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The War For Talent
- gtani 16y agoHeh, Mr. Wilson forget to mention that a primary qualifier for getting headhunter cold calls is quality/quantity of comments on HN.
- balanon 16y agoLooks like they're offering up a Macbook, a cinema display, a red Swingline stapler, and Dr. Pepper in the photo. #devporn
- DVassallo 16y ago... and an Aeron chair!
- tiffani 16y agoIf they expect you to work in that one spot more than anywhere else, the Aeron might be the most important thing you get! Nothing worse than a cheap, (eventually) painful chair. :|
- rdl 16y agoGiven how selective joshu claims to be in hiring, would be surprised if he turned down a developed who requested a mac pro and 3 x 24" or 30" monitors for both home and office, in addition to a macbook pro or macbook air. A $20k pimped out setup or two is still less than a recruiter would charge, and hopefully about the same as the value of a developer's work to the company in 1 week. I think Asana has the right idea, just letting people pick whatever they want within a $10k or so budget. There is some value in having commonality (spare parts, support, chargers), and I'd be surprised if anyone wanted anything except Apple or Lenovo laptops and high-end desktops with big monitors.
- rudiger 16y agoValuing a developer's one week of work at $20K is a bit much (~$1M per year?). Also, I'd question the judgement of developer who thinks a $20K pimped-out setup, a Mac Pro and three 30" displays at both home and office, in addition to a laptop, is necessary.
- spitfire 16y agoand no door.
- prodigal_erik 16y agoThis. Headphones sometimes help, but there are times when I think I'd be better off with a VT100 and a door. I wish anyone beyond Microsoft and Fog Creek realized what a huge waste it is to let random people knock me out of the zone incessantly.
- nadam 16y agoThe most important things for me as a developer: - Money (I have a family to care about) - 'Interestingness' of the job: does it require creativity? Do I have ownership? Can I start things from scratch, or do I have to maintain an ugly overcomplicated buggy code full of EntrpriseEntiytyManagerConfigurationFactoryFacadeIntefaceBean-s created without any philosophy behind? Hardware setup is not that important for me. Never was. Also there is no war for talent yet. Firms in Silicon Valley did not realize yet that there is talent in other parts of the world for much cheaper than in Sillicon Valley. When the real war will begin, I hope we will gain access to better opportunities here in the east than now. (Now they mostly resort to the east if some noncreative work should be done. (So called 'offshoring'.))
- etagwerker 16y agoAs a programmer, all I need is: 1. Money (to not have to worry about it) 2. A challenge 3. A great team
- buro9 16y agoAs a programmer, all I need is: 1. Money (to not have to worry about surviving with basic treats from time to time) 2. A challenge 3. A great team 4. Equity (to make the sacrifice of #1 be a bet that pays off over time to more than offset the choosing of the harder path with a tighter belt)
- jgh 16y agoBah, I don't care about equity. I just want the work to be interesting and the pay to be high.
- blacksmythe 16y agoOne place that a little more money on hardware can improve productivity is using two monitors: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/vibe.aspx
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- zemanel 16y ago... while on this side of the ocean i couldn't even accept a position at a northern europe bank because i can't afford relocation at the moment, and everyone tells me people are hiring like crazy in NY/SV. Life can be bull sometimes :(
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- jprobert 16y agoThis goes back to the popular post about Reddit being down to one developer. The war for talent comes down to a) having the resources to pay for top talent - Google or b) cool and fun concepts to work on which have enormous potential - Hipmunk. Getting hooked up with nice hard wear is great but at this point it seems expected as everyone pretty much does it (except for the bootstrapped start-up).
- giardini 16y agoWishing for a "talent-detector": I could make billions. Seriously, how can you call it a war when the territory is so poorly delineated. Searching for "talent" is like capturing neutrinos. So shouldn't it be termed a "Crapshoot for Talent" or "Gold Rush for Talent" or such? Add to that the interaction problem (an excellent worker in one environment may wither in another). Metaphors matter! Choose your weapons carefully. Oops, sorry, it isn't a war! Choose your garden shrubs carefully.
- fizx 16y agoGoogle, FBook, etc in particular are fighting over some key execs and senior engineers, as well as the flow of new grads from key universities like CMU and Stanford. That's the war. For most industry engineers, its a crapshoot.
- wladimir 16y agoIt's interesting how much the high-tech industry that made remote and distributed working possible is still bound to a locality. Outside Silicon Valley, and outside the US, there is also a lot of talent, which would dream of earning even half of what a Silicon Valley developer does, but cannot move there for some reason. Ample opportunity here for smart companies.
- robryan 16y agoDepends on the company and what they do but there is a lot of advantage to work at the same physical location at least some of the time. If this wasn't the case I think the market as a whole would have worked it out and you would see far less concentration to the one physical location.
- wladimir 16y agoThat could also be the case because the business world is slow to adapt to new paradigms. There are not many ingrained best practices yet for distributing development teams over the world. The market is moving in this way, but slowly. There is a certain threshold above which it just isn't worth to pay multiple times the salary just for someone that lives closer. It might also be that better collaboration tools need to be developed, or improved, to support this. Or that good tools exist but they are not well-known enough.
- nadam 16y agoYes. If anybody is interested: For example offering half of Sillicon Valley salary to developers I could find the brightest 10-20 programmers from my country. I am well connected amongst developers. (Hungary is a 10million people country.) Just give me a very hard 'test', I will give that or something similar to hundreds of developers, and choose the best 10. If you offer higher than market salary, money makes miracles.
- shalmanese 16y agoTopTal does this: http://www.toptal.com/ http://www.toptal.com/ . You should contact them if you're interested.
- stcredzero 16y agoDoes this "War for Talent" mean that I don't have a hope of acquiring talent through outsourcing? I just looked (briefly) at the Philippine job boards, and unless I'm doing something SEO heavy, there didn't seem to be too much there.
- jpcx01 16y agoDon't play their game. If you are a great dev, ask for what you are worth (100-150 an hour). Or get solid equity. Or start your own company. Don't be fooled by cheap gimmicks. You can buy your own Dr Pepper.
- trumbo 16y ago100-150 an hour? I have 6 years of experience and I can hardly get more than $70 an hour in NYC. Maybe I'm not a "great" developer.
- solutionyogi 16y agoI was also making around 70$ to 80$ an hour. I decided to get in to Wall St (Investment Banks/Hedge Funds) and now I am able to make more than 100$/hour. In NYC, other than finance industry, I haven't seen anyone paying more than 100$/hour.
- bballant 16y agoIt depends on what you do, but if you're a freelancer, finding your own clients, managing your own projects, and paying for your own social security and benefits, then 100/hr is fair for a good programmer in NYC. It is comparable to 100K full-time, full-benefit work, which is at around what one of USV's NYC portfolio companies will offer you if you're a good programmer w/ 6 years experience. If you feel you are underpaid, then apply for one of those positions on USV's portfolio jobs page. All of their NYC companies are awesome.
- patio11 16y agoIf you are a great dev, ask for what you are worth You don't have to be a great dev to be worth north of $150 an hour. Step 1: get inserted into the part of the company that makes money. Step 2: adjust any knob available such that they make more money. Step 3: get in the habit of citing Step 2 when you aggressively negotiate salary.
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- dstein 16y agoOkay, so New York has hipster traps: http://www.jwz.org/images/hipster-trap-560x795.jpg http://www.jwz.org/images/hipster-trap-560x795.jpg New Jersey has guido traps: http://www.thehighdefinite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/jersey-shore-trap-32459-1300473027-15.jpg http://www.thehighdefinite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/je... And now Silicon Valley has developer traps: http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2014e5ff76eed970c-500wi http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2014e5ff76eed970c-500...
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- wolfrom 16y agoI wonder if there's a point where the talent wars in the Bay Area could actually affect pg's view that the Valley is the best place for a startup. I know that Jason Calacanis has talked about how it might now make sense to do your development somewhere else.
- kovar 16y agoFinding good talent elsewhere is non-trivial, but with some care it is much easier. We're currently doing our development in WA (one founder), NH (lead developer, almost founder), and IL. If we get into one of the Bay Area programs, I'll move to CA for the program, and probably then some. The reason for the move isn't for development talent, it is for networking opportunities and mentoring opportunities.
- jgh 16y agoNo matter how much a company is willing to spend on gadgets, everyone seems to stick with that same $100 Ikea desk.
- icefox 16y agoHave you tried asking for a different desk? They end up with the same ikea desk because no one cares about it that much.
- jgh 16y agoI actually like those desks, I just think it's funny.
- georgemcbay 16y agoWho cares that the desk costs $100 if it does an excellent job as a workspace/computer desk? I'm a huge fan of the Ikea Galant desks to the point where I bought myself one for home to go along with the $700 chair I have (similar situation to what is shown in the Tasty Labs picture). I didn't buy it because it cost $100, I bought it because they are JUST ENOUGH desk to make an excellent workspace and they are height adjustable. I will never use a non-height adjustable desk again, full stop, and there aren't many other options for height adjustable desks that are anywhere near reasonable in price (and that is coming from someone who didn't blink when buying a $700 chair).
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- RandallBrown 16y agoI may not have a cinema display, but many in my company do. When I started, I had a brand new HP desktop. A few months later I got a brand spankin new Macbook Pro when I started doing Mac development. I would expect AT LEAST what I see from the picture at any serious software company and I live/work in mid-michigan. We don't have to put our monitors on cardboard boxes either.
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- VladRussian 16y agothere is no war for talent. It is just a market that started to favor seller a bit (smart buyers buy in a buyers market by the way). When i recently "came up on the market" (laid off), 2 companies gave offers under the asking price, one din't make the offer at all as it was "above the range", and another company (that i even didn't hope to get into) offered ~15% more than the asking price was and of course i'm happy to be there now.
- geuis 16y agoIt may just be me, but I don't see this "war for talent". I live in San Francisco and have worked for 3 companies since moving here. I am a damned good frontend engineer, like learning and playing with new tech, very opinionated and dedicated to good product design, and sure I would be an asset to any company that wanted to hire me. I've also had experience with trying my own startup (failed) and even been part of a team that got a YC interview. Despite all of this, any time I have interviewed with some of these companies that claim to be in a war for talent, that's not the impression I get. I always end up meeting and talking to people that are looking for CS students who happen to know HTML. Some random Facebook engineer wasted a half an hour of my time trying to get me to write a function to calculate a square root approximation method. Another interview asks me how to figure out which one of 100 bottles of wine has poison in it using 10 mice. Seriously, WTF? At no point have these people who say they desperately want a frontend engineer actually asked anything remotely touching the job skills I possess. Want super efficient pages? Well constructed js? An innovative solution to a hard frontend problem? A high performance html5 app that looks native on a phone? Apparently not. These guys just want more CS engineers like themselves and not people that have acquired the best knowledge by years of working in the field. I work at a big name media company now. When they interviewed me a couple years ago, they got it. They knew what they were looking for and what they actually needed. I work with some awesome people. Sometimes we butt heads because I care a lot about what I build and sometimes big corporate decisions are bullshit, but that's ok. The team I work with is smart and capable and we get shit done. And guess what? We aren't all CS graduates. We taught ourselves and built careers for ourselves. We learned everything we know the hard way, by actually doing it.
- JoshCole 16y agoThe question about mice seemed sort of neat to me at first. I figured the desired solution was splitting the wine into two groups, taking the group that turns out to be poisoned, and then recursing. Then I came up with an alternative solution. Step 1: Kill 9 mice. Step 2: Have the mouse drink from a wine bottle. Step 3: Wait to see if he dies. If he dies you found the right bottle. If he doesn't take the next bottle and go to step 2.
- 16y ago
- sdizdar 16y agoIt is probably just me and my overly pessimistic and cynical point of view, but sometimes I think this "war for talent" is basically synonym for "search for very good engineers willing to work 70 hours a week for less than 100K" (or something like that). I do understand the need to for these creative idea (good setup, etc.), but unfortunately these tweks and ideas work only and only after salary is good, challenge is there, and team is great. And there is one more problem: some of startups struggling to hire very good engineers are not aiming big - the prevalent business model is: we hope to be acquired by Google/Apple/Facebook/Intuit etc. Stories of Digg, Reddit, and Delicous don't inspire a lot confidence for engineers to join these companies.
- petercooper 16y agoGetting standard-issue equipment that you need to do your job? I don't disagree with the overall premise but getting a computer isn't that unusual and you need one anyway. I think 37signals gets it (more) right. A company credit card with which you can buy any training or educational materials you need to become better at what you do or to help you with your work. Now that's a perk. (Though a personal secretary/PA to handle all of the non dev BS would be even better..)
- joshu 16y agoThat was taken out of context. We get developers whatever they want. We only posted it to be funny.
- petercooper 16y agoOh, right. But yeah, I wasn't picking up on you or Quora, more Fred's interpretation of a banal reality - I'd hope any company would get their developers this sort of kit! :-)
- joshu 16y agoIndeed. However, the hiring part IS brutal. We interviewed 90-something people, made one offer. There's a huge difference between engineers and developers.