

Tech startups face stiff competition for talent - bchjam
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/us-column-cohen-recruiting-idUSTRE7573OF20110608

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tokenadult
From the submitted article: "'The best people are already working,' said
Bhoopathy, who said he pays 'above-market' rates for the right people"

In light of the quotation from the submitted article in the first reply here,
"The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," how does any
one graduate from a state university engineering program show that he or she
is one of the "right people" who is worth "above-market rates" to bring on
board a start-up's team? The one hiring heuristic mentioned here is hiring
someone who already has a job. Is there more to look for? What do people with
the best talent do to show their talent? What characteristics are tech start-
ups looking for to make sure they hire really talented developers?

Edit to respond to a reply below. I'm glad to hear from one of the interview
subjects for the submitted story. I'm not a dev myself, and I am still
learning about this industry as a matter of curiosity, having an immediate
family member who IS a dev. Sure enough, he has an active personal project in
development that he contributes to on GitHub and is deeply interested in
learning and education. I was drawn to HN because of Paul Graham's essays on
education, and my own work is in the content-development aspect of gifted
education in mathematics. I rely on my other family member (also an HN
participant) for technical advice when he can cram it into his busy schedule.

~~~
yakshaving
I was interviewed for that article (The quote re: The best people are already
working"... was me).

We tend to prefer people who are 1- Open source contributors to projects that
are related to what our project is about 2- Have active Github profiles. 3-
Have a deep interest in learning and education 4- Are willing to put up with
some experimentation (aren't afraid to rip out features and add new ones
quickly) 5- Have worked for other startups

Finally, we start with contract positions before deciding to bring people on
full time. Do you have any other suggestions to reach out to devs who fit the
bill who are currently still employed? Much harder to find out details about
if they're not on github contributing to open source stuff.

~~~
TheRevoltingX
Not that I consider myself top talent, but I work as a mobile app developer
with experience in building scalable backend systems.

My current employer is a small shop even though I got offers from a lot of
companies who were offering to pay more. They enticed me by allowing me to
work for lower pay so that I don't have to bust my ass every day.

I work a few hours a day and 8 hour days are rare. Telecommuting is also an
option but I like to work at the office.

They also buy a bunch of ipads and android devices I can take home and play
with.

This is much better for me than working at a different company at least 8
hours a day and specially in a startup environment where you have to work long
hours to get a product out.

~~~
bugsy
Sounds pretty rational to me for both of you. The important thing is whether
someone can deliver the goods, not how long it took them or where they were
sitting at the time. Most of my critical design work is done in the shower or
laying flat on my back looking at the ceiling. Having the time to do deep
consideration and reflection is a critical part of quality design work.
Sitting and typing furiously in a loud open work environment next to sales
guys screaming into their phones, secretaries flirting with management, and
air conditioning blasting away may look more impressive, but never produces
quality work.

------
mgkimsal
_He is hopeful, though, that as more VCs consider other parts of the country
to seed their ventures, the problem may take care of itself.

"The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," he (Steve
Blank) said. "Why don't we fund these companies cheaply in Ann Arbor?"_

Why not indeed. But then some of those VCs might have to travel outside the
Bay Area.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle - everyone's there because everyone's there,
and I don't see that network effect going away any time soon. Everyone was on
Windows because everyone else was on Windows. Everyone moves to iPod/iPhone,
and the network effect brings everyone over to iPhone (yes, exaggerating a
bit, but not much).

~~~
kenjackson
8000 engineers per year? Assuming four years to graduate, doesn't that imply
about 32k engineering students? If you add up all three UM campuses there are
about 58k students. Engineers make up more than half of all students? I find
that hard to believe for a non-engineering school (ala MIT or GT).

~~~
mrgordon
Exactly. I've read sources that claim there are only 11,000 computer science
graduates nationally per year. Here's the source:
<http://www.peacepowerlove.com/archives/5187>

~~~
misterbee
If you include other sources of software professionals: math, applied math,
physics, and engineering, you'll probably get closer to 50,000 per year. Add
in non-college and college dropout and you'll get even more.

(The "8,000 from one school in one year" estimate is too high, though, yes.)

------
bugsy
Things that are extremely, trivially easy to do:

1\. Throw wads of money at something.

2\. Pay off politicians.

3\. Shmoozing.

4\. I'm the sales and idea guy.

Things that are very hard to do:

1\. Design a product that people find useful and are willing to use.

2\. Design a product that people are willing to spend money on.

There's an enormous glut of VC backed companies filled with and powered by the
easy trivial stuff. These folks tend not to respect engineering design and
inventing skills, which they see as commodities they should be able to buy for
a pittance. Then they complain that there is stiff competition for talent when
designers don't choose to work for their useless startup.

~~~
shareme
You are being overly simplistic, but its a valid point. And quite frankly a
few of us have reversed the VC/Angel criteria for picking startups and use
that as an interview/offer acceptance filter...

I know out of the last 3 months only one startup out of 20 made to the almost
offer stage, I am awaiting them signing a big client that funds my position..

It came down to: 1 People involved. 2 Product/Company/market vision 3
User/client growth 4 Mixture of honesty and transparency..told me where they
could be honest and transparent and where they could not disclose and the
reasons why.

------
georgieporgie
In other news, HR still has no idea what it's doing, but is convinced that
arbitrary heuristics which eliminate candidates implicitly lead to optimal
hiring, business managers still don't understand tech work, and Wikipedia is
widely believed to trend toward accuracy.

(in other words, hiring people is hard work, really hard work, but we pretend
that employing arbitrary requirements [e.g. must be employed, must have exact
experience in variant x of library y on platform z] equals the necessary hard
work)

