

Inside the War for Tech Talent - jonbot
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/27/tech-recruiters/

======
shakes
"Though recruiters report that start-up salaries for engineers rose 20 to 30
percent in the past year and a half, to upwards of $140,000 for a developer
with three to five years experience, that still leaves start-ups priced out of
top talent in a city where working for a hedge fund can mean bonuses of up to
80 percent on a good year and CTOs command seven figures."

As a developer at a tech startup in NYC I always hear figures like this and
they seem kind of mythical. My friends in the startup world tend to feel the
same. Are there only a handful of companies paying this kind of money (Google,
Gilt, Etsy, etc.) while everyone else pays considerably lower?

~~~
look_lookatme
Agreed. At the startup I work for I went into a review asking for what I
considered a bump to market level and the number I proposed, though not as
high as 140 was still met with an "uhhh" type response. I was told most
candidates coming in were asking for my salary range at the time or lower, and
I believe them.

~~~
dadkins
Tip: "Market rate" is what someone else is willing to pay you. Go to your boss
with a better offer from elsewhere and they will change their tune fast!

~~~
jsavimbi
Pro Tip: they'll give you that raise until the project you're on is completed.
Then they'll give you the boot. Price/resume shoppers not only cause a lot of
headaches if their success becomes apparent to others within the organization,
but the bosses rarely like being held hostage to outside influencers.

In a start-up, that type of behavior is rarely rewarded in the long term as
founders tend to be people who develop relationships based on trust and
loyalty and who also talk amongst themselves and you'll run the risk of being
blackballed. Do it once if you feel underpaid, but don't expect much upside
after that.

My advice is to look for a job, consider offers and take the one that fits
what you're looking for in compensation/organization. In the future, your
current employer may reassess your value and hire you back at a higher scale.
I've seen this happen before.

~~~
blackguardx
This isn't true at larger companies. At a lot of large companies, getting
competing offers is one of the only ways to get substantial raises.

~~~
jsavimbi
What I've learned from larger companies:

1\. Your manager there is concerned with building their fiefdom and without a
loyal crew, they know they won't succeed internally. They'll have little time
for your negotiations skills and will be very unimpressed if you bring up
offers from unknown starts-ups. They're a manager at a Fortune 500 company,
dontcha know? It's their life and chosen career, not to mention their
lifeline. You're dead to them once you leave or hint of leaving for more
money.

2\. Salary levels and compensation packages are designed and set by
professional HR crew whose job it is to keep labor costs down and weed out
malcontents. Where do they get their salary guidelines? From industry groups
and consultants who specialize in companies of that size and who share that
same info with every one of their clients. Good luck walking around with an
offer from a similar-sized competitor. They'll be on the phone to them,
probably friends, telling them what a dunce you are and you'll find your offer
rescinded. Never ever mention where you're going or what they'll be paying
you. Much less at a big company.

3\. No matter how big or small the organization, outside of the entertainment
industry, and I include sports here, very few will be willing to tolerate a
disruptive prima donna for very long. Especially rank and file developers with
visions of grandeur brought on by big money stories and newly acquired skills.

Like I said, present your situation to management but don't wait around for
them to bring salaries into line. Some times they simply can't, you've misread
the market or your importance to them. If that's the case, don't force their
hand.

~~~
blackguardx
This is a very cynical view and hasn't been my experience.

~~~
jsavimbi
Sorry for the cynicism, but I'm boiling it down for you without any sugar-
coating.

------
jgrahamc
Shameless Plug. My site <http://jobs.usethesource.com/> is a HN-like board for
technical jobs that's entirely recruiter free. From the site's "House Rules":

"Recruiters, agencies and other paid intermediaries are not welcome here. This
is a peer-to-peer job site and any posting by recruiters or agencies will be
killed and accounts used deleted. I have nothing personally against you, but
this is not the site for you. Equally, jobs posted here are to be read and
responded to by job seekers, not you."

<http://jobs.usethesource.com/hrdoc>

~~~
chadgeidel
Thanks so much for creating this!

------
geebee
Having tried to recruit for an unsexy university staff job, I will agree that
it is tough to find developers. But having been through the interview process
at amazon and other "top" tech companies, it is clear that they acct (by their
own admission) a high number of false negatives.

I understand why - a bad dev can really wreak havoc. But theymve gone so far,
they seem like a man claiming to starve who turns his nose up at an apple with
a small bruise. It feels a little insincere.

I won't hire if there's a big red flag, but I'll. Give a candidate a chance.
Maybe top companies with more pull don't have to, but then how seriously
should I take these stories of how hard it is to hire.

~~~
groby_b
I've worked on teams with that attitude - and a _single_ mis-hire created
large problems. Sure, you can fire people, but

a) Once you hired somebody, you already spent a lot of money on them

b) It affects team morale. No matter what skills people have, team mates still
form personal attachments. Seeing somebody go is hard.

c) Firing means HR and legal need to spend a lot of time to make sure this is
handled properly. So, more cost.

So, I'd rather have false negatives than false positives overall.

~~~
geebee
I agree with everything you have said. A hiring manager has every right to be
as choosy as he or she chooses. I've read plenty of blogs that talk about how
rigorous the hiring process is at company x, how good you have to be to get
hired, and how they pass on candidates that would probably be good employees
because the damage of a false positive is so much higher than a false
negative. All a-ok in my book.

The part that irritates me is when these companies start talking about the
serious problem of a shortage of developers. I feel that if you want to throw
out many people who would have been good employees, you should accept the
consequences - that hiring will be very hard and you will face a shortage of
your own making.

~~~
groby_b
The point is, even if you desperately need people (i.e. a shortage), you are
_still_ better off avoiding false positives.

------
bengl3rt
I have no sympathy for companies that bitch about how hard it is to find
engineering talent if they don't operate a strong internship program. There is
a Joel blog on this - the best talent graduates from university with job
offers from all the places that they interned. There is no rational reason for
any company that purports an interest in top talent to shy away from having an
internship program. It is the cheapest hiring strategy, far cheaper than
having expensive in-house or outsourced recruiters.

~~~
larsberg
Not entirely true. Both interns and new college hires can require a lot of
work from your previously-productive employees. I've met many firms --
particularly in the finance sector -- who don't hire anyone below that 3-5
years' experience bracket. If you are willing to pay, it can really be worth
it to avoid the amount of early-stage training it takes to get a young person
either up and productive or determine they're not capable of growing into
larger-scale development and have to manage them out.

I'm not in favor of it personally, mind you, as I did a lot of hiring across
the board, but I can understand where they come from, particularly little
sub-500 employee shops.

------
tirrellp
I live in San Diego. I hear there is a war for tech talent, but it hasn't
spilled into my neck of the woods (yet?).

What is interesting to me is how unwilling startups seem to be to: \- Grow
their own talent internally by hiring inexperience.

\- Entertain SOME SORT OF telecommuting arrangement for those not in the Bay
area. Doing this would open up the rest of the West coast for '1 Week in the
Office per month, 3 weeks work from home' arrangements.

\- Pay for relocation. YMMV but I don't see it that often.

\- Open satellite offices in areas where talent is easier and less expensive
to get. The space shuttle program just ended, and there are BUNCHES of good
engineers looking for something interesting to do (In Florida). Georgia Tech
has a legacy of churning out smart engineers (In Georgia). San Diego still has
double digit unemployment (Plus the surf is better than SF!), and there are
dots and pockets of good engineering talent all across the sunbelt with
cities, states, and municipalities who would LOVE to incentivize 'hot start-
ups' to open an office there.

This is a case where I can see acu-hiring makes sense. Get a 5-10 person team
that is already kicking ass and in an office, swallow them up for $1m/head.
Boom, for the price of $10m you just got 10 engineers who already work well as
a team, a satellite office that you can use as an anchor in a new geography,
and an escape from the localized talent war.

------
giblfiz
Wow, Dave Carvajal, That was a name I was hoping I would never see again. I
actually worked with him for a while at the ladders, and after every
conversation with him I felt like I needed to take a bath to get the slime
off.

------
cHalgan
There is no war on tech talent.

Or better to say, in Bay Area, there is a war to find an engineer with 15+
year experience for 80K/year. But if you pay a market price (meaning match
what other companies pay), there will be no problem finding an engineer.
Especially for startups. But if startup offers 80K/year and corporation X
offers 120K/year + bonuses, ... you know

Maybe I'm outcast but I was told (and I believe it) that for a startup to get
a good team it needs to pay market rate + stock options.

~~~
GeorgeTirebiter
I think that's 100% correct. I have 25 years' experience and am employed
making less today (in a startup) than I did then (also in a startup) in
constant dollars.

Is 25 years' experience worthless these days? (I didn't sit on my technical
butt, and I'd give any kid today tough competition.)

I'm tired of hearing about the shortage of kids going into STEM careers --
this just proves that the kids aren't stupid.

If there were really a shortage of engineers, their salaries would increase;
since salaries are not increasing....

------
wallflower
> In the early stages of a company, a single superstar hire can mean the
> difference between success and failure

Shel Kaphan, the brilliant engineer who built Amazon.com

"The nature of the technical challenge was much more straightforward than many
other things that I had done in the past. It wasn’t something where we had to
work for years and then find out if the thing we were building would actually
work or if anybody would care.

It had a lot of pieces, some of which were not easy. Like constructing a
catalog out of a lot of non-authoritative sources, none of which was designed
to be easily built into a database. At that point, there wasn’t anything like
Ruby on Rails or anything where you could slap together a Web site with some
dynamic behavior in 10 minutes."

[http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-
empl...](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/3)

------
kenjackson
Hire bright smart people, and then train them. Give them Safari online and the
tools they need. Tell them they need to be solid in X in a week or two. Give
them a simple project that will be indicative of if they've achieved the goal.

Looking for someone with 16 years of iOS experience is just making it harder
on yourself.

------
Philly_McP
“CTOs typically go for like $225K, with $50K bonus and 1 percent equity, but
that’s rich for a small start-up,”

what do you need to do to be thought of as a candidate to be a CTO for a
startup?

my brother started at Microsoft a couple of weeks ago, plan the next 10 years
for him

~~~
harryh
I started at Microsoft straight out of college in June of 2000. Here is my
last 11 years:

\- 18 months @ MS. Didn't enjoy what I was working on. Didn't do particularly
awesome work. Quit after ~18 months.

\- Took 6 months off. Made actual friends (I moved to Seattle not knowing
anyone) Went to burningman for the first time.

\- Found a job at a small startup called PureNetworks on craigslist. Stayed
there about 2 years. Did pretty good work, but the company didn't do so well.
Management got changed over and I got fired (which kinda scared the hell out
of me) after showing up to work super late one day (like 3pm) after going to
Vancouver to party the night before.

\- Interviewed with some random companies in Seattle including Amazon. Got
referred to Google through a friend and interviewed with them as well. Ended
up taking the Google job & moving to NYC.

\- My GOOG options did pretty well (I started a cpl months before the IPO) but
def nowhere near "fuck you money." Spent 5 years @ Google working on couple
different things. Did pretty good work. Met @dens and worked on Dodgeball for
a while before it got canned. Spent my last 18 months at Google semi bored
kinda looking around for something new/smaller.

\- After @dens & @naveen got foursquare up and running they brought me on as
the first hire. Now I'm running the server engineering team (about 35
folks...and PS we're hiring! <http://foursquare.jobs>).

So, how did I get here? Worked hard. Picked up both small company and big
company skills (learned much super valuable knowledge working on large scale
infrastructure at Google) but also caught some good breaks.

Advice: work hard, learn a lot about a lot of different things. Network like
hell. Networking will get you good breaks. It'll also help you recruit once
you're running a team. This is vital. Keep a file of every smart person you
ever meet in your whole life. You won't regret it.

-harryh

~~~
michaelochurch
_Advice: work hard, learn a lot about a lot of different things. Network like
hell. Networking will get you good breaks. It'll also help you recruit once
you're running a team. This is vital. Keep a file of every smart person you
ever meet in your whole life. You won't regret it._

I'd love to hear your advice on how to network.

I'm smart, I work hard, and I'm very willing to open discussions and help
people out when I can. I try to be a good person. I don't know if this is
"networking". I guess it is, but the truth is that I haven't a fucking clue if
I'm doing it right. I know I can program, but I feel like technical skills are
ultimately less important (past a certain point) than social skills. Technical
skills hit a ceiling without vision, and vision is useless if you can't sell
other people on it.

------
Aloisius
There is certainly a war in the bay area for skilled iOS developers. We're a
small startup and pay market to above market rate, relocation expenses,
sponsor H1Bs, hefty options, cater awesome lunches, offer mentorship...
whatever is takes basically and even finding an engineer that has done more
than create HTML5 apps is a daunting challenge.

I've been halfway through negotiations to steal away someone from Google only
to have Google turn around and offer the person a truly ridiculous bonus.

Recruiters call one of my iOS engineers _daily_ (he routinely wins all the
major hackathons) and he always asks them if they're willing to take on new
clients since we need engineers too and they almost always reply that the have
all the clients they need.

------
djenryte
I found this article linked within on the cult-like hedge fund Bridgewater
Associates that subscribes to "radical transparency," pretty interesting as
well: <http://nymag.com/news/business/wallstreet/ray-dalio-2011-4/>

"Transcendental Meditation informed his belief that a person’s main obstacle
to improvement was his own fragile ego; at his firm, he would make constant,
unvarnished criticism the norm, until critiques weren’t taken personally and
no one held back a good idea for fear of being wrong."

~~~
eli
You might want to pick up the current issue of the New Yorker. It's got a
lengthy profile of Ray Dalio and Bridgewater.

------
lhnz
This whole article makes me feel incredibly underpaid. I'm not underpaid for a
developer working in London for a year, but, honestly, I wonder how easy it
would be to emigrate to the US for these kinds of job opportunities. Anybody
know?

------
joshu
I think recruiting top talent isn't that bad, but sourcing it is brutally
difficult.

------
earl
I don't really believe in the so-called war for tech talent, or at least
companies don't act like that. I'm in a bad mood this morning, so let's name
names:

Facebook: if you live in the bay area, even if you live in SF, they refuse to
do a phone screen, instead demanding that you drive to Palo Alto one to two
times for one hour interviews in lieu of phone screens. Between the hours of
10am and 4 pm. So basically they demand that you take 1-2 1/2 days off work
before even interviewing for real. Even if you don't have a car and have a leg
in a cast, they don't budge. Of course, when you tell the recruiter fine,
you're withdrawing, then they're flexible about doing things over the phone.
NB: for those of you not local to the bay area, while Palo Alto and SF are
considered to be local to each other, in practical terms, particularly if
you're not familiar with traffic on 101, it's a 75 minute drive each way to be
sure you'll get there on time.

Twitter: sit on resumes for two weeks, even if you were referred by an
employee.

A9: also sit on resumes referred by an employee for 2 weeks.

The point of this whining is companies certainly don't act like they're in a
talent crunch : shrug :

~~~
DanI-S
SF to Palo Alto takes me 30 minutes on Caltrain...

~~~
mavelikara
35 mins on the baby bullet and 46 mins on the local, according to the weekday
timetable: <http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html>

