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The War for Developers is on. Can you compete?
- mellery451 16y agoIs this "war for talent" local to the Bay Area? I departed the Bay Area ten years ago due to lack of affordable housing, but I'm genuinely curious if a strong developer job market exists anywhere else (I haven't found it where I am now).
- bartonfink 16y agoThings aren't so bad in Denver where I live.
- trorer 16y agoNYC seems to be a hot area as well - http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/the-war-for-talent.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/the-war-for-talent.html
- consultutah 16y agoEven little old Provo, UT is getting competitive. No lambos or anything like that, but finding good people is hard.
- dstein 16y agoThat brings up a good related question: does the average SV tech salary afford you a decent quality of life? What's the point of a 6 figure starting salary if you can't afford a house and need to commute for an hour just to scrape by?
- rdouble 16y agoIf you are young or single and dont mind renting it is pretty good. I've done the math numerous times and always come out ahead financially with jobs in the bay area. If you have kids and/or feel the need to buy a house it is probably an entirely different story.
- ChuckMcM 16y agoSo you can buy a house in the south bay for $600K, using that as a baseline and a 6% Mortgage you're talking $3,500 house payment which is 60% -> 40% of your take home pay vs 100K -> 150K salary. Leaving you 2K -> 5k / month for other stuff. (car/insurance/phone/cable/utilities/food/etc). 'Average' salary for tech workers is $110K [1] so can you live on $2K/month? [1] http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-20/business/17829511_1_silicon-valley-online-survey-average-salary http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-20/business/17829511_1_si...
- btcoal 16y agoWay to completely forget about taxes. Also, if hackers were 1/10 as unionized as teachers or other public sector employees OR GM employees the median salary would be double that.
- ChuckMcM 16y agoActually I included taxes, my pass on it was take base 65% of base pay as 'take home' pay and start from there. (I included both state and federal and no dependents as my guess). Dual engineer couples clearly with no kids are in a better spot.
- unfug 16y agoI'm in Louisville and we have had a hell of a time trying to hire quality developers. The pool of quality talent here is much smaller than the demand.
- bugsy 16y agoGoogle-stalking you just now, it looks like you work at a place called ignew which has seven employees and annual revenue of $1 million. The company site doesn't even have job listings though. This is a problem. In a search I found a single job listing for your company on the web for an iPhone+Android developer. This was on a set of sites under something called MyCareerNetwork.com, which I had never heard of before as a job board. Checking for jobs within 100 miles of Louisville on Joel's board, where many microsoft developers hang out and which is much more well known, there are 0 search results anywhere near your city so I know you are not currently advertising there. If I've guessed correctly about where you work, then you guys should probably at least advertise in known locations if you are really having problems finding people. I would assume of course that since you can't find anyone locally you are doing the basic hygiene issues such as offering good packages, full relocation, and paying for interview expenses. But the one ad I found specifically says you won't pay relocation. This sort of thing is a huge red flag. So, you say you are having trouble finding people. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the market though based on my brief investigation but is a problem with not trying hard and not providing even the minimal incentive necessary. You should be aware that iPhone and Android skills are both quite hot right now and developers that are expert in both are extremely rare and command a premium. You should be looking at paying full relocation and salary in the $250k range. That's the market.
- rdouble 16y agoThe only other place is NYC. Other locales have spokespeople who talk about how they are desperate for programmers and how great it would be to work there. Then you find out the reality and it's 50k top salary programming tps reports in an office park in the suburbs.
- blahblahblah 16y agoI've always been somewhat puzzled as to why NYC is the software development hub that it is. It's easy to get why the Bay area is such a powerful draw for developers. It's the one place in the continental U.S. where the climate is perpetually perfect, so it's only natural that people want to live there and it's inevitable that people with rare and valuable skills that can command high salaries will congregate there. It's not as clear to me what the draw is for NYC since the weather there is as bad or worse than Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, or Milwaukee and the cost of living is higher than those Midwestern cities. It seems like Boston should be a bigger software hub than NYC just on the basis of the proximity of MIT and Harvard and the intellectual community that fosters. On the basis of desirable climate (and astonishing natural beauty), it seems like Honolulu ought to be a major software hub, but it isn't. What's NYC's secret of success as a software hub?
- dot 16y agomoney. lots of money.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoHuge population (ESP including commuters), access to capital, "cool.".
- colinyoung 16y agoMainly because of "cool".
- rdouble 16y agoNYC is not a software development hub. However, there are a lot of programming jobs there because media, finance, fashion and other "New York" industries all need programmers. These industries all have a lot of money so salaries for programmers are good.
- spamizbad 16y agoIt's "strong" here in Chicago, although employers aren't anywhere near as generous as they are in the Bay Area. My friends tell me it's pretty strong in Austin, TX too.
- rickd 16y agoI wouldn't say there's anything resembling a "war" out here (I'm in Denver). But I will say that my employer hasn't been able to find ANY quality devs locally. While the job scene here is tiny, there's still a lot of demand. Our last 2 hires have been from out of state. Also, you get to live in the mountains...
- rmason 16y agoYou could do all that stuff. Or you could switch to an entirely different playing field. How about hiring your developers in the Rust Belt where they work for a third less and are unlikely to be poached by other startups? Surely you're joking right? Create a billion dollar company where it snows four months out of the year? Yes and a recent example rhymes with coupon;<).
- trorer 16y agoObviously there are other great places to locate, but the Bay Area remains the hub. Startups have to compete with several 800 lb gorillas!
- runT1ME 16y agoI know a few developers there. If they're good enough, they still work there and get a very high salary... The problem is not that great developers are expensive, it's that they're expensive and very rare.
- invalidOrTaken 16y agoI've heard this before and it makes basic sense. So here's my question: what do I do to become a "great" developer? Are we talking "any specialty beyond PHP?" Hadoop knowhow? Advanced statistical algorithm knowledge? Database theory? Or is the bar absurdly low, and if we can just find a !@#$% developer who can code fizzbuzz and isn't an idiot is the thought process?
- illumin8 16y agoTo be honest, most people that are great developers didn't just turn middle-aged, think "I want to be a great developer," and spend a few years becoming one. Most of these developers have been hacking since they were literally single-digit age. Read Notch's AMA on Reddit (creator of Minecraft) - he was only 9 when he started hacking and he's 31 years old now. So, if you're asking how do I become a great developer now, it's probably too late.
- z92 16y agoBad contrast of font color. Can't read it without pressing ctrl-a.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rwolf 16y agoThank god for readability.
- erickhill 16y agoSeattle is booming, too. Amazon alone has around 1900 open positions.
- trorer 16y agoSo many people are hiring, this is a good time to be a developer! Big companies and startups alike.
- cageface 16y agoMakes me a bit uncomfortable. I hope this doesn't play out like 1997-2000 and trash the job market for several years again.
- chc 16y agoThe problem in 1997-2000 was idiotic investment, not a strong job market. Amazon wasn't one of those overvalued companies then, and I certainly don't think it's overvalued now.
- helmut_hed 16y agoThey may not have been "overvalued" then, in hindsight, but they quickly became even less overvalued, dropping from over 100 in late 1999 to below 10 in late 2001.
- waterlesscloud 16y agoIndeed. AMZN was my major stock loss in those years.
- ktsmith 16y agoThere were more than enough crappy dot com companies hiring executive chefs turned "programmers" after taking a community college class on MS Front Page to say that the job market was also inflated. The number of unqualified people that were employed in some type of IT position during the boom was very apparent to anyone that had to deal with filtering resumes during the beginning of the bust.
- staunch 16y agoIt's one of my pet conspiracy theories that Google has hired tens of thousands of the best programmers not because they actually need them for anything, but primarily to keep them out of the hands of rivals and potential killer startups.
- qq66 16y agoWhy would you think they don't need them?
- staunch 16y agoBecause more programmers != more productivity. Brook's Law, etc.
- qq66 16y agoRight, but Google is one of the biggest websites in the world, operating in nearly every country, etc. etc., it shouldn't be at all surprising that they have thousands of engineers, even though the productivity of each will be lower than it would in a smaller organization.
- staunch 16y agoIt's software. Running the same software in 100 countries doesn't require 100x more programmers. Ask a random Googler what he works on at Google. In my experience 9/10 times it's something they could easily do without.
- earl 16y agoHas anyone noticed salaries rising in correlation with this supposed demand? I personally haven't seen salaries rising as much as I would have thought...
- metaprinter 16y agoYeah I got an email today from elance(i've never used them) telling me they have thousands of web developer jobs that have only been bid on by a few people and they need more developers. Taking a look at the site, all the jobs are for less than $500... the war rages on.
- bugsy 16y agoThe article says "early stage startups need to compete". I agree with this. I haven't really seen much movement in that direction though. So many startups try to get early employees to shoulder all risk themselves with no hope of reward, bogus equity deals, no benefits, etc. You hear about these VCs buying substantial slices of ownership for $12,000 or $6,000 or other such trivial amounts less than their weekly cost of first class airfare, which makes it impossible to offer real salaries to new hires. Very little action going on that indicates there is a true understanding in the start up community that top talent is needed to invent top products that draw customers. Heck, there was recently an announcement here from some company that was telling startups they didn't even need to have developers, they had plugin disposable cog developers in india that could do whatever was needed remotely, as if killer product development was a solved problem now handled by line workers. Obviously these nameless overseas developers won't be getting equity. Really has seemed like amateur hour in the startup community for some time. So little activity is consistent with a desire to build solid companies with good products that are sustainable. Instead, more and more VC funds are run by guys with little successful business experience, who seem mostly interested in living the high life at the expense of the investors they are fleecing.