

10% unemployment yet every startup in NYC struggling to hire - jonsteinberg
http://jonsteinberg.com/15-unemployment-yet-every-startup-in-nyc-is-s

======
mgkimsal
Could it have anything to do with most of them likely only wanting to hire
people geographically in (or near) NYC? And hand-in-hand with that, the
startups don't really want to pay something adequate for someone with the
necessary experience to live modestly within commuting distance?

I know more people who have offshored engineering/dev work to India and the
like than send work to developers in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, etc. Then they
complain about the less than stellar work, with timezone diffs, English
proficiency, cultural differences and so on.

There's a pretty large pool of people who are willing to work remote and -
gasp - even travel to your main office sometimes, but who simply aren't going
to uproot and live in NYC to make $100k. For someone raising a family, they
could make $75k in Omaha or Tupelo and have a _much_ better quality of life.

[http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc](http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc)
[http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc](http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc)

9400 Java jobs in NYC, but only 900 are estimated at $150k or higher.

Cost of living between Omaha (at 75k) and NYC:
[http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=531370...](http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=53137000&city2=53651000)

Cost of living between Nashville (at 80k) and NYC:
[http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=547520...](http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=54752006&city2=53651000)

You need roughly $150k in NYC to have an approximate lifestyle. Yet only 10%
of the jobs pay that.

The concept of 'hiring' itself may be due for a makeover, and a 'JIT' approach
to company development may be in the cards for companies struggling to hire
the right people (which they'll likely lay off the moment things go south
again).

~~~
mgkimsal
Adding on:

We've also had a housing crisis which is keeping many people chained to their
current regions due to underwater mortgages and no housing sales. 5 years ago
people could move their families across country for a good job. Even if they
_want_ to now, they can't. This is just not acknowledged by most companies.

I was approached a couple years ago by a company that was starting up - 'ex
google founders' and all that. The product/service was pitched to me as a
collaboration/communication tool to help remote teams work more effectively.
Sounded great, but I was not allowed to work remote. I had to upsticks and
move to SF. To work on a remote collaboration tool. WTF?

~~~
nostrademons
There really is a _huge_ difference between working in person with someone and
working remotely. I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks
of programmer time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

It doesn't really surprise me that ex-Googlers would insist you work in
person. As a large multinational, Google feels the pain of distributed teams
more than many companies, which is probably why they're founding their
startup. It'd probably sink their startup if one of their key employees was
not working in person with them.

~~~
gaustin
> I've seen misunderstandings that could waste literally weeks of programmer
> time get corrected by a 15-minute pair-programming session.

Are they things that wouldn't have similarly been resolved by remote pairing?

~~~
nostrademons
With what tools? In theory, if you have a shared screen, and real-time voice
communication, and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video, it should
be basically the same as being there. The technology to do this is very, very
expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this
startup.

You also miss out a lot on serendipity. Many of the best ideas that eventually
become actual Google products happen because a bunch of folks are hanging out
over beers, or they're sharing the latest cool thing they've stumbled across
on the Internet, or they're shooting each other with nerf darts before going
home. This sort of relaxed socialization seems to be exactly what you need to
get creative ideas to bubble up to the surface. When you have to feel like
you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of
spontaneous idea generation.

~~~
coryrc
>> With what tools? In theory, if you have a shared screen

VNC, emacs

>> and real-time voice communication,

telephone

>> and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video

projector, webcams, monitor

>> The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though,
which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.

When you are considering $75k versus $150k per year, the above is not
expensive

------
jrockway
It's because "every startup" is lazy and afraid to take risks. In the
programming world, for example, everyone wants to hire someone who has 150
years of experience with each of C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, OCaml,
Haskell, and node.js. Problem is, that is not possible. So the position goes
unfilled.

If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with
English degrees and teach them programming, they would probably do really,
really well. But nobody is willing to do that, so college grads go without
jobs and startups go without employees.

(Also, startups expect you to really drink that Kool-Aid. They want you to
work 12 hour days, skip weekends, not take vacation, and "be loyal" to the
company. Why would anyone do that when they can work 9-5 for 4x as much money
at an investment bank?

Ironically, even the investment banks can't hire anyone, but that is for other
reasons.)

~~~
mgkimsal
That's another really good point. There's not much in the way of
apprenticeship in software.

Companies will often pay for relo expenses for someone, providing they stay
for X years (else they repay the relo money back). Companies could do
something similar with education, whether it's local college classes, inhouse
training, etc. If you leave within the first year, you pay the company back
those expenses. Or... have retention bonuses for people for staying past 1
year, and invest in education for people at lower wages. Many companies would
find some real gems out there, waiting to be discovered, and would engender
far more loyalty than most currently get.

~~~
bugsy
I'm not sure I am following this. If you want to attract actual talent, you
have to pay full relocation. The good ones have stable jobs they enjoy. And
they are going to pay their own relocation for a new job that may not work
out? I don't think so. The only people that pay their own relocation are the
desperate and the completely untalented.

As far as having to pay back if you are laid off or the company is otherwise
dissatisfied due to their own lack of having a decent vetting process, ha ha
ha. Indentured servitude. That's a new one. I'm sure that will get the best of
the best. Not.

~~~
nostrademons
Relo packages are a perk that's given out to those with a certain amount of
experience. I got one last time I changed jobs, but I barely squeaked in
(official policy was that it's only for candidates with 5+ years of
experience, I had 4 years, they said "We'll work something out"). And I
would've had to pay it back if I worked at the company for less than a year.

The vast majority of my friends did not get relo packages, because this is
their first job out of school. Companies don't typically offer relo for fresh
college grads.

I thought this discussion was about junior engineers?

~~~
waterlesscloud
If you can't find employees, you have to get out of the mindset of "perks"
that employees are lucky to get and start offering what it takes to get what
you want.

Or keep whining there's no employees.

One of these paths is more productive than the other.

------
maxawaytoolong
Perhaps the reason startups are struggling to hire in NYC is not because there
are too few hackers but because there are too many startups. Most hackers
simply do not have aspirations to work 80 hours a week to make some MBA
jackass rich off of his website which promises to revolutionize the world for
apartment brokers, attempt to make print media relevant online, or sell last
year's handbags at a discount.

~~~
clofresh
I worked at a profitable, medium size company with a startup-like hacker
culture and it was still very difficult to hire talented programmers despite
being able to offer interesting work that provided a net benefit to society,
normal hours, free soda and career development. We'd have to go through many,
many candidates who looked good on paper (lots of experience, top tier
education) but were awful once you presented them with basic programming
problems. It was actually pretty demoralizing to have to reject the volume of
people that we did.

I do agree that there are a lot of silly startups these days, but it doesn't
mean that there isn't also a shortage of quality hackers.

~~~
bugsy
Wow free soda! I can't imagine why top talent wasn't beating a path to your
door!

~~~
icefox
free soda is typically an indication of a place that has not yet become
institutionalized. Most startups have this perk and at some point some manager
comes in and kills it off for <insert reason of the week>. It is a sign that
things are changing which often coincides with top talent moving off. A canary
in a coal mine if you will that there might be good developers there.

~~~
clofresh
Yup, exactly. See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750>

~~~
bugsy
I do agree with you that canceling soda programs means doom is assured and
it's time to bail, as with a dead mine canary.

However, soda, coffee and toilet paper and soap in the bathroom are very small
things. Listing them in an ad as one of the key benefits of working for a
company is also a mine canary, one that says the company has very little to
brag about.

------
jorgeortiz85
I agree with the author that programming (not just "tech") literacy should be
part of every curriculum, I don't think this will solve the unemployment
problem.

Technology is very good at creating value, but not very good at creating jobs.
All 72 tech companies in the S&P 500 combined employ about 2.3m people [1],
whereas just Wal-mart employes about 2.1m people. Those numbers are worldwide
employment, but for reference, the US had 15m unemployed in November.

Even the breakout, unimaginable success that is Google only employs about
28,000 people. And I'm sure that for every hire Google has made, they've
displaced many more people that used to depend on print advertising. (To be
clear, I'm not saying that technology is net bad for the economy. Technology
creates a lot of value for the individuals that work and invest in it, and for
the economy as a whole. However, technology is not a massive creator of jobs.)

So unless startups become a multiple of the size of the entire S&P 500
technology sector, they're not going to make a noticeable dent on
unemployment.

[1] I compiled a spreadsheet
([https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEt...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEtYWUJjcTRNNkxMRS1YZGRrd0E&hl=en&authkey=CJflxN0N))
based on information available on Wikipedia[2] and through Google searches

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies> and individual
company pages

~~~
rorrr
Yeah, but walmart people will soon be replaced by robots. More and more
automation will create more and more unemployment among uneducated.

It's pretty fucking hard to automate programming. Heck, we can't even solve
voice and character recognition.

~~~
rbranson
We have automated the hell out of programming (compilers, shared libraries,
higher level languages, etc), but as soon as we do that, they just expect us
to be more productive :)

I think it will be still be a long time before robots replace humans, even at
Wal-Mart-like jobs. There are a few places where it's appropriate (self
checkout, for instance), but there are things that humans do without batting
an eyes are very very hard or expensive for robots (spoken communications,
visual and auditory classification, spatial navigation and obstacle
negotiation).

Humans aren't really that expensive honestly. Considering that the rent on a
few servers from EC2 can equal the hourly wage of a Wal-Mart employee, it's
going to be a while before these equations start working out.

~~~
sedachv
It's not just self-checkout, but things like vending machines (big in Japan,
will eventually be big everywhere else; this is starting to occur now with DVD
rental vending machines) and robot warehouses (Kiva already does pretty well
with this). Also Amazon and Netflix. Their warehouses may not be run by
robots, but are extremely automated. This also applies to food - there's no
reason automats can't make a comeback. I also don't doubt for a second that
one of the first things Google will do with self-driving cars is automate the
trucking industry.

You're absolutely right about people not being very expensive though. Labor
costs actually make manual manufacturing in China less expensive than in fully
roboticized factories in Japan or the USA for many things.

------
steele
Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science & engineering, but
blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes (or exercise balls,
yoga mats, etc) at a startup is completely off base. The job market is rough
for recent graduates who were all but promised that the world is hungry for
the skills their universities have tried to imbue upon them for an extremely
large sum of money. Perhaps a small startup run by the campus Business School
"idea guys & girls" less than a decade out of undergraduate school themselves
is not the most secure option for someone whose student loan interest clock
just started ticking. Should anyone be surprised that a senior or recent
graduate might rather wait the several months to hear back from a large
consulting company (who are also in hiring mode due to layoff too many people
in 09 & are feeling client pushback on their broken offshore/onsite models)?
The talent pool isn't as shallow as you would think. Startups buzz about "how
to interview and retain a rockstar gurus" and end up looking for a walk-on-
water engineer to work long nights for beans & equity with no guarantees for
success. Smart kids are malleable, and even if they leave college learning
Ruby, Common Lisp, or whatever the flavor of the week is, they will need to
grow on the job. Take a chance, offer competitive or better-than-market
compensation, and grow your talent from eager minds that buy into your vision
enough to feel financially comfortable and invested in the success of the
organization.

~~~
pyre

      > Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science &
      > engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes
    

More to the point, blaming higher education isn't filling the cubes _right
now._ How is ranting about higher education going to solve your business's
immediate needs? Even in a perfect scenario, where higher ed. _is_ the
problem, and even if a solution to the problem was implemented, how long would
it take to see results? Are you going to just let your business languish until
then?

(Note: 'you' is a generic you, not the poster. My comment was just inspired by
misreading his first sentence on first glance.)

~~~
okaramian
I think there is also an alignment problem between what the purpose of higher
education is supposed to be and what employers are expecting from entry level
employees.

College is not job training, it is a place where you learn how to learn stuff.
The reason people believe otherwise is because college is really expensive, so
it has to be viewed as an investment that will get you a job and deliver
appropriate training.

Learning how to learn is important, it lets you move forward in whatever you
take on. College as it is, is not a trade school, which seems to be what
employers are expecting.

A degree in engineering or CS will churn out someone who has a strong
analytical mind and the ability to learn more. Places that are hiring may need
to adjust and accept that this is what the market is at the entry level,
instead of complaining that the skills are not available at the price that
they're offering. Companies might be better off offering less and expecting
less (at the start, you might not get someone who can start churning on your
application immediately) and growing talent in the process.

Also I've started seeing a lot of companies acting like the work they're doing
is on the level of Google, when it's not and interviewing like they are and
that's what they need.

Basically, it seems like a lot of employers have expectations that are way off
the mark.

~~~
jonsteinberg
I think your points are fair. However, I see lots of practical coursework at
even purely liberal arts school. Architecture, accounting, chemistry, etc. all
have direct and practical learnings.

Why not just try to inject a little tech and software thinking into the
economics, marketing, sales-oriented, and management classes taught both
undergraduate and graduate.

And why not teach code, as a way of learning to learn, in middle and high
schools?

~~~
okaramian
Definitely good points.

Regarding education at the high school and middle school level, I never had
required programming courses, but we did have a Pascal course in middle
school, and in high school we were offered (and I took) C++ computer
programming courses at the Honors and AP level. This was at a public school,
and I don't see why that can't happen at more schools.

I think introducing some type of programming into the college level for ALL
majors would be valuable. I don't know if you need to inject that directly
into the curriculum, maybe a series of "Development For Dummies" clubs
taught/marketed by young CS and Engineering students could help bridge the
gap. Maybe in exchange those students could run clubs that might open
CS/Engineering students to more than analytical thinking as well.

~~~
bugsy
One big problem. No one that is a capable enough developer to teach computer
science is going to be teaching at a high school. And more pay isn't an
answer, the problem is bureaucracy and endemic stupidity in the institutional
structure of public primary and secondary education.

~~~
okaramian
I think it depends. My teacher for the AP class was a former student/MIT
graduate and was starting his own business. This was as exception from the
norm, but it's possible!

Maybe having teachers that teach single classes on a volunteer basis?

------
ig1
Yes there's a mismatch between the jobs available and the skills of the
unemployed. But the rest of the article is pretty much wrong.

Plenty of people aren't cut out for programming or just don't like it. Trying
to force them into jobs where there not a good fit isn't good for anyone.

Business schools should teach a wide range of case studies from a range of
sectors. Yes that includes farming and food logistics.

The beer company InBev ships $36 billion dollars a year of beer. That's more
than market cap of Facebook. The Beer industry is probably worth more than the
combined value of every startup featured on Techcrunch in the last year.

Let's not exaggerate the importance of our industry in the wider scheme of
things.

------
itg
The skills he mentions in the article should be taught on the job, not in
college. The other problem I noticed, especially when it comes to fresh
undergrads, is some companies want people who already have some exact skillset
yet don't want to do any training of their own.

~~~
_delirium
This is one of the things big engineering firms in other areas do better, I
think (though they do some things worse). A company like Boeing doesn't expect
you to come out of college having exactly the skills needed to design a 787 or
run a wind-tunnel test. Partly this is out of necessity, because they use a
lot of in-house software packages, equipment, and proprietary methods that
your university couldn't teach you even if they wanted to. So they focus more
on whether college graduates have a solid grounding in engineering principles,
rather than whether they know how to work exactly the stuff Boeing is going to
want them to do.

Similar story at petrochemical firms; my dad is a process engineer mainly for
PTA- and polyethylene-manufacturing units, and they surely don't expect most
incoming hires to know how the PTA synthesis process works, or even
necessarily to know what PTA is (it's a chemical used to make polyester). They
just expect a general chemical-engineering background; they don't want to have
to teach the _entirety_ of what engineering means, what process modeling is
and how you might use it, what debottlenecking is, etc., but they don't expect
incoming knowledge to be very specific.

~~~
krschultz
Working for one of the big defense contractors at the moment, they definitely
prefer to hire fresh grads. They will burn 6 months of you being completely
unproductive on their dime to train you in the blink of an eye. Thats $50k to
them before you even did anything. Plus they have a process for everything and
have experienced guys holding your hand and checking your work.

They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of
touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to
the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain
to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company
and are incapable of moving on.

So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new
grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them.

Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of
funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich.
So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed
process and senior engineers to check everyones work.

~~~
evgen
I would also be willing to bet that the skills being learned during this
training period are far less portable than most coding skills. If your startup
teaches you how to crank out a crud RoR app in six months you can probably
walk out the door at that point and get a 25% salary bump from another startup
that now does not need to spend six months training you. If you learn the
details of your specific cog at Lockheed in six months you are not going to be
able to go to General Dynamics and apply the same skills as soon as you walk
in the door.

~~~
krschultz
That is completely true. It only gets worse the longer you stay in one group.
After 20 years of doing 1 little piece of a giant puzzle (of which there is
only one and there are no competitors), can you really go anywhere else and be
anything other than entry level? And how do you give up $120k for $60k as an
entry level guy elsewhere even though after 20 years you should be making
$180k.

It is a giant trap for those that aren't aware of it from day 1.

------
rmc
Programming is a rare and economically valuable skill. It's hard to train
people to be programmers.

------
mmaunder
NYC startups are struggling to hire because there is a real shortage of
skilled labor in the country including technology labor. The 10% unemployment
reflects a surplus of labor that would normally be taken up by manufacturing
jobs which we don't have since we became a service economy. The 08 crash was
an excuse to fire legacy employees. We will never get the jobs back that we've
lost.

------
lkrubner
So far, on Hacker News, the conversation has focused on hiring programmers,
but the original article is broader than that:

"Despite all this unemployment, every startup I know needs to hire not only
engineers, but also sales and operations team members. And this is not just
bubble seed startup dollars at work."

In 2008 I tried to find a good marketer to work with a client of mine. This is
a difficult task. There are many people who claim they understand online
marketing. Finding anyone who is any good is very difficult. The noise to
signal ratio is amazing.

Likewise when it comes to fundraising, pitching to investors, etc. It is tough
to find the few people who are good.

Possibly part of the problem is that, even in this economy, the folks who are
truly good are making really good money and don't want to invest time with a
startup.

No doubt there are many folks out there who will one day prove their talent
but they have not yet had the chance. The question then becomes, how to find
them?

------
BrianMatch
Part of the issue is that the 10% unemployment rate is not equally distributed
across all demographics.

If we generalize the desired startup labor pool as college-educated adults
over the age of 25, the national unemployment rate drops to 5.1%
(<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm>). I can't find a great
source, but I'd also wager that when you factor location (NY metro) and
industry (technology), the unemployment rate drops even further--almost to the
point of natural unemployment.

If you fit this profile you shouldn't have a difficult time finding work, and
hence we have a "war for talent" in the face of high, national unemployment.

------
lkrubner
Responding to previous comments, I would advise against using an Indian firm
for a startup. I think overseas firms can do well when assigned routine work,
like putting in a CMS where all the requirements are straightforward, or
handling inventory and accounting. For exceptional circumstances (which is
what a startup faces) you want people who can meet everyday in the same room.

Geographical distance is a major problem for small startups.

I worked on a project last year where the project manager was thrilled at the
idea that he could hire Indian programmers for $10 an hour. I was in New York
City, we had another programmer in North Carolina and another in Europe. The
"CEO" was an investor who attended meetings 2 or 3 times a month. The project
manager was basically the CEO, but he had no real power, since everything
needed to be decided by the CEO. Myself and the project manager would have 3
hour conversations and decide on something, but then need to explain it to the
CEO, whom we only saw a few times a month.

The project went nowhere.

From this, I conclude, it is best to have small team working in the same room,
when doing a startup.

The team in India was unusually bad. Every time they committed code to
Subversion, something broke and I would have to fix it.

~~~
gnufied
Duh, You are right; if someone wants to hire lots of cheap Indian labour for
$10 an hour, you will get bad programmers. I think, at that rate you will get
bad programmers anywhere in the world.

I am building (<http://solaro.com>) and we just launched our application out
of beta. Development happens from India and surely there are kinks and warts,
but at the end of day it works.

I think there are lot of things people get wrong when doing outsourcing:

1\. Going cheap. Good programmers are costly. In India you will have to fight
with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and likes for the talent, you can't pay
cheap and expect good programmers.So, please do not come to India, if goal is
to stay cheap.

2\. Not involving the team. You will have to bring down your walls and involve
everyone intellectually. This is real, if people aren't involved with the
product, you are going to get crappy result. I am saying nothing new, but what
already Jim McCarthy said in Dynamics of software development. But this is
more true for projects, where your team is spread across different
geographical locations.

3\. Iterate. Short iterations, deliver, continuous integration and continuous
deployment. Do not sleep on the project.

4\. Small teams, do not build a large team just because it is cheap. I know I
am saying the obvious here, but I have seen people getting it wrong too often.

5\. If the client (or product owner) is located in different geographical
location, he/she has to work harder than everyone else.

------
danbmil99
1) because all us smart NYC programmers got the hell out of there during the
"Silicon Alley" days.

2) Practically anyone who lives within 100 miles of Wall Street and can
program, and isn't a completely dysfunctional human (and many who are), is
doing something in the financial sector. It's a huge brain drain, and it's
practically impossible to compete with on the basis of salary. To boot, you
can't easily motivate these folks with options because A) NY doesn't have a
reputation for churning out tech winners and B) these same people study
finance for a living, so when you offer them some options or founder's stock,
suddenly you're into a discussion of volatility premiums and Black/Scholes
analysis of the present-day value of said stock/options.

It's just not a suitable place for a vibrant startup community.

------
waterlesscloud
How many startups really need rockstar ninjas? I mean _really_ need them? As
in the business will succeed if you have them and fail if you don't. I bet
that number is actually very small.

But everyone thinks they're the special case.

~~~
nostrademons
Having worked at two startups that died either because they could never
attract skilled senior engineers or because they lost them, I think the number
is quite large.

There're lots of ways for a startup to die and relatively few for it to
succeed. The value of having a skilled senior engineer (or "rockstar ninja" as
you put it, though that term has connotations that don't really describe the
type of early engineers you want) is that they can see many of those failure
modes ahead of time and avoid them. And when they do end up in a dead-end,
they can quickly backtrack and fix the problem instead of wondering "what do
we do now?"

------
pdelgallego
Are you sure startups in NYC are struggling to hire?

A years ago, I was in the states under a F1 visa. I was looking forward to do
an internship in NYC. I couldn't even get an interview. I spoke with at least
twenty recruiters.

I was at that time an active OS contributor, I had commit access in projects
like Rubinius or in Sputnik Tests (Google conformance test suite to test V8).
I had also two years of commercial java programming experience, and personal
projects in rails, sinatra and django. This was just after I finished a
internship at Google.

What compensation was I asking for? Enough money two rent a room and buy food.

~~~
mikecane
Oh god, recruiters. They will kill your dreams every time. They have _zero_
ability to judge skill. They are basically car salesmen. If your resume
doesn't fit their template, you will never, ever get work, and you could be a
damned genius with recommendations from others too.

------
maxawaytoolong
If kids in the NYC metro area don't have an opportunity to learn programming
in grade school it's because the schools suck. Perhaps if parents cared about
their children's education, they could just relocate to a more forward-
thinking part of the country. I was tutoring AP Computer Science to the kids
of Vietnamese immigrants in the midwest 12 years ago. I took "C" and
"Hypercard" class in junior high school 20 years ago and I lived in a farming
town in the middle of nowhere.

The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't
want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office,
most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work.

"...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices
with suppliers, creating P&L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing
bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of
startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.

~~~
krschultz
I don't know if teaching code in school really matters at all. I never took a
class in programming in elementary, middle, or high school. I didn't take a
class in programming until junior year of college.

I got my first job at a startup writing code when I was a freshman in college.

I was an engineering major, and I taught myself how to program in middle
school, but never did I ever take a class on it.

Of all the various things I have learned, learning programming has one of the
lowest barriers to entry of any. I really think it is a waste of money to
focus on it in school. Most of the kids that I knew who took AP Comp Sci were
ruined by it. A multiple choice test for basic programming? Yuck.

~~~
maxawaytoolong
AP CS is heinous, yes.

I disagree with the rest, though. I would agree if I thought the other classes
were worthwhile, but about 70% of my junior high and high school was filler at
best. At least if there had been programming classes I could have taken those
instead of truly pointless stuff like the JV girls volleyball coach teaching
"social studies" via VHS tapes.

~~~
krschultz
See in my opinion, with the limited resources they have I'd rather see them
fix your social studies class than add programming. There just aren't that
many people that are going to be doing software development, but we probably
can agree if everyone knew more about history, politics, and government this
country would be better off.

------
OzzyB
"There's a massive misalignment between the labor pool and the job pool, and I
blame our undergraduate institutions"

I don't, I just think the Rent Is Too Damn High.

<http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/>

~~~
huangm
Actually, the price of good engineers being high + high unemployment speaks
precisely to a misalignment of supply/demand.

------
KevinMS
Good, let them struggle.

Maybe someday they will learn that the only developers aren't young and just
out of college.

There are plenty of good developers that are self taught, and there are also
plenty of good developers who aren't in their 20's, but if you every look at
the "about us" of these startups, and they have pictures, what do you see?

------
kls
I still say, the tech market reigniting and the quantitative easing are
strangely well timed. I have to wonder if the tech market is being inflated,
because it is the one market that has not suffered decades of neglect. It
could be a good thing, as the world does need investment in technology if we
are going to hit the next whatever revolution now that the information age
looks to be at the least maturing, investments in science seem to be the
natural course to bring on the advancements for the next age. Unfortunately
some of those ages dawned with investment in science for less than peaceful
purposes. So if the industry is being inflated, then I supposes it is better
than massive investment in military spending to bring about the next age.

------
ThomPete
Every startups is struggling because very few of those 10% live in NYC and
have the relevant education or background.

~~~
jonsteinberg
Yes. You're right about that

------
iskander
I've hired a few technical employees in the Chicago area, and I found that
it's almost impossible to find someone with basic reasoning skills. Most
people I interviewed had very poor eyes for details, had a hard time spotting
or understanding their own mistakes, making sense of novel situations,
thinking abstractly or generalizing from specifics etc... This was true even
among CS graduates from schools with decent reputations. I don't know why the
pool is so bad or if it has always been this way.

~~~
bugsy
How much do you pay, what relocation is offered, what interviewing expenses do
you cover, what benefits are paid, what severance package is offered, and do
you provide engineers with all the tools, books and training they request.

You don't need to answer me, just answer these honestly to yourself and that
will tell you why you can't find anyone competent.

~~~
iskander
If qualified applicant need assurance of all these things before even
applying, that confirms in my mind that such applicants have the privilege of
scarcity.

Has your hiring experience been substantially different from mine?

~~~
bugsy
From what you describe yes. I am able to hire talent I need, but I do offer
competitive pay and benefits in line with what other places that are able to
hire are doing. It's standard for serious firms to cover interview expenses
for example. We also do recruiting rather than just tossing ads out and hoping
for the best, which is ineffective since the vast majority of job _seekers_ in
IT are looking for a job because they don't have one. The ones who are not
seeking but who are open to change are the ones to look for. I meet them on
blogs, at conferences, and by contacting them after reading articles they have
published.

Hiring a very good developer is like hiring a very good actor, which doesn't
come for peanuts and which will be worth much more than their salary, whereas
hiring an average one will be worth less than their salary. 7/8 of the people
that get CS degrees in the US are not fit to develop software at all. Of the
remaining 1/8, nearly all of them have found a place they like and are not
looking to move without incentive. But that doesn't mean there's a shortage.
It just means you have to pay market rate and treat them respectfully and make
sure all hygienic issues are dealt with. Low pay is poor hygiene. Lack of full
relocation is poor hygiene (Why should the new employee subsidize the cost of
coming to work for you? They shouldn't.) Absurd contractual terms such as
claiming ownership of things they do on their own time is poor hygiene. An
office full of dimwits is poor hygiene. Clueless management is poor hygiene.
Not providing proper tools is poor hygiene. Hygiene issues are ones that need
to be taken care just to not be a lousy place to work. Get all this taken care
of and then one can start thinking of actually making it a good place to work.
Having a good reputation as a place to work is hard to get, easy to screw up,
and is worth a lot to convince someone with skills that it is worth the
massive risk to uproot their life, leave a job they like and come work for a
new venture.

------
rick888
I've noticed that many startups want people that are: a senior developer in
new technology X, is good at Photoshop, and can design customer facing
webpages. They also want to pay you well below market wages (because you
should be happy to work for a fun company that has a fooseball table) and give
you company equity in place of sub-market wages (which is a joke, because most
startups are out of business within 5 years).

------
puredemo
Because those 10% of unemployed folks are definitely highly-skilled
programmers. Right.

------
charlesju
<http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617>

High School dropouts are 15.7% unemployed. College grads are at 5.1%,
basically full employment given job changes. <http://bit.ly/3FWnbX>

~~~
phil
That's not "basically full employment" -- it's the highest unemployment rate
among college grads in the last 2 decades.

Here's a BLS report that shows that more clearly:
[http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_...](http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=get_data&reformat=true&from_results_page=true&from_year=1992&to_year=2010&Go.x=2&Go.y=9&initial_request=false&data_tool=surveymost&series_id=LNS14027659&&series_id=LNS14027660series_id=LNS14027689&series_id=LNS14027662&output_type=default&original_output_type=default)

~~~
charlesju
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment>

"The idea that the full-employment unemployment rate (NAIRU) is not a unique
number has been seen in recent empirical research. Staiger, Stock, and Watson
found that the range of possible values of the NAIRU (from 4.3 to 7.3%
unemployment) was too large to be useful to macroeconomic policy-makers.
Robert Eisner suggested that for 1956-95 there was a zone from about 5% to
about 10% unemployment between the low-unemployment realm of accelerating
inflation and the high-unemployment realm of disinflation. In between, he
found that inflation falls with falling unemployment."

~~~
achompas
You can't take the American labor force's NAIRU and apply it to college grads
--historically, they have lower unemployment.

------
gunmetal
The resume/interview hiring process is severely broken in US. It is not the
schools, it's the companies hiring, they are looking for some perfect holy
grail but really need to just start hiring people and pick through the chaff.
These startups deserve what they get making it impossible to even find their
'perfect employee'.

------
d2viant
That 10% is the broader unemployment rate and includes all occupations. I
believe the latest stats from the BLS peg unemployment among software
developers at about 4%. Most good developers are gainfully employed, it's up
to you to entice them away from what they're currently doing.

~~~
bugsy
"Most good developers are gainfully employed"

I agree, but I'd say that _all_ good developers who want to be employed are
employed.

Companies bring up 10% unemployment because they think "Gosh with all this
unemployment there will be lots of 'hungry' developers and we should be able
to hire top talent for $80k or some other piddling sum."

The fact is that unemployment among competent developers (and marketers and
sales) is 0%, so if a company wants to hire one they've have to pay more than
the other guy and offer better working conditions. The incompetently run
companies don't comprehend this, they are much too "bargain" oriented on non-
commodity products.

------
Supermighty
From my view the real problem is how valuable will English majors be at my
startup. How long will it take them to get up to speed where someone doesn't
have to hold their hand anymore.

I am really weary of hiring someone with zero programming experience. But not
as apprehensive about hiring a programmer with little experience but some
experience.

I'd be more likely to hire someone who was a self starter when it comes to
learning programing over and English major who just couldn't find a job.

------
cafard
I know a number of quite proficient programmers with degrees or backgrounds in
the classics. Some, to be sure, are of the generation where 8th-grade
programming class wasn't really an option. I'd much rather see the primary and
secondary schools teach human languages and mathematics than see them try to
teach coding.

------
Tichy
Then again, maybe the cranberry farmers and beer shippers are the people who
are really running the world.

------
itsnotvalid
TL;DR version of anything like that: Those people aren't the ones that
startups want to hire right now.

------
known
They prefer to hire a _highly skilled wage slave_.

------
rwhitman
To those hiring in NYC - I just relocated to the east coast from CA and am
looking for opportunities in NYC. Feel free to reach out.

------
chailatte
Let's see....bad weather, high rent, high cost of living, lots of wall street
jackasses, too many damn tourists, and plenty of terrorist threats. And we
haven't even started talking about silicon valley's tech culture and close
proximity to Asia.

~~~
dstorrs
Let's see...incredible food, 24/7 nightlife, culture like nowhere else in the
world, one of the largest and richest parks in the country, probably the best
public transportation system in the country, a _hell_ of a lot of convenience
(drop-off wash-and-fold on every street corner, etc), a diverse and
interesting population, easy access to not one, not two, but THREE separate
international airports (JFK, LGA, Newark), and easy access to Europe.

~~~
whoover
You listed nothing of interest to the typical startup programmer.

Having a bunch of ways to travel doesn't do any good for people who are
spending most of their time holed up in one spot. They won't be flying all
over the place.

Night life? Have you MET many geeks? Plus that would cut into work hours.

Drop-off laundry? That means I have to take it somewhere. I'd rather have
washer/dryer in the apt., then I don't have to lug it anywhere. Who cares
about folding.

A diverse and interesting population -- very few of whom work in or understand
startups. You don't have time to socialize anyway, and if you did, listening
to people talk about finance or fashion is not "interesting".

Incredible food... This can be had in ANY major city. But nobody in a startup
wants a 3 month waiting list to get into NY's trendiest new spot, so none of
that stuff matters at all.

Culture... again, staring at a computer all day.

Parks? Yeah, like they don't have that anywhere else.

Not compelling in the least.

Look at Google's perks to get an idea of what developers want. Basically: get
everything else out of the way so I can develop! Get rid of interruptions and
distractions and extraneous TRAVEL -- I don't want to spend my time carting my
jiggly fat physical body from place to place so that I can physically do the
same thing in another place.

It's the same for ANY discipline. Olympic swimmers have the same deal -- eat,
sleep, train. Being "well-rounded" is essentially training for social skills.

