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Retailers Are Losing the Software Talent Wars

64 points by jongraehl 15y ago

Roboprog 15y ago
Hmm. Rather than spend $180 or $300 million to purchase tech companies, maybe some of these stores could try paying Silicon Valley salaries to a team of 10 or 20 devs. 20 devs * $200 K (loaded) / year = $4 M / year. ... Assuming they had a way to bootstrap an idiot-rejection-filter.
- bgentry 15y ago
  That's a much better plan. It's funny that they are unwilling to pay above-market salaries to a few competent devs.
  - fleitz 15y ago
    Big box retail is currently built on an interchangeable parts model. Retailers keep costs down by making people replaceable, unfortunately at this point that model doesn't work well for tech. It's unlikely that this will change as that mindset is built into the culture of the organization and has done well for the industry in the last 30 years. It's likely that retail will undergo another change such as when sears took over in the late 19th / early 20th century. Retailers arent going to lose the war they will simply be replaced by more nimble competitors who can properly leverage technology. Contrary to popular belief there are good developers outside of sv and some developers are motivated towards well paying 9 to 5 jobs instead of options and sodas. The article also conveniently ignores the huge logistics infrastructure retailers have and focuses purely on websites, while the web is certainly important the reality of the situation is that currently retailers such as Walmart have huge competitive advantages due to its investment in logistics tech and infrastructure.
    - kls 15y ago
      It's unlikely that this will change as that mindset is built into the culture of the organization and has done well for the industry in the last 30 years. It will change if organizations like Amazon and Zappos prove out that it is a competitive advantage. It is just mainstream retail is not the proving grounds for such revelations.
  - ajross 15y ago
    It's a terrible plan. Paying a bunch of rock star salaries just gets you a bunch of people that say they are rock stars. If you don't have any on staff, you don't actually know if they are or not (pg has an essay about exactly this). History is filled with these kind of rock star failures. Buying the company gets you a team that can verifiably build the product you want, because they already did. That kind of conservative risk management is worth a ton of cash in the real world.
    - ams6110 15y ago
      Well GP did say "Assuming they had a way to bootstrap an idiot-rejection-filter" Though why would it not be possible to hire a person with a track record of building the sorts of things you want, and let that person hire the team? Buying a company may or may not get you a team, depending on whether or not they stick around.
      - kls 15y ago
        I am getting ready to put together an article on this subject, it is actually pretty easy to identify a key developer and recruit them, it is just that most companies hiring practices are the antithesis to identifying that developer.
    - droithomme 15y ago
      $200k isn't a rock star salary. You are correct that paying market salaries for competent engineers does not ensure competent engineers. However it must be noted that not paying market salaries for competent engineers definitely ensures that one employes substandard talent. The market is working well right now and competent engineers have no problem receiving market rate. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why competent engineers will not find a job paying the market rate for their talent, and that is exactly what happens. As for the companies that can not pay market rate, well they are simply not competitive and will fail. That's how the free market works and it is a very good thing. Any company that requires being competitive in the tech domain needs to be willing to pay for key talent. Companies like Target definitely need to do everything they can. Arguments that incompetent developers are good enough are absurd. Obviously what they have now is not working. Building a site that can handle a nationwide retailer the size of Target, second only to WalMart in brick and mortar stores, is completely non-trivial. The top 2 engineers there need to be paid at least $1.5 million annual salary. Sorry. I know many companies don't like this but there it is. Now obviously there are many levels below this, but this requires a pretty large development team and several below this level are going to be getting $200k-$400k. At the bottom, the losers that are just out of college and don't know anything, those guys are going to be making $75k to start. Because that's the starting salary. Companies don't want to hear this. Only the fatuous useless ignorant executives that have run the company into the ground should be paid these salaries, in their opinion. Well, they can keep thinking that and see where it gets them. Many will lobby Congress, that is a popular tactic. Pay a lobbying firm $25 million and maybe you'll be able to flood the market with cheap engineers from overseas who are willing to work for $21 an hour, and are able to do the same things that any other $21 an hour retail employee can do. Because the overseas guys that really know their stuff are not looking for $21 jobs, they are making the same salary as everyone else with their skill level. Because that's how the market works.
- buff-a 15y ago
  LOL. 200k? 20 devs? To build store.target.com? They'd better be awesome, and that awesome doesn't walk for 200K. That level of awesome builds the product (show don't tell) and then sells it for $180m.
  - Roboprog 15y ago
    How many developers should it take to build an ecommerce site??? Sys-admins + DBAs + "biz logic" devs + "front end" devs and a few artist, project mgr types and entry level supporting developers??? Given a sufficiently inefficient process, an infinite amount of labor can be absorbed, I suppose. I would think a core tiger team could accomplish wonders simply iteratively triaging their existing operations.
    - projectileboy 15y ago
      Consultant for a big box retailer here. Yes, of course I can build a shopping cart site with a few good hackers, and I can find a few good hackers anywhere. But that's not what I have. I have a pile of legacy crud that has to integrate with ten other piles of legacy crud, not to mention the external crud with which I must integrate. And did I mention that during holiday the site gets a little more traffic than most sites? Or that the site makes a few hundred million dollars, and can't just be rewritten on a whim? To solve these sorts of problems, I don't need ten good hackers, I need more like 50. Or more. And that's the challenge the article is talking about. Because good hackers have options like Facebook - or their own startups - where they don't have to deal with that kind of noise. It's a serious challenge for any big company which relies heavily on the web, which in 2012 is every big company.
      - HalibetLector 15y ago
        "Or that the site makes a few hundred million dollars, and can't just be rewritten on a whim?" Why not? If the site is unstable and can't stay up, you can either throw 50 programmers at it and still have it crash regularly or you can take far fewer and re-write it from scratch. You're right about programmers not liking the cruft, but we also don't like most of the management processes that occur in large companies. I don't know if things have changed, but back when I worked for a large brake corporation, web programmers were devalued and distrusted. All of our decisions had to be signed off (in triplicate!) by a manager who didn't know how to program or the implications of the decisions being made. To give you on example, one of the official company-wide policies was that if you wanted to transfer files between company offices over the internet, you had to use FTP for "security purposes." We were technically not allowed to use SSH or SFTP because, when I asked, my boss said nobody had heard of it. This was in 2006.
- officialchicken 15y ago
  Or maybe offer a percentage of the online sales revenue, after returns (and avoiding hollywood math). I've interviewed with several "luxury" retailers within the past year, and my idiot-rejection-filter was usually triggered soon after the beginning of the interview. It was usually due to the perception of inmates running asylum, or a legacy technology I didn't want anywhere near my resume (VB). Either way, lack of technological leadership, planning, and execution was easy to spot with a phone call or visit to a store.
desireco42 15y ago
Not only that they have caps on how much developers can make, they are also heavily miss-managed, full of crazy managers with insane ideas, consulting companies with their own agendas, agile that is not even close to agile, etc. You don't need to be in Silicon Valley to make decent website, you do have to manage it and develop it properly, most don't do that.
- jaggederest 15y ago
  Right, it's not a failure of recruiting, it's a failure of management and environment: nobody wants to work at Target developing software no matter how much money they pay.
  - reissbaker 15y ago
    It'd be interesting to know how much they pay, though. And how they adjust salary over time.
hkarthik 15y ago
Here in Dallas, lots of retailers have their corporate headquarters here. I've done some consulting work for one of them in the past and a couple years ago one of them was trying to recruit me pretty heavily for their big e-commerce push. Most of these companies don't have that many full time employees in their IT departments. A handful of full time employees will oversee an army of contractors and consultants. Most of these folks are specialized in SAP, Oracle, Business Objects, etc and don't know the first thing about building scalable web-based e-commerce. The sites that do exist tend to be old, monolithic .NET or Java apps with antiquated processes to deploy them. An old boss of mine that went to work for one of these retailers said he had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  "Business Objects" -- <<shudder>> "What is this ''diff'' you speak of?"
- kls 15y ago
  had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site That is a huge issue that developers see when they see an established company. Then you add in existing technical ego's from other teams and you just have a recipe for a stagnant crashing every month disaster. It's a generalization, but we all make them, it is how we make semi-informed decisions based on loose facts. Some large companies are wrongly maligned in the process but it's the reality. When I took over the web at Marriott, we separated it from IT all together and made it a business division, in doing so we could make decisions independent of IT approval and we I had an independent budget under my discretion. Many companies just don't get how these slight organizational changes can make a huge difference in a teams ability to deliver technology.
  - hkarthik 15y ago
    The retailer that tried to recruit me was led by a former startup CTO that was doing much of what you described to try to change things. Aside from separating IT, the other big change was to create a new campus/location with a better dress code, no Web Sense, and a separate network domain. This post reminds, I should check in with him and see how things are going.
prophetjohn 15y ago
The fact is that being an engineer at Target is very likely a boring, bureaucratic drag. The best engineers are overwhelmingly the best engineers because they love what they do and hone their craft. Someone who takes so much pride in what they do is not likely to get much satisfaction out of developing a website that helps people buy a mop. It's a fine thing to do; people need mops. But it's not a particularly interesting problem to be solving. So, I think places like Target will always have this problem unless they're willing to pony up the cash and offer more money than the interesting jobs. After all, there's no reason that some behemoth like Target can't compete with some SV startup in salary.
- ams6110 15y ago
  Basic e-commerce for such things as mop-buying is a solved problem in 2011. Not sure why you would even need a large team of top-notch developers at a place like Target. A few good sysadmins and DBAs, and maybe some graphics/front-end types. Edit: Upon thinking about this a moment longer, I think that actually there would be (or could be) interesting work at Target, simply because of the scale of the operation. Though sadly you are still probably hitting the mark in the "bureaucratic drag" assessment.
  - droithomme 15y ago
    Target is the third largest brick and mortar retailer in the US. Running a computer network nationally for Target is not a solved problem. Sure, it's a solved problem for #1 WalMart, using entirely custom software that WalMart developed in house. But it's not like WalMart is selling that software to Target.
    - tsotha 15y ago
      But how much traffic does Target get? The fact that it's the third largest brick and mortar retailer means nothing at all.
- mdda 15y ago
  I agree with everything you say, but think it should be emphasized that tech people at (for instance) Amazon are fundamentally in the same 'buy a mop' situation, except that Amazon believes that it is/can be so much more. Fundamentally, it's clear that Target will never be a company that holds its tech people in awe - whereas at Amazon, you 'just' know that a single mop supplier is lower on the totem pole than a single DBA, for example.
mwsherman 15y ago
Wouldn’t this state of affairs scream out for simple, off-the-shelf ecommerce? Ecommerce platforms have been around as long as the web, but they are enterprisey behemoths (last I looked, a long time ago). Where is the Wordpress for retail?
- asher 15y ago
  > Where is the Wordpress for retail? http://www.shopify.com/ http://www.shopify.com/
- ams6110 15y ago
  Target itself is an enterprisey behemoth. Not trying to take away from your comment, I think there's definitely a place for a "Wordpress for retail" and would be surprised if it doesn't exist (though it's not something I've really looked into). But I'm not sure something like that would easily scale to what Target would need.
  - thebrokencube 15y ago
    BigCommerce, Shopify, Volusion are probably the closest to 'Wordpress for retail', but they seem to be mostly focused towards small businesses. Not that big businesses can't use them, but yea.
    - ericingram 15y ago
      These are more like 'squarespace for e-commerce'
    - mikhaill 15y ago
      The companies you mention are all fine shopping cart providers, but someone who's selling more then a few products (not even the size of Target) needs much more then a simple shopping cart. * Integration into their inventory systems and multiple warehouses. Do you want to be able to buy on the site, pickup in store? That means you need to tie your ecommerce site to your brick and mortar systems. * Do you have vendors that dropship on your behalf? You need a way to import their catalog data and send them their orders. Did they mess up and not have inventory by the time your order arrives, better have a way for them to notify you, so you can notify customers. * Gift cards that work online and in stores. * Customer service systems that tie to your e-commerce so staff can help customers. * Syncing all sales data to your finance, ERP, business intelligence and other back-end systems. * Returns? A system for RMA, tracking returns, issuing refunds and exchanges. Want to buy online/return to store? better tie your store systems to your e-commerce again. * Marketing? Have to tie your online store your e-mail software. Building a full fledged e-commerce solution is much harder than many realize. There are great tools that solve parts of what retailers need but there is no all-in-one tool to get a large retailer online and just working out of the box.
adaml_623 15y ago
I think that article is neglecting the posibility that Target (as an example) has the software engineers who are talented enough to fix the site. But what they almost definitely have is buckets of management and procedures preventing them from fixing the site. The kind of person who is afraid to reboot the server because it hasn't been rebooted in 6 months. Or who says if we do anything then we might make it worse.
- codeonfire 15y ago
  Also lets not forget micromanaging tech managers who's one or two years of development before they went into management (hey they figured out technology in one year unlike all those other saps) entitles them to force their stupid and disastrous ideas onto the engineering team.
sun123 15y ago
I have worked in the IT department of a large IT firm. It is frustrating. There is a long irritating procedure for doing even small things.When I decided I'll be using jQuery in one of the screens, the guys at the "top" stopped me saying it may violate copyright laws and stuff like that. Most people are simply not aware of what is going on in the industry.
jtchang 15y ago
I can't believe some of you are saying they should put together a bunch of awesome programmers and rewrite their platform from scratch. Certainly that is an option. But rarely is it ever the correct one. Your new platform could be as riddled with bugs as the old one. The truth is that finding good engineers is about knowing the right incentives. Retailers are losing the talent wars because they don't know how to compete. And while salary is one lever Target can fiddle with, it certainly isn't the only one. Target needs to look at the right incentives for the people they want to hire. Is telecommuting an option? How about direct authority to approve changes? Or the chance to build your own team? These are the incentives that matter to engineers. The problem is cutting through all the rhetoric in hiring. Target can say "we want to revolutionize the ecommerce industry" but do any engineers actually believe them? That's tough.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  Well said. Debugging, instrumentation, refactoring and understanding "system integration" are going to be big skills in an environment like this. Making a whiz-bang social-media site on a clean slate is a valuable skill, but it's not what this problem needs solved. Compensation can be non monetary as well. I telecommute a few days a week at my current position, and the hours are reasonable (important when you have a family!). My compensation is probably quite meager by Bay Area standards, but things are cheap in the Sacramento area.
- kls 15y ago
  And while salary is one lever Target can fiddle with, it certainly isn't the only one. I would argue set high enough it is the only lever. Many that play the start up game do so because first and foremost, there is the chance to earn far more than they can at an organization like Target. Sure it's a long shot but, there is at least the chance, if large organizations started to cross that chasm. I believe that they would indeed start to attract talent. If one could become moderately wealthy working for Target then a lot of people would choose that option, sure it's not the fame and fortune of making it in a start up, but a road somewhere in the middle is a road I would imagine that many developers would be willing to travel.
  - 15y ago
KevinMS 15y ago
I must be living in some parallel universe. My resume just sits up on dice and monster and the only hits I get every day are from the same useless headhunters about exciting "6 month" ruby or perl gigs. Sure, I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking, but you'd think if all this press is true about a dev talent shortage, I'd be seeing some more outreach, even though I'd probably not be interested.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  >I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking Yeah if you want a cool job, or however you define the job you feel you deserve, you need to sell yourself and network. Period.
  - KevinMS 15y ago
    Yea, but understand that is not my point, and I'm not asking for your Tony Robbins like advice. If there was such a desperate market for talent out there, I should be seeing it, regardless of whether I was selling myself or not. Either their talent searches are incompetent or this is just manufactured news for somebodies agenda.
    - brianbreslin 15y ago
      If they can't find you, dice or not, they won't know why they should hire you or who you are.
      - KevinMS 15y ago
        But somehow those bottom feeding headhunters can find me and send me about 20 emails a day all for the same job.
        ryanhuff 15y ago
        That's because you're swimming in their pond. Get out of Dice and find other ways to meet people who work for the companies that you want to work with.
joshwa 15y ago
I work at macys.com, and here's where I recruit you! Unlike most retailers, our e-commerce division operates on its own, and we have the agility (and capital budget) to move quickly and act on big opportunities. Yes, there's a lot of work and headache that's involved with dealing with massive retail systems, and they have about as much legacy stuff as you'd imagine a 150-year-old company with a history of giant acquisitions, but thankfully most of us never have to think about that stuff except at the edge of some giant diagram. We have a whole bunch of floors in downtown SF that's just for dotcom--mostly engineers, some QA, some product/management, etc. We're reasonably up to date with new technologies--although we're a Java shop, some stuff gets done in Scala, there's an active Hadoop project, and lots of big, interesting problems in scalability, UX, big data, analytics, SEO, etc. Example: I work on the internal-facing web product setup apps, primarily on product image stuff. Every product has to get photographed (including getting the physical sample from the manufacturer to the right studios, on the right model, etc), color corrected (we sell items in 60+ colors) mapped to products (is this the primary image? a swatch? a back view? which UPCs does it represent? what happens if the color sells out?). This all happens at scale: 130k physical samples trafficked, 150k products, 250k images. Too bad this is on a weekend before new year's, otherwise I'd get all my favorite dev leaders in here to pitch you. We're growing (even in a down economy, we're posting significant growth year after year) and hiring like crazy (a current search shows 25 open FTE requisitions in SF, and our contract partners even more). The work environment is a little BigCorp-ish, but it's relaxed (it's SF, after all), and they take work/life balance seriously, so if you're a hacker with a family you're definitely welcome here. I work with a lot of really smart people who get things done. Yes, we sell pants, but you get a 20% discount, and you get to find out when things go on sale beforehand ;) Current openings: http://ecommerce.macysjobs.com/ http://ecommerce.macysjobs.com/ Salaries are Bay-Area competitive, full benefits package, etc. or if you want to know more you can contact me directly at joshua.wand@macys.com, with "Hacker News" in the subject. NB going to bed now (11pm PST) but will be up in the morning to answer questions
- leak 15y ago
  I've shopped at macys.com several times because of the awesome deals on there but every time, I've returned everything that arrived. I also shop Zappos a lot and almost never return anything. For me, I think the site is really lacking on general product information through media (pictures/videos). Most of the products I click on usually have 1 picture (zappos has at least 4 and a video) and the picture doesn't even really help at all (ie: the shirt is tucked into the jeans so you can't see the fit). What are your thoughts on this? I know you guys have a gang of products but I figure if you have to setup a photo shoot for 1 angel, might as well get every angel. I admit that I don't know what i'm talking about when it comes to this stuff (I'm just using Zappos as a reference).
mechanical_fish 15y ago
So is it just me or does the main example in this article have a glaring flaw? One that appears right in the first sentence? For a decade, Target (TGT) outsourced its website operations to Amazon.com (AMZN). I don't know about the other retailers, but Target's recruitment problem begins and ends in this sentence. Target lost the talent war a decade ago; it just took until now for the seeds of their destruction, which they planted and fertilized in Amazon's organization, to grow tall enough to be noticeable. Oh, well, I'm sure the management genius who scored a short-term boost in profits by feeding the seed corn to Amazon collected a nice bonus.
jeremystine 15y ago
Now that you have heard from big-Corp (Macy's) here is where I pitch you! I'm a one man team working for my family biz Stine Home & Yard. We just launched StineHome.com with very limited product (around 100 products) but goal by end of 2012 is to have over 35,000 products online. Looking to bring on board someone who has exerience with this. No bureaucratic bs. Would have a feeling of a startup in a cool city. Preferably would live in New Orleans/Louisiana area. If interested drop me a line at jeremystine@gmail.com with Hacker News in subject.

64 points by jongraehl 15y ago

Hmm. Rather than spend $180 or $300 million to purchase tech companies, maybe some of these stores could try paying Silicon Valley salaries to a team of 10 or 20 devs. 20 devs * $200 K (loaded) / year = $4 M / year. ... Assuming they had a way to bootstrap an idiot-rejection-filter.

bgentry 15y ago
That's a much better plan. It's funny that they are unwilling to pay above-market salaries to a few competent devs.
- fleitz 15y ago
  Big box retail is currently built on an interchangeable parts model. Retailers keep costs down by making people replaceable, unfortunately at this point that model doesn't work well for tech. It's unlikely that this will change as that mindset is built into the culture of the organization and has done well for the industry in the last 30 years. It's likely that retail will undergo another change such as when sears took over in the late 19th / early 20th century. Retailers arent going to lose the war they will simply be replaced by more nimble competitors who can properly leverage technology. Contrary to popular belief there are good developers outside of sv and some developers are motivated towards well paying 9 to 5 jobs instead of options and sodas. The article also conveniently ignores the huge logistics infrastructure retailers have and focuses purely on websites, while the web is certainly important the reality of the situation is that currently retailers such as Walmart have huge competitive advantages due to its investment in logistics tech and infrastructure.
  - kls 15y ago
    It's unlikely that this will change as that mindset is built into the culture of the organization and has done well for the industry in the last 30 years. It will change if organizations like Amazon and Zappos prove out that it is a competitive advantage. It is just mainstream retail is not the proving grounds for such revelations.
- ajross 15y ago
  It's a terrible plan. Paying a bunch of rock star salaries just gets you a bunch of people that say they are rock stars. If you don't have any on staff, you don't actually know if they are or not (pg has an essay about exactly this). History is filled with these kind of rock star failures. Buying the company gets you a team that can verifiably build the product you want, because they already did. That kind of conservative risk management is worth a ton of cash in the real world.
  - ams6110 15y ago
    Well GP did say "Assuming they had a way to bootstrap an idiot-rejection-filter" Though why would it not be possible to hire a person with a track record of building the sorts of things you want, and let that person hire the team? Buying a company may or may not get you a team, depending on whether or not they stick around.
    - kls 15y ago
      I am getting ready to put together an article on this subject, it is actually pretty easy to identify a key developer and recruit them, it is just that most companies hiring practices are the antithesis to identifying that developer.
  - droithomme 15y ago
    $200k isn't a rock star salary. You are correct that paying market salaries for competent engineers does not ensure competent engineers. However it must be noted that not paying market salaries for competent engineers definitely ensures that one employes substandard talent. The market is working well right now and competent engineers have no problem receiving market rate. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever why competent engineers will not find a job paying the market rate for their talent, and that is exactly what happens. As for the companies that can not pay market rate, well they are simply not competitive and will fail. That's how the free market works and it is a very good thing. Any company that requires being competitive in the tech domain needs to be willing to pay for key talent. Companies like Target definitely need to do everything they can. Arguments that incompetent developers are good enough are absurd. Obviously what they have now is not working. Building a site that can handle a nationwide retailer the size of Target, second only to WalMart in brick and mortar stores, is completely non-trivial. The top 2 engineers there need to be paid at least $1.5 million annual salary. Sorry. I know many companies don't like this but there it is. Now obviously there are many levels below this, but this requires a pretty large development team and several below this level are going to be getting $200k-$400k. At the bottom, the losers that are just out of college and don't know anything, those guys are going to be making $75k to start. Because that's the starting salary. Companies don't want to hear this. Only the fatuous useless ignorant executives that have run the company into the ground should be paid these salaries, in their opinion. Well, they can keep thinking that and see where it gets them. Many will lobby Congress, that is a popular tactic. Pay a lobbying firm $25 million and maybe you'll be able to flood the market with cheap engineers from overseas who are willing to work for $21 an hour, and are able to do the same things that any other $21 an hour retail employee can do. Because the overseas guys that really know their stuff are not looking for $21 jobs, they are making the same salary as everyone else with their skill level. Because that's how the market works.
buff-a 15y ago
LOL. 200k? 20 devs? To build store.target.com? They'd better be awesome, and that awesome doesn't walk for 200K. That level of awesome builds the product (show don't tell) and then sells it for $180m.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  How many developers should it take to build an ecommerce site??? Sys-admins + DBAs + "biz logic" devs + "front end" devs and a few artist, project mgr types and entry level supporting developers??? Given a sufficiently inefficient process, an infinite amount of labor can be absorbed, I suppose. I would think a core tiger team could accomplish wonders simply iteratively triaging their existing operations.
  - projectileboy 15y ago
    Consultant for a big box retailer here. Yes, of course I can build a shopping cart site with a few good hackers, and I can find a few good hackers anywhere. But that's not what I have. I have a pile of legacy crud that has to integrate with ten other piles of legacy crud, not to mention the external crud with which I must integrate. And did I mention that during holiday the site gets a little more traffic than most sites? Or that the site makes a few hundred million dollars, and can't just be rewritten on a whim? To solve these sorts of problems, I don't need ten good hackers, I need more like 50. Or more. And that's the challenge the article is talking about. Because good hackers have options like Facebook - or their own startups - where they don't have to deal with that kind of noise. It's a serious challenge for any big company which relies heavily on the web, which in 2012 is every big company.
    - HalibetLector 15y ago
      "Or that the site makes a few hundred million dollars, and can't just be rewritten on a whim?" Why not? If the site is unstable and can't stay up, you can either throw 50 programmers at it and still have it crash regularly or you can take far fewer and re-write it from scratch. You're right about programmers not liking the cruft, but we also don't like most of the management processes that occur in large companies. I don't know if things have changed, but back when I worked for a large brake corporation, web programmers were devalued and distrusted. All of our decisions had to be signed off (in triplicate!) by a manager who didn't know how to program or the implications of the decisions being made. To give you on example, one of the official company-wide policies was that if you wanted to transfer files between company offices over the internet, you had to use FTP for "security purposes." We were technically not allowed to use SSH or SFTP because, when I asked, my boss said nobody had heard of it. This was in 2006.
officialchicken 15y ago
Or maybe offer a percentage of the online sales revenue, after returns (and avoiding hollywood math). I've interviewed with several "luxury" retailers within the past year, and my idiot-rejection-filter was usually triggered soon after the beginning of the interview. It was usually due to the perception of inmates running asylum, or a legacy technology I didn't want anywhere near my resume (VB). Either way, lack of technological leadership, planning, and execution was easy to spot with a phone call or visit to a store.

desireco42 15y ago

Not only that they have caps on how much developers can make, they are also heavily miss-managed, full of crazy managers with insane ideas, consulting companies with their own agendas, agile that is not even close to agile, etc. You don't need to be in Silicon Valley to make decent website, you do have to manage it and develop it properly, most don't do that.

jaggederest 15y ago
Right, it's not a failure of recruiting, it's a failure of management and environment: nobody wants to work at Target developing software no matter how much money they pay.
- reissbaker 15y ago
  It'd be interesting to know how much they pay, though. And how they adjust salary over time.

hkarthik 15y ago

Here in Dallas, lots of retailers have their corporate headquarters here. I've done some consulting work for one of them in the past and a couple years ago one of them was trying to recruit me pretty heavily for their big e-commerce push. Most of these companies don't have that many full time employees in their IT departments. A handful of full time employees will oversee an army of contractors and consultants. Most of these folks are specialized in SAP, Oracle, Business Objects, etc and don't know the first thing about building scalable web-based e-commerce. The sites that do exist tend to be old, monolithic .NET or Java apps with antiquated processes to deploy them. An old boss of mine that went to work for one of these retailers said he had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site.

Roboprog 15y ago
"Business Objects" -- <<shudder>> "What is this ''diff'' you speak of?"
kls 15y ago
had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site That is a huge issue that developers see when they see an established company. Then you add in existing technical ego's from other teams and you just have a recipe for a stagnant crashing every month disaster. It's a generalization, but we all make them, it is how we make semi-informed decisions based on loose facts. Some large companies are wrongly maligned in the process but it's the reality. When I took over the web at Marriott, we separated it from IT all together and made it a business division, in doing so we could make decisions independent of IT approval and we I had an independent budget under my discretion. Many companies just don't get how these slight organizational changes can make a huge difference in a teams ability to deliver technology.
- hkarthik 15y ago
  The retailer that tried to recruit me was led by a former startup CTO that was doing much of what you described to try to change things. Aside from separating IT, the other big change was to create a new campus/location with a better dress code, no Web Sense, and a separate network domain. This post reminds, I should check in with him and see how things are going.

prophetjohn 15y ago

The fact is that being an engineer at Target is very likely a boring, bureaucratic drag. The best engineers are overwhelmingly the best engineers because they love what they do and hone their craft. Someone who takes so much pride in what they do is not likely to get much satisfaction out of developing a website that helps people buy a mop. It's a fine thing to do; people need mops. But it's not a particularly interesting problem to be solving. So, I think places like Target will always have this problem unless they're willing to pony up the cash and offer more money than the interesting jobs. After all, there's no reason that some behemoth like Target can't compete with some SV startup in salary.

ams6110 15y ago
Basic e-commerce for such things as mop-buying is a solved problem in 2011. Not sure why you would even need a large team of top-notch developers at a place like Target. A few good sysadmins and DBAs, and maybe some graphics/front-end types. Edit: Upon thinking about this a moment longer, I think that actually there would be (or could be) interesting work at Target, simply because of the scale of the operation. Though sadly you are still probably hitting the mark in the "bureaucratic drag" assessment.
- droithomme 15y ago
  Target is the third largest brick and mortar retailer in the US. Running a computer network nationally for Target is not a solved problem. Sure, it's a solved problem for #1 WalMart, using entirely custom software that WalMart developed in house. But it's not like WalMart is selling that software to Target.
  - tsotha 15y ago
    But how much traffic does Target get? The fact that it's the third largest brick and mortar retailer means nothing at all.
mdda 15y ago
I agree with everything you say, but think it should be emphasized that tech people at (for instance) Amazon are fundamentally in the same 'buy a mop' situation, except that Amazon believes that it is/can be so much more. Fundamentally, it's clear that Target will never be a company that holds its tech people in awe - whereas at Amazon, you 'just' know that a single mop supplier is lower on the totem pole than a single DBA, for example.

mwsherman 15y ago

Wouldn’t this state of affairs scream out for simple, off-the-shelf ecommerce? Ecommerce platforms have been around as long as the web, but they are enterprisey behemoths (last I looked, a long time ago). Where is the Wordpress for retail?

asher 15y ago
> Where is the Wordpress for retail? http://www.shopify.com/ http://www.shopify.com/
ams6110 15y ago
Target itself is an enterprisey behemoth. Not trying to take away from your comment, I think there's definitely a place for a "Wordpress for retail" and would be surprised if it doesn't exist (though it's not something I've really looked into). But I'm not sure something like that would easily scale to what Target would need.
- thebrokencube 15y ago
  BigCommerce, Shopify, Volusion are probably the closest to 'Wordpress for retail', but they seem to be mostly focused towards small businesses. Not that big businesses can't use them, but yea.
  - ericingram 15y ago
    These are more like 'squarespace for e-commerce'
  - mikhaill 15y ago
    The companies you mention are all fine shopping cart providers, but someone who's selling more then a few products (not even the size of Target) needs much more then a simple shopping cart. * Integration into their inventory systems and multiple warehouses. Do you want to be able to buy on the site, pickup in store? That means you need to tie your ecommerce site to your brick and mortar systems. * Do you have vendors that dropship on your behalf? You need a way to import their catalog data and send them their orders. Did they mess up and not have inventory by the time your order arrives, better have a way for them to notify you, so you can notify customers. * Gift cards that work online and in stores. * Customer service systems that tie to your e-commerce so staff can help customers. * Syncing all sales data to your finance, ERP, business intelligence and other back-end systems. * Returns? A system for RMA, tracking returns, issuing refunds and exchanges. Want to buy online/return to store? better tie your store systems to your e-commerce again. * Marketing? Have to tie your online store your e-mail software. Building a full fledged e-commerce solution is much harder than many realize. There are great tools that solve parts of what retailers need but there is no all-in-one tool to get a large retailer online and just working out of the box.

adaml_623 15y ago

I think that article is neglecting the posibility that Target (as an example) has the software engineers who are talented enough to fix the site. But what they almost definitely have is buckets of management and procedures preventing them from fixing the site. The kind of person who is afraid to reboot the server because it hasn't been rebooted in 6 months. Or who says if we do anything then we might make it worse.

codeonfire 15y ago
Also lets not forget micromanaging tech managers who's one or two years of development before they went into management (hey they figured out technology in one year unlike all those other saps) entitles them to force their stupid and disastrous ideas onto the engineering team.

sun123 15y ago

I have worked in the IT department of a large IT firm. It is frustrating. There is a long irritating procedure for doing even small things.When I decided I'll be using jQuery in one of the screens, the guys at the "top" stopped me saying it may violate copyright laws and stuff like that. Most people are simply not aware of what is going on in the industry.

jtchang 15y ago

I can't believe some of you are saying they should put together a bunch of awesome programmers and rewrite their platform from scratch. Certainly that is an option. But rarely is it ever the correct one. Your new platform could be as riddled with bugs as the old one. The truth is that finding good engineers is about knowing the right incentives. Retailers are losing the talent wars because they don't know how to compete. And while salary is one lever Target can fiddle with, it certainly isn't the only one. Target needs to look at the right incentives for the people they want to hire. Is telecommuting an option? How about direct authority to approve changes? Or the chance to build your own team? These are the incentives that matter to engineers. The problem is cutting through all the rhetoric in hiring. Target can say "we want to revolutionize the ecommerce industry" but do any engineers actually believe them? That's tough.

Roboprog 15y ago
Well said. Debugging, instrumentation, refactoring and understanding "system integration" are going to be big skills in an environment like this. Making a whiz-bang social-media site on a clean slate is a valuable skill, but it's not what this problem needs solved. Compensation can be non monetary as well. I telecommute a few days a week at my current position, and the hours are reasonable (important when you have a family!). My compensation is probably quite meager by Bay Area standards, but things are cheap in the Sacramento area.
kls 15y ago
And while salary is one lever Target can fiddle with, it certainly isn't the only one. I would argue set high enough it is the only lever. Many that play the start up game do so because first and foremost, there is the chance to earn far more than they can at an organization like Target. Sure it's a long shot but, there is at least the chance, if large organizations started to cross that chasm. I believe that they would indeed start to attract talent. If one could become moderately wealthy working for Target then a lot of people would choose that option, sure it's not the fame and fortune of making it in a start up, but a road somewhere in the middle is a road I would imagine that many developers would be willing to travel.
- 15y ago

KevinMS 15y ago

I must be living in some parallel universe. My resume just sits up on dice and monster and the only hits I get every day are from the same useless headhunters about exciting "6 month" ruby or perl gigs. Sure, I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking, but you'd think if all this press is true about a dev talent shortage, I'd be seeing some more outreach, even though I'd probably not be interested.

mattdeboard 15y ago
>I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking Yeah if you want a cool job, or however you define the job you feel you deserve, you need to sell yourself and network. Period.
- KevinMS 15y ago
  Yea, but understand that is not my point, and I'm not asking for your Tony Robbins like advice. If there was such a desperate market for talent out there, I should be seeing it, regardless of whether I was selling myself or not. Either their talent searches are incompetent or this is just manufactured news for somebodies agenda.
  - brianbreslin 15y ago
    If they can't find you, dice or not, they won't know why they should hire you or who you are.
    - KevinMS 15y ago
      But somehow those bottom feeding headhunters can find me and send me about 20 emails a day all for the same job.
      - ryanhuff 15y ago
        That's because you're swimming in their pond. Get out of Dice and find other ways to meet people who work for the companies that you want to work with.

joshwa 15y ago

I work at macys.com, and here's where I recruit you! Unlike most retailers, our e-commerce division operates on its own, and we have the agility (and capital budget) to move quickly and act on big opportunities. Yes, there's a lot of work and headache that's involved with dealing with massive retail systems, and they have about as much legacy stuff as you'd imagine a 150-year-old company with a history of giant acquisitions, but thankfully most of us never have to think about that stuff except at the edge of some giant diagram. We have a whole bunch of floors in downtown SF that's just for dotcom--mostly engineers, some QA, some product/management, etc. We're reasonably up to date with new technologies--although we're a Java shop, some stuff gets done in Scala, there's an active Hadoop project, and lots of big, interesting problems in scalability, UX, big data, analytics, SEO, etc. Example: I work on the internal-facing web product setup apps, primarily on product image stuff. Every product has to get photographed (including getting the physical sample from the manufacturer to the right studios, on the right model, etc), color corrected (we sell items in 60+ colors) mapped to products (is this the primary image? a swatch? a back view? which UPCs does it represent? what happens if the color sells out?). This all happens at scale: 130k physical samples trafficked, 150k products, 250k images. Too bad this is on a weekend before new year's, otherwise I'd get all my favorite dev leaders in here to pitch you. We're growing (even in a down economy, we're posting significant growth year after year) and hiring like crazy (a current search shows 25 open FTE requisitions in SF, and our contract partners even more). The work environment is a little BigCorp-ish, but it's relaxed (it's SF, after all), and they take work/life balance seriously, so if you're a hacker with a family you're definitely welcome here. I work with a lot of really smart people who get things done. Yes, we sell pants, but you get a 20% discount, and you get to find out when things go on sale beforehand ;) Current openings: http://ecommerce.macysjobs.com/ http://ecommerce.macysjobs.com/ Salaries are Bay-Area competitive, full benefits package, etc. or if you want to know more you can contact me directly at joshua.wand@macys.com, with "Hacker News" in the subject. NB going to bed now (11pm PST) but will be up in the morning to answer questions

leak 15y ago
I've shopped at macys.com several times because of the awesome deals on there but every time, I've returned everything that arrived. I also shop Zappos a lot and almost never return anything. For me, I think the site is really lacking on general product information through media (pictures/videos). Most of the products I click on usually have 1 picture (zappos has at least 4 and a video) and the picture doesn't even really help at all (ie: the shirt is tucked into the jeans so you can't see the fit). What are your thoughts on this? I know you guys have a gang of products but I figure if you have to setup a photo shoot for 1 angel, might as well get every angel. I admit that I don't know what i'm talking about when it comes to this stuff (I'm just using Zappos as a reference).

mechanical_fish 15y ago

So is it just me or does the main example in this article have a glaring flaw? One that appears right in the first sentence? For a decade, Target (TGT) outsourced its website operations to Amazon.com (AMZN). I don't know about the other retailers, but Target's recruitment problem begins and ends in this sentence. Target lost the talent war a decade ago; it just took until now for the seeds of their destruction, which they planted and fertilized in Amazon's organization, to grow tall enough to be noticeable. Oh, well, I'm sure the management genius who scored a short-term boost in profits by feeding the seed corn to Amazon collected a nice bonus.

jeremystine 15y ago

Now that you have heard from big-Corp (Macy's) here is where I pitch you! I'm a one man team working for my family biz Stine Home & Yard. We just launched StineHome.com with very limited product (around 100 products) but goal by end of 2012 is to have over 35,000 products online. Looking to bring on board someone who has exerience with this. No bureaucratic bs. Would have a feeling of a startup in a cool city. Preferably would live in New Orleans/Louisiana area. If interested drop me a line at jeremystine@gmail.com with Hacker News in subject.