
$150K and up for Software Devs in Austin - jefflinwood
http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true
======
drewcrawford
I'm a freelance mobile developer in Austin.

My experience is that companies are "desperate" in the sense that they're
willing to invite you to lavish parties and fill you with free alcohol to get
you to work there. But as soon as you start talking contracting, telecommute,
or anything other than "sit at this desk for 60-hour weeks trying to get
permission to fix an awful codebase with terrible equipment," suddenly they're
not interested.

Story time: one of the best, most experienced local developers I know
interviewed at a name-brand tech firm who is covered once a week on HN.
_Twelve separate times_ , they told him "We'll let you know today" as to
whether or not he was hired. Several weeks later he found out third-hand he
was the fall-back guy for some other non-qualified person they ended up hiring
instead. He's told me horror stories about their code base that would make
your hair stand up. This company keeps inviting me to parties about once a
month.

There is a developer shortage in Austin, but the article blows it out of
proportion. In reality the reason these few companies are "desperate" has to
do with developers who want respect as human beings, autonomy to get things
done, reasonable hours, a company that understands the need for technical
excellence and not "put out fires" mentality, etc. If you do those things it's
not that difficult to hire...

~~~
blakeweb
Bias: I'm a co-founder of BuildASign.com, an ecommerce company in Austin, and
we're hiring. (Extra bias: we're a great company to work for, if Austin
interests you.)

I agree that this article blows the issue out of proportion, but then again,
any intelligent internet company realizes that its future success and future
value is determined, more than anything else, by the quality of its software
people. That being the case, any company where the higher-ups don't think
finding the best software folks is the #1 problem (or at least one of the
critical issues) at the moment is probably not a company you'd want to work
for anyway. I think this is the #1 problem we face as a company, and yet I
agree this article blows the "problem" out of proportion in the way the
article presents the issue.

~~~
boxaustin
Word on the street is that you guys have a core group of developers that are
set in their (old and busted) ways.

~~~
blakeweb
I think that's likely to be the perception any time you have a company that's
grown quickly and organically, at least when your whole company depends on
your software as much as ours does. Ditching something that's interwoven into
every business process is tough, and making new approaches play well with
existing ones is tricky. We're all for doing things the best way.

If you have specific ideas, I'd love to hear them, and would gladly buy you
lunch. Shoot me an email.

------
oacgnol
Just wanted to share my experience as a junior software engineer straight out
of college (May 2011, UT Austin) with experience at 3 different startups now.

There's been a discussion lately about the city of Austin being unable to
retain engineering graduates, most of whom leave the city unable to find entry
level work here (refer to [http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-
talent-in...](http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-talent-in-
austin/) to get what I'm talking about). Many of my college friends want to
stay in the city that they've grown to love, but many don't and end up moving
back home to find work. The growing exodus has become a problem over time, but
prospects seem to be on the rise again with initiatives by the City of Austin
and other organizations (campus2careers is a great one) to keep graduates in
the area. HireStarter, the recruiting agency that was mentioned in the
article, was excellent in placing me at my current startup even though I had
little experience. There's hope out there for junior guys, but it's still
going to be tough.

I don't expect things to get better tomorrow as this movement is still early
stage, but if this momentum keeps up, suddenly Austin will have a new supply
of junior and (formerly junior) senior devs.

Again, I still consider myself very fresh to the local industry so my
observations may be a bit myopic :).

~~~
dasil003
Not wanting to take entry level software engineers is possibly the most bone-
headed move a big company can make. Someone needs to send a memo to
management.

Big companies with no technical culture are not generally fun places for
engineers. Experienced engineers can probably sniff out the really bad ones
from a mile away. If they don't take new grads then essentially they're
staffing up with the desperate and the downtrodden.

Telling the HR guys to hire new grads would, just by youthful ignorance and
the law of averages yield a much better team over time. Granted retention
would be the next problem, but at least they'd be _somewhere_.

~~~
nupark2
On the contrary, experienced engineers are the ones most likely to be
comfortable with a non-exciting big company that provides solid benefits, a
reasonable working schedule, and mature, well-considered engineering
practices.

Our own company isn't large, but we're rather traditional. We're not hackers,
we believe in technical correctness, test-driven development and choosing the
best tool for the problem at hand. This means that we generally write mobile
software in the target platform language, server software in JVM languages,
and on the occasions where we get to work on hardware and OS development, C
and assembly.

The work approach is not laden with technical culture and "fun", unless you
find solid engineering to be fun (personally, I do).

However, we've had great success in hiring genuinely senior engineers with at
least a decade of experience each. We experimented early on with hiring junior
engineers, but found that the overhead of dealing with untrained engineers was
exceptionally high -- something that models my experience elsewhere, at larger
companies.

With the caveat that these are generalizations, I've found that the cost to
hiring junior engineers is expressed in obvious and (perhaps) non-obvious
ways. There are the obvious costs of the training and mentoring required,
along-side lower productivity, and a lesser ability to estimate complexity and
time to completion. There are also more abstract costs, such as technical and
design debt that junior engineers are much more likely to incur simply due to
a lack of experience. There are also cultural costs -- if you hire too many
junior engineers, you'll create a technical culture and working experience
that drives senior candidates away, amplifying the costs I've listed above.

Of course, I readily admit that _someone_ must hire untrained junior
engineers, and I realize the implicit unfairness of hiring standards that
would exclude myself were it 15 years ago. However, there are companies other
than our own that are willing to bear these costs in exchange for being able
to recruit at the scale they require -- we're just not one of them, and I
think our reasoning is sound.

That said, there are some things a junior engineer can do to make themselves
less junior, (possibly before even entering the labor market):

\- Get experience (class projects don't count). A great way to do this is by
contributing to OSS, especially projects that demand high-technical competence
(eg, contribute to the ruby interpreter or MacRuby, not just high-level Ruby
on Rails). Senior engineers have past experience to draw on when implementing
software projects; this allows them to design not just for the immediate
requirements, but with an understanding of how the requirements, maintenance
costs, and performance will evolve over time.

\- Study practical implementation topics (... and then get experience
implementing them). A lot of the value of a senior engineer is in their broad
understanding of the practical topics of the field. Coming out of a CS
program, you should hopefully have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of CS, but
what many candidates are missing is a firm understanding of applied
programming. Some off the cuff general book suggestions: UNIX Network
Programming, Application Programming in a UNIX Environment, Mac OS X
Internals, Applied Cryptography, The Design and Implementation of The FreeBSD
Operating System, Database in Depth. This list is probably incomplete :)

\- Don't settle for _just_ an internship. Internships at big companies (Apple,
Google, Microsoft) serve as a relatively cheap first-pass filter on college
candidates for hiring. Of a given pool of software interns at a company like
Apple, it's unlikely that more than a 10% of them will be hirable material,
and of those 10, maybe 2-3 will actually get jobs. Other companies may hire a
larger percentage (I don't have any experience there). If you want to work for
Apple, Microsoft, or Google (or think you might), then don't sit on your
laurels if you get an internship there. Pick a real, practical problem that,
and work on it, hard, leveraging your access to senior engineers for advice
and guidance as much as possible. If you just coast through the internship,
you probably won't receive an offer. I think some students look at internships
at the big companies as prestigious. However, they _may_ be viewed as the
opposite -- an internship at one (or more) of those companies without being
hired is a red flag for me, since I'm wondering why you didn't get an offer.

~~~
dasil003
You seem to have some kind of chip on your shoulder, because you are reading a
bunch of things into what I said that were not intended and are way out there.

In short, the company you describe _does_ have technical culture.

~~~
nupark2
> _You seem to have some kind of chip on your shoulder, because you are
> reading a bunch of things into what I said that were not intended and are
> way out there._

I wouldn't read my response as a line-by-line rebuttal of your post. It
wasn't.

> _In short, the company you describe does have technical culture._

By that measure, all companies have a technical culture.

However, big company culture (outside of Google and Apple) is usually not
appealing to junior engineers, but is to senior engineers -- which is the
opposite of your original point, and what I intended to address.

------
mgkimsal
"Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to
prompt 25 Central Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new
talent."

Awesome idea - cause there's certainly not a dev shortage in California, is
there?

They'd probably have more luck doing a whistlestop tour of the midwest and
north atlantic states, hitting up the more rural areas. Many techies in those
areas have few options, or may be stuck with remote-only options, and may not
enjoy the weather as much. The Austin companies have an automatic 'better
lifestyle' story against more of those areas (weather alone) rather than
trying to compete with California (where most of the devs are there _probably_
because of the Valley and the software dev culture already).

In short, I'd guess it's an uphill battle to get people to move from SF to
Austin, probably much harder than getting people from, say, St Joseph,
Michigan to uproot for Austin.

"After resumes were shared, business cards exchanged and several follow-up
phone interviews completed, not a single one of those California candidates
has made the move to Texas, according to the Austin Technology Council, which
organized the trip."

Oh wow, and look at that, it didn't work. Wh not?

"It's even tighter there than it is here," said participant Rod Favaron , CEO
of Austin startup Spredfast . "The challenge is there just aren't enough good
software developers to go around."

They didn't think of that before? Or just can't think outside the bubble?

~~~
veverkap
You are absolutely right about them hitting the wrong geographical area.

However, as a developer in the mid-Atlantic, I think the lifestyle here is
just as good :)

I'd love to find a remote opportunity with any of those firms, but it seems
that is difficult to find these days.

~~~
mgkimsal
Many people do like where they live, but... I suspect more people would prefer
to leave, say, Maryland for Austin than leaving SF.

------
mspaint
May I submit that if companies collectively hired some junior/entry level
employees, they might eventually have some mid and senior level developers in
the market? Just looking at Startuply for example, there is maybe one junior
position out of 53 positions listed in Austin.

Perhaps hire one senior level and a two or three junior level developers to
work closely together, and try and raise the productivity of the new devs.

If there are NO senior level programmers available, maybe they should get
creative.

~~~
wyclif
Spot on. I've seen this again and again: everyone is hurting for senior
people, and everyone wants rock stars/ninjas. Hardly any companies that I see
are willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to
his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience. They just
wanna plug the hole and fill the position as fast as they can, and that's
usually bad for both employer and employee long term.

~~~
rickmb
Bull.

Companies have been hiring tons of inexperienced devs throughout the late '90s
and early '00s, and they have been hurt badly by it. Incoherent teams full of
junior devs that lacked practical skills and didn't know how to work in a team
nearly killed many software based companies.

A CS degree teaches barely any professional skills, it's all on the job
training, so training a junior is extremely costly.

So nowadays, smart companies build their team around seniors, and only then
start hiring juniors one at a time. Which means 3 to 4 seniors for every
junior dev.

It's not about "plugging the hole", it's about making sure the ship doesn't
start leaking so badly it sinks.

~~~
mgkimsal
"Companies have been hiring tons of inexperienced devs throughout the late
'90s and early '00s, and they have been hurt badly by it."

Hiring "junior devs" and "hiring inexperienced devs" can be a world apart.

Hiring someone for position X who turns out to be inexperienced is not the
same as explicitly hiring a junior developer with the intent of training them
up.

I've seen a lot of the former, but not much of the latter. The two ideas get
conflated quite often, but in reality are different and the latter takes a
bigger commitment of resources.

"So nowadays, smart companies build their team around seniors, and only then
start hiring juniors one at a time."

5-10 years from now, the conventional wisdom will probably be different. Sr
devs might be more willing to leave, and if there are fewer of them, a larger
percentage of your company knowledge, culture and IP resources go with them.

------
hkarthik
I'm a developer in Dallas and many of the same things are affecting our
market, although we're mostly big companies and less startups.

I personally work with a geographically distributed team and as long as we
meet face to face on occasion, we're highly effective and we can hire when
ever we find good talent no matter where they live.

I know companies like GitHub, LivingSocial, and 37 Signals all embrace this
remote team model and utilize it well to find the talent they need without
taking desperate measures.

That begs the question, why aren't most of these startups doing the same
thing? I understand big companies are often too paralyzed in bureaucracy to
hire remote workers, but shouldn't startups be a little more flexible in this
regard?

~~~
megamark16
It seems like most hip startups want you in their office, drinking
coffee/beer/coolaid with the rest of the team. I don't know more companies
don't give a distributed team a chance, but from my observations it seems like
they're all inherently against the idea.

~~~
rickmb
Distributed teams work when the company, its culture and processes are stable
and clear. Most software related companies don't get anywhere near that in the
first five to ten years. In the mean time, fast growing start-ups look for the
engineers they hire to be their future technical leaders, and to be deeply
involved in the entire company, not just writing code.

In short: drinking coffee/beer/koolaid with the rest of the team is of vital
importance, even if the actual work can be done remotely.

Also, the people that don't get this aren't good hires for remote work anyway,
because one primary skill needed for a remote worker is knowing how to
compensate for not being physically present.

------
incongruity
Okay HN – (forgive the personal bent to this, please) what's the best way for
me to find a decent paying, but fun job?

I've got ~8 years of python experience, ~2 years of experience with
Javascript/JQuery/etc. and will be finishing up my masters in design (and an
MBA) in the spring and, while I'm actually really proud of a lot of the work
I've done, I'm irrationally terrified that I won't find a fun job that pays
halfway decently... so, without becoming a plumb for a recruiter with their
own best interests at heart, do y'all have any tips for finding a job worth
having?

(Backstory -- I haven't been out of a job since I got out of college, so I'm
feeling totally out of practice with regards to the job search)

~~~
iigs
Wall of text ahead. Sorry. :)

Don't sweat it too much. You can do things to adjust your odds, but there's a
lot of luck involved, so part of it is out of your control. Who's hiring, what
they're looking for, how your resume matches what they want, and how you
interview that day can all turn good candidates and good employers into non-
matches.

Mind your ethics and personal preferences, but don't over-emphasize the fun
part of a fun job. Your attitude can control your opinions to some extent, and
this plays in your favor here. Employers generally trip over themselves to try
to convince candidates that they're a fun and exciting place to work. They're
not trying as hard to pour money on you (generally). Geeks are generally bad
at negotiating, and bad early steps can have a long-term, sometimes nearly
permanent, effect on your salary level. It's also common to feel bitter if you
ever realize you're being screwed over financially.

Don't sweat recruiters too much. As a candidate your interests don't directly
align with theirs. That doesn't mean that you're necessarily always at odds.
If you care about a fun work environment you will probably find that they
don't have much to offer you. It doesn't hurt to talk to them, but don't
expect much.

Probably the single biggest attack point for hitting your stated goals is
during the job interview. Make sure that you realize the interview is, and
treat it as, a mutual process. Are your future teammates boring, stupid, or
difficult? What's the manager looking for, explicitly and implicitly? Why did
the last person on the team leave (even/especially if the team is growing)?
How does the hiring manager (or the higher-up "fit" interviewer, usually a
Director or executive) think about the company culture, and what do they do
about it?

You will probably not benefit by bringing up salary or benefits before the
interviewer does, so don't. Once that topic has been broached don't be afraid
to dig. If you're feeling brash, ask how the company makes salary decisions.
There are services out there that offer salary ranges for employee positions.
Maybe they use that data. If so, how?

Eventually you'll get an offer. Congratulations! It's very common for
employers to set a tight expiration on one. If your offer expires sooner than
you're comfortable making a decision, push back gently but firmly. Commit to a
response deadline, but give yourself the time you need to decide.

~~~
incongruity
Thanks. I'm often one to write long replies – it's actually a bit gratifying
to be on the receiving end of one, so thanks for your time.

So, I dig everything you're saying... I guess I should have been more specific
– by fun, I mean 'rewarding' in just about every sense except
financial/ladder-climbing, etc, but I think all of what you said still
applies.

In response to what you said, however, do you have any tips on negotiating?

A classmate was just offered 65k for a job in NYC that would pay 80-85k at a
comparable firm in Chicago and he took the offer with no negotiating because
he was afraid to do so... which blew my mind, honestly... so, I am to not be
that guy...

~~~
fooooobar
> do you have any tips on negotiating?

Interview like it's going out of style; it'll help you feel more comfortable,
if nothing else. When you have multiple offers, you can tell one company that
the other is offering more. Then you can say that you have a significantly
higher offer that's much closer to the average offer in your area, without
revealing the exact dollar amount. Plus, you actually have a second offer you
can go with if the first company doesn't offer more.

Also, look up online what average salaries are for your occupation and your
area.

------
goodweeds
It is pretty depressing to realize how under-paid we are in the bay area when
you factor in cost of living. A lead systems administrator in SF tops out at
about $150k, but more likely is about $120k, which is the same my friends in
Wisconsin and New Jersey make, where the cost of living is 60% and 30% lower,
respectively.

~~~
boredguy8
But you get to live in San Francisco rather than Wisconsin or New Jersey. It
might not matter to some people, but I have almost zero desire to live long-
term anywhere other than San Diego, LA, or San Francisco. There are enough
people who feel the same way that I do, and so employees can pay a bit less.

~~~
potatolicious
I live in SF right now. It's not even that nice... it just _costs_ a lot, and
in many ways I feel like the insane amount of love the city gets from its
residents is at least in part to feel better about _paying_ such ridiculous
living costs.

I've lived in a lot of major cities in my life, and SF is the first one where
I've had to literally dodge human shit while walking on the sidewalk.

The weather is pretty much the only reason I don't regret moving here. Even
the famously liberal population drives me up the wall sometimes - amazingly
cliquey, and way smugger than even South Park portrays this place.

~~~
wyclif
I'm a denizen of the East Coast. On every visit to SF I notice shit on the
sidewalks that public services never clean up. I guess it's the vast number of
homeless people and crackheads. They just pull their pants down and defecate
wherever they are. I never saw that in Philly.

But yeah, the weather sure is nice. I figure that's part of the problem,
though: if you're homeless, you'll head somewhere that's warm all the time.
Everbody had the same idea and solution.

~~~
potatolicious
Talking to other people in SF about the city always strikes me as somewhat
Stockholm Syndrome-y. People take pride in paying $2K for an apartment on a
street where the police warns you to stay inside because two people got raped
blocks apart in the same week. It's so surreal.

Oh, the crime isn't so bad. _Everyone_ knows to stay away from the west side
of Dolores Park! The crackheads in the TL won't bother you unless you show
fear! Haha! Another person got shanked on my block this week - if only they
were as street smart as the rest of us! I deftly dodged a piece of human shit
on the sidewalk on my way to work without missing a beat, how delightfully
urban-sophisticate!

I've never before lived in a place where violent crime, rampant substance
abuse, and extreme poverty was treated in such a blase way, and often
glorified as "vibrancy" and "color". The more I live here the more I feel like
people here have these _giant_ goggles on that _only_ allows them to see the
charming mini-muffins, startup parties, and great coffee.

~~~
balloot
I have lived in SF for 5 years, and seriously have no clue WTF you are talking
about. The crime rate in SF is quite average as far as big cities go. You make
it sound like some post apocalyptic hellhole.

~~~
tptacek
San Francisco has a higher incidence of violent crime per capita than does New
York, despite the fact that San Francisco is concentrated into 46 square
miles, while New York spans 301 square miles.

What this means in practice is that nobody in San Francisco lives more than
walking distance from an area of the city in which people are routinely
mugged, whereas you have to get north of the 140s in NYC to see drastically
increased crime.

San Francisco is, for its population, anomalously small. That plays into a lot
of the problems perceive in it: it drives housing costs, makes transportation
infrastructure harder to build, retards home ownership (and thus neighborhoods
--- had a block party lately?), puts people into closer contact with crime, &c
&c.

I lived in SF for several years, and I think 'potatolicious is if anything
understating his case.

~~~
tedunangst
Shouldn't the small size make transportation easier to build? I've always
assumed muni sucks so bad because it's part of some grand plan I never
understood. Incompetence cannot explain it, it's so bad it has to be
deliberate.

~~~
goodweeds
Can you explain to me why Muni and BART suck? I take BART or AC Transit every
day, and Muni 2 or 3 times per week, and have for years. A decade ago I was
afraid of Muni because I was afraid of poor people. I'm no longer afraid of
poor people, I'm afraid of the rich, so Muni feels really natural.

------
gruseom
There's a lot of discussion in this thread around "junior" vs. "senior". This
misses the point, which is to hire good programmers and avoid bad ones. It's
as if the industry has finally burned itself out of the "programmers as
replaceable cogs" model and has replaced it with the next-laziest model, "hire
senior, not junior". That is an improvement, but it's still so off-base that
the words "junior" and "senior" applied to programming make me cringe.

Here are two factors the junior/senior model does not take into account.
First, a good but inexperienced programmer will learn so quickly that they
will run rings around mediocre experienced programmers in no time. Second,
experience isn't only a good thing. Once people have repeated something a
certain way enough times (and surprisingly few repetitions are required), they
become locked-in and unable to see alternatives. This loss of flexibility is
toxic to effective programming.

Of course that happens less to good programmers than bad ones, but that only
puts us back at the real question - how do you tell a good one apart from a
bad one? - something we have no satisfactory way of answering that is
compatible with current hiring practices.

What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and
"senior". Our industry lacks this. What is our path to learning? We have the
sink-or-swim model in which people once hired are installed in a silo and told
to work on their tasks. Everyone recapitulates all the classic mistakes and
has to figure everything out for themselves. I know I did. It cost me at least
5 years developmentally, and I'm only putting the number that low to save
face. This way is so inefficient that it must eventually yield to something
better. Hopefully when that happens there will also be less of the prickly
auto-didact about most of us - but that's another story.

~~~
akkartik
_What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and
"senior"._

Reading other people's code is too hard. We go through life trying to do it as
little as possible.

~~~
mattmiller
Reading other peoples code is a great way to learn, but often other peoples
code is not very accessible. How often do you look at the code written by a
star dev in another department on another project. I can't:

-identify star devs unless I work with them directly,

-look at the code base of the project they are working on if I am not also working on it,

-find out which portions of the code they wrote (without looking through commit logs)

In many places a <i>healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and
"senior".</i> is not facilitated by the employer.

~~~
gruseom
In my experience, it happens through personal interaction and is a matter of
culture. Facilitated by employers? Most employers are decades away from
knowing how to do that. Or rather, most employers that exist today will never
do it.

The interesting question is how many good programmers would be happier working
in such a culture. I believe the answer is significantly many, and that this
is a competitive edge waiting to be exploited. We hear so much about perks and
benefits. My programmer soul says: fuck perks and benefits. Give me an
environment that is teeming with creativity where I get to work with great
people that I learn from and am inspired to do what seemed impossible.

------
yxhuvud
"We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said,
"and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."

Everyone? No, it does not hurt the employees.

~~~
xer0
Yeah, but they aren't anyone, they're just talent.

~~~
adestefan
May favorite was when a very large corporation started to call their HR
department Human Capital Management. Human Resources is bad enough, but once
you start calling me captial I'm never going to work for you again.

------
karmajunkie
Here's my gripe about this:

Ok, so startups have limited funds, fair enough. But way too many of them
offer way too little in the way of equity to make up for a below-market salary
and the risk and opportunity cost of taking the job.

I have zero sympathy for larger firms. When they talk of raising H1-B limits
and how tight the market is, what they really mean is that they can't find
developers for what they're willing to pay. the work these developers do is
critical to the bottom line of the company. Why should a CEO make out like a
bandit through compensation or stock prices while the teams that enabled it
toil away for a pittance, comparatively speaking? Wages across all industries
have been mostly flat for years—its only in the last few years that the
IT/development industry is starting to show some movement.

(And before someone points out that everyone in a software company contributes
to success, even non-developers, I totally agree—everyone ought to share in
success.)

------
prophetjohn
One of the companies mentioned in the article was advertising internships and
failed to even call me in for an interview. And it took them 5 weeks to
respond saying that they did not have a position that matched my
qualifications. It's possible that I suck, but I have a 4.0 GPA advertised on
my resume and offered a pretty compelling cover letter.

It's possible that many of these companies have a hard time recruiting talent
because their recruitment process is broken.

~~~
pagekalisedown
Notice the quote "I'm not going to pay the California wages".

Keeping salaries low is clearly a priority for these people.

I have a strong feeling this might be a fluff piece to increase the H1B quota.

~~~
austindev9000
So what are the actual salaries they are offering in Austin? The HN post says
150k but that's roughly the SF rate anyway.

------
Kilimanjaro
Why are companies so averse to telecommuting? There is an endless supply of
S/D around the world.

~~~
_dps
The telecommuting issue is separate from the "rest of the world" issue; the
former is primarily a communication and culture problem, but the latter is all
about concentration of talent around leading technical companies (primarily in
the US).

There are indeed many people all over the world with programming knowledge;
there are far fewer with _experience on a technically sophisticated project_.
The latter class of talent is highly concentrated around the hotspots of
sophisticated technical companies which, on average, keep their most important
teams in the US.

If you are just reading and writing rows on a single instance of MySQL you can
get all the talent you want from just about anywhere in the world. If you want
to roll your own fault-tolerant distributed filesystem your options are
(statistically) much more narrow, because anyone who can do that is likely to
have been tempted by an offer to work at, e.g., Google in Mountain View.

~~~
oneplusone
I don't know about that. I am located in Toronto, Canada and would be
interested in a UX design/front end development telecommuting job that paid
$120k+.

However, nobody really wants to hire somebody that they can't watch. In the
past I have emailed several companies about job postings that list telecommute
as an option, and in all but one of the cases they where not open to somebody
more than 3 hours away from the office.

I don't really understand this position. I am in ET so the time zone can't be
an issue. I am in an English speaking country so there won't be any language
barriers. I think companies in the US need to realize that increasingly fever
people will want to move there because it the US is become very scary.

~~~
pagekalisedown
The US is only scary for Canadians and Western Europeans perhaps.

------
vaksel
I think there are 2 parts of the problem.

1-companies want to pay a pittance compared to what the person is actually
worth. Face it, if you offer $90K, and your competitor offers $120K, the
person has to be insane to take an offer that differs so much.

2-companies have really high requirements when they don't actually need them.
If you are doing something simple, you don't need a Google level
engineer...especially if you are not willing to pay a proper salary for one.

------
tansey
I moved from CA (Palo Alto and San Diego) to Austin in August to start my PhD
at UT. Austin is pretty good in the sense that it's probably the best possible
city you could live in that's in middle America.

That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain
rude and self-centered. There is a lot of "get out of my way" attitude, both
metaphorically in how people interact in conversation, and literally on the
roadways. It's also landlocked, and I miss the ocean terribly.

I'm here purely because the CS department at UT Austin is the best in the
world for my area of research (Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks).
However, in a couple of years when my class requirements are done, I'm
planning on finishing my dissertation research remotely from a coastal city.

There really is nothing at all I can imagine Austin has to offer me that is
worth staying here over SF, SD, or even the east coast like NYC or DC. Maybe I
just don't get it.

~~~
oldstrangers
"That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain
rude and self-centered."

No offense, but that might be the most backward thing I've ever heard. Have
you seen LA or SF? I feel like you might live in a one or two person bubble.
Honestly, where are you hanging out in Austin?

~~~
geori
I agree. Austin is one of the most chill places in the world. As a matter of
fact, the only thing people bitch about are all the self-centered Californians
who moved to TX in order to escape high real estate prices.

~~~
karmajunkie
... Who then drive up real estate prices here in Austin enough that "normal"
people have a hard time buying in town.

To the OP: get out of your bubble, man. Austin is one of the friendliest
places around.

~~~
lightweb
I left Austin and even I know that Texas is in general much friendlier than
the big metro areas in California. :-)

I agree, the OP needs to hang out with more Austinites. Unfortunately, the
reason I left Austin was precisely because the ratio of "Austinites" to
"Transplants" was headed in the wrong direction FAST. I've been gone almost 4
years now and I hear that it's only getting worse.

Austin still has pockets of cool left, but it's nothing like it was in the
80's, 90's and 00's. It's been on the steady decline for decades.

All that said, it's probably a much better choice than most anywhere else in
Texas and probably the south/southwest.

------
gorbachev
So I've been toying with the idea of relocating to Austin, because New York is
f __*ing expensive.

I even sent a couple of job applications some time ago before I got my new job
in NYC. I'm not a rockstar, but I'm good and my resume shows it. I get a LOT
of bites in New York metro area.

However, these Austin companies didn't even bother to respond, except one. The
interesting thing about the one that responded was that the job was tailor
made for me. It was uncanny...it's almost as if they read my resume and
produced the job listing to match. Which is why I sent in the application in
the first place.

The response was that they found me unqualified for the job. What a load of
horse manure. If you're sending form letters to rejected candidates, please
take some time to actually use the right template. I believe this one
should've been the "no_relocation" or the "ceos_son-in-law_was_more_qualified"
template.

------
Aqua_Geek
I keep hearing of this huge shortage of developers, but the situation I have
encountered while looking for a job seems to be saying something else.

Is there really a lack of good talent, or is the recruiting process so
horribly broken that good developers don't make it through the first levels of
filtering by non-technical people?

~~~
mattmiller
I think you have a point. We are trying to hire at a large company and we
don't see many resumes that make it through the HR filter. I still haven't
figured out how this process works.

------
coconutrandom
Austin is a great place to live.

~~~
ebiester
Question: how far outside the Austin cocoon can a gay man go without being
lynched? (I mean this metaphorically, of course.)

Austin has a great reputation, but it's still in Texas.

~~~
juddlyon
I moved to Austin from SF and was told by a friend prior to moving that
"Austin is California surrounded by Alabama."

You can definitely sense a cultural contrast outside of Austin.

~~~
ebiester
I come from Tucson, Arizona actually :) it's the same type of cocoon there,
though Tucson is starting to get more conservative as people like me move out
(this month even!) and more conservative people move in.

Seeing people smoke pot openly in the streets still messes with me.

------
keyston
This is good news.. atleast for texas. I'm about 45mins from austin and
finding local gigs are always hard. Wonder if they do remote work...

------
anamax
> "We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said,
> "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."

If they've made an agreement to not recruit from each other, they're in
violation of anti-trust law.

Google, Apple, and at least one other company got busted for this in SV about
three years ago.

~~~
pagekalisedown
Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intuit, ..

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/05/04/apple-a...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/05/04/apple-
allegedly-at-center-of-employee-compensation-conspiracy-involving-google-
intel-adobe-pixar-and-lucasfilm/)

------
rudiger
Guess I'm moving to Austin!

------
Maven911
I think the only reason this article was so popular and generated so many
comments was the clever marketed headline

------
gexla
Free beer, taco's and a job interview can't make a good mix. I suppose that if
I let one rip before I start slurring my qualifications, and the company isn't
interested, then it was never meant to be.

~~~
adestefan
Your son Rip is on line toot.

------
shareme
the biggest obstacle in moving to Austin is not what the article states..

Think about it people..if the developer has a house mortgage will he move?
No..

If the dv still has edu debt will he move? no..

