7 ms·

Google, Facebook and Zynga on a hiring binge in California

48 points by pathik 16y ago

spif 16y ago
Which is why for some reason's it's good to be an entrepreneur outside of California. Recently traveling to the US this was quite a revelation: being in Europe (Amsterdam) can also be a competitive advantage.
- woan 16y ago
  I don't follow unless you are saying that other areas are less competitive. There is a good reason that CA is hot for tech companies. It's the whole ecosystem. Were it not for the ecosystem, these same folks are smart enough to found or move their companies elsewhere.
  - nkassis 16y ago
    I think he meant that not being in California is an advantage because you don't have 3 hulking giants (and more) taking practically 100% of the available engineers. Whatever is left is fiercely battled for by the smaller companies.
    - dlsspy 16y ago
      Some people just want to work in small companies. I get recruited from Google and Facebook regularly. I'm not ready to work in that kind of environment. I know lots of people who aren't. I work with several of them. We want to do things those guys aren't going to do.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - ardit33 16y ago
        ditto here. After my experience with Amazon, it definitely made my mind that big corporation are not happy places in general. Sure, I could tell people I worked on the Kindle and I did a bunch of the ui and framework (worked well in bars with girls), but the bureaucracy of a large company just sucks your soul. You have to cut through so much b.s. to just get anything done. I remember at some point the documentation of some features were taking more than the implementation and testing itself, just to satisfy some guidelines. Aslo, unless you are starting your own company, a lot of smaller companies are a crapshoot. I really think that mid-sized nimble companies are the best (between 50 and 180 people). If they are doing well, and are growing, there is a lot more opportunity in such companies career wise, and friendship/social wise than in a large corp. You just create better bonds with your mates, working towards a common goal, without political bs., and you have the chance to see all parts of the business closer (in large corps, you are just in some part of engineering, with no visibility to the business decisions). This month I just moved to Yammer, and so far it has been awesome experience. (btw, if any of you guys are looking for something new in SF let me know ardit33@gmail.com. We are looking for great engineers, both server and client side. Also this is a company that practices http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/ for real. There is no forced scrum, tdd, tbd, or whatever. It is up to the individual engineers in teams to come up with something that works well for them, as long as things go well. I would say other similar companies to Yammer in the Bay Area are: EventBrite, Square, Evernote, etc... Stable, growing, real business models, and yet fun to work at. If you are an up and coming hacker, join one of these companies, work for a while (and get real salaries, and equity), meet great people, and move on to your own thing when you are ready. Just my 2 cents.
  - samtp 16y ago
    If you're a small company outside of California, you don't have to compete with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zygna.... for the best engineers. As a startup you can never match their salaries. Sometimes it's good to be a big fish in a small pond.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mkramlich 16y ago
I've noticed a spike in emails from recruiters for jobs/gigs in California recently, both from the companies cited (I've had emails from all 3) and from others. I've lost track of how many times in the last week alone I've had to tell recruiters "I'm not willing to move to California at the moment". Thinking of making a macro for it. Also, I've come close a few times to telling recruiters to tell their clients to please discover the joys of ssh/sftp/dropbox/basecamp/email/irc/phone, ie. telecommuting. I'm increasingly finding it funny that employers care where my body is considering how an extreme gap there is between the demand for qualified engineers and the supply of available+interested+affordable ones.
- jedberg 16y ago
  99.9% of my job can be done from home. Yet I still commute 2 hours every day to get to the office. Why? Because there is just something to be said for working in the same room as the other folks on your team. Sometimes we'll all work from home, and we'll be in IRC all day chatting the same way we do in the office. Yet when we are in the office, we seem to get more done. The best example is when I hear some of the other folks talking about a new feature or a code change, and I overhear something that sets off my sysadmin alarm bells. If we weren't in the same room, we'd have to wait until the code review phase to find out, "oh hey, the servers can't DO that." This way we can head off these problems early with minimal overhead. How annoying would it be to have to send an email every time you had an idea, and then wait for everyone to approve it? When everyone is in the office, we just turn around and finish that process in a few seconds.
- joe-mccann 16y ago
  Totally. Trying to get me to leave Austin, TX which is half the cost of living AND has no state income tax is a tough sell to us devs here. Remote work is becoming more and more accepted lately as recruiters and companies are realizing people actually may not want to live in Cali. Granted, monthly in person meetings may be necessary but a flight and a hotel is a reasonable fee, IMO.
- jshen 16y ago
  And some of us would love to work for company X, but bought houses during the bubble and are now effectively stuck where we're at. I'd would be great to telecommute, but most aren't up for that as jedberg illustrates.
jedberg 16y ago
No kidding! They keep stealing my people! ;) Seriously though, it's been making things tough. We've really had to step up our game lately to make compelling arguments. Luckily, we have some advantages over those guys, like being able to push code live to millions of people with pretty much no bureaucracy.
- rdtsc 16y ago
  Play against their giant corporate structure. They can't adapt and be flexible, but you can. You might not be able to match their salary + bonus, but you can do other things. How about giving your employees more vacation time? A lot of them are not living in the same town as their family, they will value having time to spend with family, or to travel. Google has what? 3 weeks of time off? Give them 6 if you can. Pitch it as, "sure you can make all that money, but will you have time to spend with you kids or to travel?" Also, let some people work from home if possible. Let them keep flexible hours, make 11 to 3 core hours and let people come in early or leave late ... It is stuff that might take lots of red tape in large companies.
  - rdouble 16y ago
    Google does all that stuff already.
    - rdtsc 16y ago
      6 weeks of vacation? starting up?
      - EmployedRussian 16y ago
        3 weeks at start; 4 weeks after 3 years; 5 weeks after 5 years: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/lifeatgoogle/benefits/index.html#ta http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/lifeatgoogle/benefits/ind... By "does this already", rdouble probably meant: work from home, flexible hours, etc. More vacation time in lieu of salary may also be a tough sell: Google allows up to several (3? 6?) month of unpaid personal time off, making it pretty easy to trade salary for vacation "on demand".
keane 16y ago
"San Francisco's Twitter… has more than 400 employees and plans to grow to 3,000 employees by July 2013." Wow. Planned staff increases: Google: 25% YouTube: 30% Facebook: 50% Twitter: 650% (over 2 years) That is amazing. I am very curious what organization and methods Twitter has planned to manage scaling up like that.
- neutronicus 16y ago
  I don't know, but I think they're desperate for some data mining know how so they can do better targeted advertising. I think it's do or die for them.
- whiletruefork 16y ago
  Also the growth is not necessarily all in engineering. For example, I think Twitter is going to be needing a sales team to help push any pending ad products.
- fizx 16y ago
  I hear Facebook has internal guidelines that say they can't grow by more than 60% y/y.
  - gwern 16y ago
    In _Founders at Work_, McKinsey's consultants are quoted as recommending growth be no greater than 25% because past that, the corporate culture is lost.
muhfuhkuh 16y ago
How about the "5 million dollar bonus" (I'm guessing restricted stocks) to retain one top engineer? We must be switching over from brawn to brains in the human value chain, which is apt, as the ENTIRE value of NFL teams doesn't even equal the value of any ONE of the companies mentioned (Total value of Facebook is $50B while total value for combined NFL teams is ~37B for example). Either that, or we're in a bubble. I, being the incurable optimist, vote for the former.
- gxs 16y ago
  Well it depends on how you look at it. Elite brawn (elite NFL player): 20M / year. Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year. Note: I didn't compare brawn to say, Zuckerberg, because that would be more like comparing the owners of the team. Just my $0.02.
  - muhfuhkuh 16y ago
    "Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year" "Elite brain" isn't some clean up hitter lighting up code or architecting for you. Elite brain is CTO, or EVP of technology. In terms of e.g., basketball, the Micky Arison of Apple is undoubtedly Steve Jobs, so LeBron is someone like Jony Ives. I'm quite sure Jony is walking away with way more than $20M after designing the iPod, iPhone and iPad (some speculate it's somewhere in the $150-200 Million range).
Tiktaalik 16y ago
These three companies have each now opened offices in Seattle too. I suppose that could end up heating up that market as well.
djb_hackernews 16y ago
I joined linkedin this week, 16 hours later I was contacted by a Google recruiter "impressed" with my software engineering experience. I listed my current job title 'Software Developer'. No description, no technical bullet points, nothing, just a title. Thats what they were "impressed" with.
patio11 16y ago
Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months? Headlines like this mean the demand curve has shifted. If you don't communicate that fact to your bosses, they will likely not recalculate the market clearing price for your labor for you. (If it had gone down, on the other hand...)
- jbarham 16y ago
  > Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months? Sure, the suckers on H1B work visas who are waiting for their green cards, which can take several years... Given that your H1B visa is tied to a particular job at a particular company at a particular salary, and your green card application resets if you change jobs, it obviously discourages H1B workers from fully participating in the free labour market. Not that I'm bitter or anything, ;), but I was exactly in that situation last year, getting hounded by recruiters for jobs much more appealing that the one I was in. But my H1B visa and green card application, not to mention the financial responsibility of providing for my family, prevented me from considering those positions. So I said adios to the US, played my trump card of being married to an Australian, and I now have permanent residency in Australia without any restrictions on who I can or cannot work for (unless it's a government position that requires I be a citizen, which doesn't interest me anyway). FWIW, Amazon's Singapore AWS data center is working out just fine from Down Under as I work on my startup...
- billpaetzke 16y ago
  How much of a raise do you suggest? 5%, 10%, more?

48 points by pathik 16y ago

spif 16y ago

Which is why for some reason's it's good to be an entrepreneur outside of California. Recently traveling to the US this was quite a revelation: being in Europe (Amsterdam) can also be a competitive advantage.

woan 16y ago
I don't follow unless you are saying that other areas are less competitive. There is a good reason that CA is hot for tech companies. It's the whole ecosystem. Were it not for the ecosystem, these same folks are smart enough to found or move their companies elsewhere.
- nkassis 16y ago
  I think he meant that not being in California is an advantage because you don't have 3 hulking giants (and more) taking practically 100% of the available engineers. Whatever is left is fiercely battled for by the smaller companies.
  - dlsspy 16y ago
    Some people just want to work in small companies. I get recruited from Google and Facebook regularly. I'm not ready to work in that kind of environment. I know lots of people who aren't. I work with several of them. We want to do things those guys aren't going to do.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - ardit33 16y ago
      ditto here. After my experience with Amazon, it definitely made my mind that big corporation are not happy places in general. Sure, I could tell people I worked on the Kindle and I did a bunch of the ui and framework (worked well in bars with girls), but the bureaucracy of a large company just sucks your soul. You have to cut through so much b.s. to just get anything done. I remember at some point the documentation of some features were taking more than the implementation and testing itself, just to satisfy some guidelines. Aslo, unless you are starting your own company, a lot of smaller companies are a crapshoot. I really think that mid-sized nimble companies are the best (between 50 and 180 people). If they are doing well, and are growing, there is a lot more opportunity in such companies career wise, and friendship/social wise than in a large corp. You just create better bonds with your mates, working towards a common goal, without political bs., and you have the chance to see all parts of the business closer (in large corps, you are just in some part of engineering, with no visibility to the business decisions). This month I just moved to Yammer, and so far it has been awesome experience. (btw, if any of you guys are looking for something new in SF let me know ardit33@gmail.com. We are looking for great engineers, both server and client side. Also this is a company that practices http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/ for real. There is no forced scrum, tdd, tbd, or whatever. It is up to the individual engineers in teams to come up with something that works well for them, as long as things go well. I would say other similar companies to Yammer in the Bay Area are: EventBrite, Square, Evernote, etc... Stable, growing, real business models, and yet fun to work at. If you are an up and coming hacker, join one of these companies, work for a while (and get real salaries, and equity), meet great people, and move on to your own thing when you are ready. Just my 2 cents.
- samtp 16y ago
  If you're a small company outside of California, you don't have to compete with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zygna.... for the best engineers. As a startup you can never match their salaries. Sometimes it's good to be a big fish in a small pond.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mkramlich 16y ago

I've noticed a spike in emails from recruiters for jobs/gigs in California recently, both from the companies cited (I've had emails from all 3) and from others. I've lost track of how many times in the last week alone I've had to tell recruiters "I'm not willing to move to California at the moment". Thinking of making a macro for it. Also, I've come close a few times to telling recruiters to tell their clients to please discover the joys of ssh/sftp/dropbox/basecamp/email/irc/phone, ie. telecommuting. I'm increasingly finding it funny that employers care where my body is considering how an extreme gap there is between the demand for qualified engineers and the supply of available+interested+affordable ones.

jedberg 16y ago
99.9% of my job can be done from home. Yet I still commute 2 hours every day to get to the office. Why? Because there is just something to be said for working in the same room as the other folks on your team. Sometimes we'll all work from home, and we'll be in IRC all day chatting the same way we do in the office. Yet when we are in the office, we seem to get more done. The best example is when I hear some of the other folks talking about a new feature or a code change, and I overhear something that sets off my sysadmin alarm bells. If we weren't in the same room, we'd have to wait until the code review phase to find out, "oh hey, the servers can't DO that." This way we can head off these problems early with minimal overhead. How annoying would it be to have to send an email every time you had an idea, and then wait for everyone to approve it? When everyone is in the office, we just turn around and finish that process in a few seconds.
joe-mccann 16y ago
Totally. Trying to get me to leave Austin, TX which is half the cost of living AND has no state income tax is a tough sell to us devs here. Remote work is becoming more and more accepted lately as recruiters and companies are realizing people actually may not want to live in Cali. Granted, monthly in person meetings may be necessary but a flight and a hotel is a reasonable fee, IMO.
jshen 16y ago
And some of us would love to work for company X, but bought houses during the bubble and are now effectively stuck where we're at. I'd would be great to telecommute, but most aren't up for that as jedberg illustrates.

jedberg 16y ago

No kidding! They keep stealing my people! ;) Seriously though, it's been making things tough. We've really had to step up our game lately to make compelling arguments. Luckily, we have some advantages over those guys, like being able to push code live to millions of people with pretty much no bureaucracy.

rdtsc 16y ago
Play against their giant corporate structure. They can't adapt and be flexible, but you can. You might not be able to match their salary + bonus, but you can do other things. How about giving your employees more vacation time? A lot of them are not living in the same town as their family, they will value having time to spend with family, or to travel. Google has what? 3 weeks of time off? Give them 6 if you can. Pitch it as, "sure you can make all that money, but will you have time to spend with you kids or to travel?" Also, let some people work from home if possible. Let them keep flexible hours, make 11 to 3 core hours and let people come in early or leave late ... It is stuff that might take lots of red tape in large companies.
- rdouble 16y ago
  Google does all that stuff already.
  - rdtsc 16y ago
    6 weeks of vacation? starting up?
    - EmployedRussian 16y ago
      3 weeks at start; 4 weeks after 3 years; 5 weeks after 5 years: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/lifeatgoogle/benefits/index.html#ta http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/lifeatgoogle/benefits/ind... By "does this already", rdouble probably meant: work from home, flexible hours, etc. More vacation time in lieu of salary may also be a tough sell: Google allows up to several (3? 6?) month of unpaid personal time off, making it pretty easy to trade salary for vacation "on demand".

keane 16y ago

"San Francisco's Twitter… has more than 400 employees and plans to grow to 3,000 employees by July 2013." Wow. Planned staff increases: Google: 25% YouTube: 30% Facebook: 50% Twitter: 650% (over 2 years) That is amazing. I am very curious what organization and methods Twitter has planned to manage scaling up like that.

neutronicus 16y ago
I don't know, but I think they're desperate for some data mining know how so they can do better targeted advertising. I think it's do or die for them.
whiletruefork 16y ago
Also the growth is not necessarily all in engineering. For example, I think Twitter is going to be needing a sales team to help push any pending ad products.
fizx 16y ago
I hear Facebook has internal guidelines that say they can't grow by more than 60% y/y.
- gwern 16y ago
  In _Founders at Work_, McKinsey's consultants are quoted as recommending growth be no greater than 25% because past that, the corporate culture is lost.

muhfuhkuh 16y ago

How about the "5 million dollar bonus" (I'm guessing restricted stocks) to retain one top engineer? We must be switching over from brawn to brains in the human value chain, which is apt, as the ENTIRE value of NFL teams doesn't even equal the value of any ONE of the companies mentioned (Total value of Facebook is $50B while total value for combined NFL teams is ~37B for example). Either that, or we're in a bubble. I, being the incurable optimist, vote for the former.

gxs 16y ago
Well it depends on how you look at it. Elite brawn (elite NFL player): 20M / year. Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year. Note: I didn't compare brawn to say, Zuckerberg, because that would be more like comparing the owners of the team. Just my $0.02.
- muhfuhkuh 16y ago
  "Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year" "Elite brain" isn't some clean up hitter lighting up code or architecting for you. Elite brain is CTO, or EVP of technology. In terms of e.g., basketball, the Micky Arison of Apple is undoubtedly Steve Jobs, so LeBron is someone like Jony Ives. I'm quite sure Jony is walking away with way more than $20M after designing the iPod, iPhone and iPad (some speculate it's somewhere in the $150-200 Million range).

Tiktaalik 16y ago

These three companies have each now opened offices in Seattle too. I suppose that could end up heating up that market as well.

djb_hackernews 16y ago

I joined linkedin this week, 16 hours later I was contacted by a Google recruiter "impressed" with my software engineering experience. I listed my current job title 'Software Developer'. No description, no technical bullet points, nothing, just a title. Thats what they were "impressed" with.

patio11 16y ago

Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months? Headlines like this mean the demand curve has shifted. If you don't communicate that fact to your bosses, they will likely not recalculate the market clearing price for your labor for you. (If it had gone down, on the other hand...)

jbarham 16y ago
> Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months? Sure, the suckers on H1B work visas who are waiting for their green cards, which can take several years... Given that your H1B visa is tied to a particular job at a particular company at a particular salary, and your green card application resets if you change jobs, it obviously discourages H1B workers from fully participating in the free labour market. Not that I'm bitter or anything, ;), but I was exactly in that situation last year, getting hounded by recruiters for jobs much more appealing that the one I was in. But my H1B visa and green card application, not to mention the financial responsibility of providing for my family, prevented me from considering those positions. So I said adios to the US, played my trump card of being married to an Australian, and I now have permanent residency in Australia without any restrictions on who I can or cannot work for (unless it's a government position that requires I be a citizen, which doesn't interest me anyway). FWIW, Amazon's Singapore AWS data center is working out just fine from Down Under as I work on my startup...
billpaetzke 16y ago
How much of a raise do you suggest? 5%, 10%, more?