employment" -- it's the highest unemployment rate among college grads in the last 2 decades. Here's a BLS report that shows that more clearly: http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=get_data&reformat=true&from_results_page=true&from_year=1992&to_year=2010&Go.x=2&Go.y=9&initial_request=false&data_tool=surveymost&series_id=LNS14027659&&series_id=LNS14027660series_id=LNS14027689&series_id=LNS14027662&output_type=default&original_output_type=default http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_...
- charlesju 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment "The idea that the full-employment unemployment rate (NAIRU) is not a unique number has been seen in recent empirical research. Staiger, Stock, and Watson found that the range of possible values of the NAIRU (from 4.3 to 7.3% unemployment) was too large to be useful to macroeconomic policy-makers. Robert Eisner suggested that for 1956-95 there was a zone from about 5% to about 10% unemployment between the low-unemployment realm of accelerating inflation and the high-unemployment realm of disinflation. In between, he found that inflation falls with falling unemployment."
  - achompas 16y ago
    You can't take the American labor force's NAIRU and apply it to college grads--historically, they have lower unemployment.

KevinMS 16y ago

Good, let them struggle. Maybe someday they will learn that the only developers aren't young and just out of college. There are plenty of good developers that are self taught, and there are also plenty of good developers who aren't in their 20's, but if you every look at the "about us" of these startups, and they have pictures, what do you see?

lkrubner 16y ago

Responding to previous comments, I would advise against using an Indian firm for a startup. I think overseas firms can do well when assigned routine work, like putting in a CMS where all the requirements are straightforward, or handling inventory and accounting. For exceptional circumstances (which is what a startup faces) you want people who can meet everyday in the same room. Geographical distance is a major problem for small startups. I worked on a project last year where the project manager was thrilled at the idea that he could hire Indian programmers for $10 an hour. I was in New York City, we had another programmer in North Carolina and another in Europe. The "CEO" was an investor who attended meetings 2 or 3 times a month. The project manager was basically the CEO, but he had no real power, since everything needed to be decided by the CEO. Myself and the project manager would have 3 hour conversations and decide on something, but then need to explain it to the CEO, whom we only saw a few times a month. The project went nowhere. From this, I conclude, it is best to have small team working in the same room, when doing a startup. The team in India was unusually bad. Every time they committed code to Subversion, something broke and I would have to fix it.

gnufied 16y ago
Duh, You are right; if someone wants to hire lots of cheap Indian labour for $10 an hour, you will get bad programmers. I think, at that rate you will get bad programmers anywhere in the world. I am building (http://solaro.com http://solaro.com) and we just launched our application out of beta. Development happens from India and surely there are kinks and warts, but at the end of day it works. I think there are lot of things people get wrong when doing outsourcing: 1. Going cheap. Good programmers are costly. In India you will have to fight with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and likes for the talent, you can't pay cheap and expect good programmers.So, please do not come to India, if goal is to stay cheap. 2. Not involving the team. You will have to bring down your walls and involve everyone intellectually. This is real, if people aren't involved with the product, you are going to get crappy result. I am saying nothing new, but what already Jim McCarthy said in Dynamics of software development. But this is more true for projects, where your team is spread across different geographical locations. 3. Iterate. Short iterations, deliver, continuous integration and continuous deployment. Do not sleep on the project. 4. Small teams, do not build a large team just because it is cheap. I know I am saying the obvious here, but I have seen people getting it wrong too often. 5. If the client (or product owner) is located in different geographical location, he/she has to work harder than everyone else.

lkrubner 16y ago

So far, on Hacker News, the conversation has focused on hiring programmers, but the original article is broader than that: "Despite all this unemployment, every startup I know needs to hire not only engineers, but also sales and operations team members. And this is not just bubble seed startup dollars at work." In 2008 I tried to find a good marketer to work with a client of mine. This is a difficult task. There are many people who claim they understand online marketing. Finding anyone who is any good is very difficult. The noise to signal ratio is amazing. Likewise when it comes to fundraising, pitching to investors, etc. It is tough to find the few people who are good. Possibly part of the problem is that, even in this economy, the folks who are truly good are making really good money and don't want to invest time with a startup. No doubt there are many folks out there who will one day prove their talent but they have not yet had the chance. The question then becomes, how to find them?

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iskander 16y ago

I've hired a few technical employees in the Chicago area, and I found that it's almost impossible to find someone with basic reasoning skills. Most people I interviewed had very poor eyes for details, had a hard time spotting or understanding their own mistakes, making sense of novel situations, thinking abstractly or generalizing from specifics etc... This was true even among CS graduates from schools with decent reputations. I don't know why the pool is so bad or if it has always been this way.

bugsy 16y ago
How much do you pay, what relocation is offered, what interviewing expenses do you cover, what benefits are paid, what severance package is offered, and do you provide engineers with all the tools, books and training they request. You don't need to answer me, just answer these honestly to yourself and that will tell you why you can't find anyone competent.
- iskander 16y ago
  If qualified applicant need assurance of all these things before even applying, that confirms in my mind that such applicants have the privilege of scarcity. Has your hiring experience been substantially different from mine?
  - bugsy 16y ago
    From what you describe yes. I am able to hire talent I need, but I do offer competitive pay and benefits in line with what other places that are able to hire are doing. It's standard for serious firms to cover interview expenses for example. We also do recruiting rather than just tossing ads out and hoping for the best, which is ineffective since the vast majority of job seekers in IT are looking for a job because they don't have one. The ones who are not seeking but who are open to change are the ones to look for. I meet them on blogs, at conferences, and by contacting them after reading articles they have published. Hiring a very good developer is like hiring a very good actor, which doesn't come for peanuts and which will be worth much more than their salary, whereas hiring an average one will be worth less than their salary. 7/8 of the people that get CS degrees in the US are not fit to develop software at all. Of the remaining 1/8, nearly all of them have found a place they like and are not looking to move without incentive. But that doesn't mean there's a shortage. It just means you have to pay market rate and treat them respectfully and make sure all hygienic issues are dealt with. Low pay is poor hygiene. Lack of full relocation is poor hygiene (Why should the new employee subsidize the cost of coming to work for you? They shouldn't.) Absurd contractual terms such as claiming ownership of things they do on their own time is poor hygiene. An office full of dimwits is poor hygiene. Clueless management is poor hygiene. Not providing proper tools is poor hygiene. Hygiene issues are ones that need to be taken care just to not be a lousy place to work. Get all this taken care of and then one can start thinking of actually making it a good place to work. Having a good reputation as a place to work is hard to get, easy to screw up, and is worth a lot to convince someone with skills that it is worth the massive risk to uproot their life, leave a job they like and come work for a new venture.

Supermighty 16y ago

From my view the real problem is how valuable will English majors be at my startup. How long will it take them to get up to speed where someone doesn't have to hold their hand anymore. I am really weary of hiring someone with zero programming experience. But not as apprehensive about hiring a programmer with little experience but some experience. I'd be more likely to hire someone who was a self starter when it comes to learning programing over and English major who just couldn't find a job.

gunmetal 16y ago

The resume/interview hiring process is severely broken in US. It is not the schools, it's the companies hiring, they are looking for some perfect holy grail but really need to just start hiring people and pick through the chaff. These startups deserve what they get making it impossible to even find their 'perfect employee'.

itsnotvalid 16y ago

TL;DR version of anything like that: Those people aren't the ones that startups want to hire right now.

puredemo 16y ago

Because those 10% of unemployed folks are definitely highly-skilled programmers. Right.

danbmil99 16y ago

1) because all us smart NYC programmers got the hell out of there during the "Silicon Alley" days. 2) Practically anyone who lives within 100 miles of Wall Street and can program, and isn't a completely dysfunctional human (and many who are), is doing something in the financial sector. It's a huge brain drain, and it's practically impossible to compete with on the basis of salary. To boot, you can't easily motivate these folks with options because A) NY doesn't have a reputation for churning out tech winners and B) these same people study finance for a living, so when you offer them some options or founder's stock, suddenly you're into a discussion of volatility premiums and Black/Scholes analysis of the present-day value of said stock/options. It's just not a suitable place for a vibrant startup community.

rick888 16y ago

I've noticed that many startups want people that are: a senior developer in new technology X, is good at Photoshop, and can design customer facing webpages. They also want to pay you well below market wages (because you should be happy to work for a fun company that has a fooseball table) and give you company equity in place of sub-market wages (which is a joke, because most startups are out of business within 5 years).

rwhitman 16y ago

To those hiring in NYC - I just relocated to the east coast from CA and am looking for opportunities in NYC. Feel free to reach out.

known 16y ago

They prefer to hire a highly skilled wage slave.

cafard 16y ago

I know a number of quite proficient programmers with degrees or backgrounds in the classics. Some, to be sure, are of the generation where 8th-grade programming class wasn't really an option. I'd much rather see the primary and secondary schools teach human languages and mathematics than see them try to teach coding.