
If you only hire in the Valley, you don’t have the best talent - rdl
http://pandodaily.com/2013/06/21/tom-preston-werner-if-you-only-hire-in-the-valley-you-dont-have-the-best-talent
======
nostrademons
I think most companies in the Valley would acknowledge this.

The thing is - most companies are not looking for the best _talent_ , they're
looking to build the best _teams_. And one of the things that helps a team to
gel is having all the members co-located together. It would be wonderful if
the physical presence barrier was broken and you could setup virtual presences
that were as efficient as physical ones, but something intangible seems to be
lost when you only interact over e-mail.

It works for GitHub because it makes the company a very incentivized user of
their own product - they're developing for precisely the sort of organization
that is their market, and so they understand their market better than if they
acted like a normal start-up. But if they were playing in a fast-moving
consumer market or trying to capitalize on a recent platform or innovation,
they'd get eaten alive.

~~~
mahyarm
You'll be surprised what google hangouts on a wired connection on both ends
can do, especially when on-ramping people.

Why wired? Packet loss from wifi seriously degrades the conversation. Wired on
both ends and packet loss is practically non-existant.

There are downsides to not being distributed too. Being distributed for
example lets engineers control their interruptions and environment far more.
If companies really really cared about building the best teams, they wouldn't
do the nearly industry standard open office layouts. Open office layouts make
for easy management and harder development.

~~~
nostrademons
I use Hangouts extensively; I work for Google, we eat our own dogfood as far
as videoconference software goes. That's one of the main reasons I'm
pessimistic about distributed teams. _Despite_ having probably the fastest
fiber backbone in the world, and _despite_ having an inside track to the VC
software we use, it still turns out that being physically present with the
people you work with is pretty important. Enough that I'm moving offices this
week, 3 cubes down, so that I can be 30 ft. closer to the rest of my
teammates. There seems to be something intangible that is lost when you move
out of shouting distance, and even though we have the technology to shout over
3000 miles, it doesn't seem to be the same.

~~~
vidarh
One thing (of many) that simply _must_ be handled better for video
conferencing to even getting close to be a viable replacement is the "eye
contact" problem. People need to be able to look in someones eyes on screen,
and see them looking back at them.

For the occasional call for e.g. an interview, I make it a point to look into
the camera, rather than on screen, and it makes a big difference in how I get
perceived, but that turns the video aspect into a one-way thing - like looking
into a TV camera. While looking at the screen means you loose a _lot_ of the
signals you'd get face to face just from having a harder time reading facial
expressions, and from the way peoples interaction change when they don't get
eye contact with you.

There's lots of other bits and pieces that impact its usefulness too, but to
me solutions to the eye contact issue needs to be there before there's much
point. E.g. in my experience with teams seated close together, eye contact is
often _the_ primary indicator that you've gotten someones attention and can
start asking a question and know you're not interrupting something important.

Without that, you're either back to the keyboard, or "polluting" the
environment with distracting speech - often I see team members using IM even
to someone at the next desk over when failing to get eye contact, exactly to
avoid disturbing everyone else by speaking, so that's a non-starter.

It's an incredibly important part of communication that most current video
conferencing seriously hampers.

------
cliftonmckinney
Wrote a relevant blog post about this issue not too long ago. The article
states the obvious of course. Talent isn't evenly distributed, but it is
distributed. What's most compelling for perhaps Valley and New York companies
only, is the wide disparity with regard to compensation:

Two Silicon Valley startups raise $1M and they each have need for a great
team. Team One is on site. They spend a lot of otherwise productive time
attempting to hire great engineering talent away from other equally impressive
startups in the area. They pay $150k per person (let's call it $200k fully
loaded) for talented, but not phenomenal people. Team Two is fully
distributed. They decide to hire the best, no matter where they are, and at
$150k per person _everyone_ outside of Silicon Valley gives them a look with
much less effort on their part. They save time, they save on office space in
SV, and, best of all, they build a team of truly phenomenal folks who are
happy to be making $150k, because it's likely $50k higher than they were
making at whatever job they had before they got recruited.

Assuming you can build a better _team_ in the Valley is only relevant if you
have a reasonable expectation that you'll find similarly talented folks at the
same price no matter where you are. That is simply not the case.

More on the blog: [http://blog.workforpie.com/2013/06/04/the-case-for-remote-
wo...](http://blog.workforpie.com/2013/06/04/the-case-for-remote-work/)

~~~
hawkharris
I've heard that the costs of living are very high in California. Is actual
compensation much lower when you take this into account?

~~~
SBCodeMonkey
You should see the ridiculousness in the Santa Barbara/Goleta area... Same
cost of living as Silicon Valley, Less Pay. Higher cost of living than LA, San
Diego and Seattle but engineers get paid less than those areas.

~~~
madsushi
I know that Montecito was one of the highest priced zip codes in the USA, as
of a few years ago. SB is stuck between the ocean and the mountains, with no
room to grow.

------
enduser
I am the sort of experienced full-stack hacker many Valley companies would
love to have on their team. However, I like smaller cities, commuting
exclusively by bicycle, having an enormous garden, eating locally grown food,
easy access to amazing outdoor adventures, and mild winters. You'll probably
never find me in the Valley or in the Boston or New York area. The bay area is
too populous and northeast winters are terrible.

No amount of money can change those things. Quality of life is worth more to
me than high salaries.

I do, however, like interesting work and brilliant coworkers. I mostly work
with local businesses that are doing interesting non-high-tech stuff, like
mass-custom lean manufacturing, but it would be great to have more options for
working with people who know programming at least as well as I do.

Working locally with people does seem to beat the isolation of remote work,
however. It probably makes sense for a company focused on collaboration tools
to have a team that relies on collaboration tools to function.

~~~
spudlyo
Come to Seattle if you're not already here, sounds like it would be right up
your alley.

~~~
wavefunction
Sounds like they're right where they want to be.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Sounds like they are already in Seattle or Portland, or somewhere
international.

------
apinstein
GitHub is a pretty amazing company and story. Their culture, the tools, etc
are all very inspiring, and the whole community definitely benefits from their
experiments. This meme always gets me thinking about how to attract the best
talent for our company.

That said, holding them up as a model of how to build a tech team never quite
feels like a good idea.

GitHub is a developer product, built for developers by developers. That
essentially makes all of their employees domain experts in the product as
well. They can also robustly dog-food their product. Both of those factors in
my opinion make it much easier to have a successful distributed team. They can
trust everyone to make good decisions absent a strong product team.

I've worked at 5-6 different startups with varying levels of distributed teams
and never felt that distributed communication of product, architecture, etc
was ever as productive as with the co-located teams. Trying to involve the
remote people always felt like "extra work" and it wasn't a smooth process.

I would be very curious to hear from non-developer product companies about
their successes (or failures) with remote teams. Are new tools like Google
hangouts, shared whiteboards, and github really enough to allow you to have a
productive product/engineering team?

~~~
ilaksh
Did you have a shared chat room and use it?

~~~
apinstein
We have tried that for the local team but it didn't get used despite trying
3-4 different chat tools (IRC, HipChat, I forget the others). People end up
talking in person b/c it's easier.

~~~
ilaksh
LOL why didn't you try it for the remote team??

~~~
apinstein
At the time I had lots of remote teams, those tools didn't exist. This is why
I'm asking for counter-examples.

The few times I have done remote teams it has always devolved into the
expected problems. I want a non-GitHub example of someone that makes it work.

~~~
jacobparker
Mozilla

------
drawkbox
Love this. Talent is all over the world. This is also why companies of the old
style, non virtual offices, have multiple offices in some aspects.

New, distributed companies, such as github, 37 signals, small game companies
etc, they will always have the best employees and even if an employee moves
they are still actively on the team. For some industries like games, it might
be the only way to gather all the people and skills needed as especially with
games it is hard to find people in the same area with required skills.

Virtual teams lead to much less disruptive change to a team which leads to
stronger teams. But like it is stated, all important communications need to be
virtual and through that channel first, it will fail otherwise and some can't
do it. The world is big, cities are big, why destroy competitive success
because it is to hard to coordinate? Traffic, moving, costs
(living/goods/travel) are all better suited for easy access and ultimately
company survival with virtual teams.

The absolute best thing about virtual teams is it is all about delivery and
getting things done. Minimizing BS, time wasted and shipping product.

Virtual teams can come together for integrations, planning, celebrations and
be as strong or stronger as physical logistical teams. It doesn't work for all
industries but in technology/creative it can truly free up people to focus on
work. How many offices have you worked at that after a while actual productive
work hours go down to 3-4 due to all the excess stuff, then you have to work
at night or after hours just to keep up with all the wasted time at the office
and travel and general life that pops up. Virtual team are delivery first and
that is the right way to be productive.

------
SeoxyS
This is somewhat off topic; but I have to say I am quite disappointed by the
way in which PandoDaily puts out its events.

I was quite looking forward to seeing Tom talk; so I got my first PandoMonthly
tickets. The event started at 6, with the talk scheduled to start at 7. I only
really cared about Tom, not so much networking, so I showed up at 7. Made it
there by 7:01, only to be greeted by a bouncer that told us that they had just
closed the doors. They were instructed by PandoDaily not to let anybody in
after 7. When we mentioned that we had _paid_ for tickets; we were told "too
bad."

PandoMonthly, from this experience alone, is already the worst event I have
ever seen put on. Way to tell your customers "fuck you."

~~~
megablast
If the talk started at 7, it would be rude to arrive anything later than 6:50.
I think this is great, blocking people at 7. There is no other way to get
things running on time and without disruption.

------
chaz
I feel like developer-heavy organizations would be more successful at this. A
major factor is the tools facilitate a lot of the communication (commit
messages, bug tracking, build notifications, documentation, etc.). They're
also comfortable using tools and generally adapt quickly to new platforms. And
in my own personal experience, it worked with their personalities.

I'd like to hear more examples of this working successfully at scale in
highly-cross functional teams, with distributed marketing, sales, design,
support, and product groups. Communication always seems to be a complaint at
companies, and I'd like to hear more about how this was addressed.

------
ilaksh
I think that the chat room seems obvious but it is not to a lot of older
managers and it is very important.

I have worked with some (generally older) developers who just didn't have
online communications skills and even refused to use a shared chat room. They
might be seemingly able to exchange a few emails or IMs, but then the next
week they would be busy, stop using emails/IMs, but the day you go into the
office or call them suddenly the communication increases 10-fold. Or they did
it but didn't know how to use it. I.E. they would spread the chat out into
many many rooms and fill them with irrelevant design speculation and idle
chat.

------
oxtopus
I think the title of this is a bit misleading. The message is much less about
"the valley" and more about building a culture around geographically
distributed collaboration.

------
kasey_junk
Not that I disagree with the sentiment or to rag on GitHub or their management
(I think they have a nice product). But this article is simply quoting the CEO
of a small company that has been around for very little time. Is the Valley so
insular that they think this is truly a management success or is this just a
terrible article?

~~~
jusben1369
I'm not a huge fan of the Valley having lived there for a long time and moved
away however.......what the Valley does _really_ well is understand very
quickly when something new and revolutionary is afoot. That's the difference
between picking the next 100 bagger or being a sheep. Github is a rapidly
growing company hiring some of the best talent globally in a game changing way
- and so far it's going against all the "common perceptions" about how you
build and scale out a startup. I'd say watch this space closely.

~~~
jacques_chester
The Valley does this by assuming that _everything_ is new and revolutionary
and forgetting that almost nothing is. The hits are remembered, the far more
numerous misses are forgotten.

That's why it works at all. If the Valley was stocked with grumpy curmudgeons
like me, there wouldn't be a Valley.

------
dotBen
Post ends with _" While talent may be distributed everywhere, that kind of
serendipity is the most concentrated in Silicon Valley."_

Um...

------
bdcravens
Irony is that this is coming from a San Francisco based, VC-backed media site,
of which most of their writers (kinda assuming this based on their staff list)
are located in SV.

------
zura
The goal is to get shit done, not necessary with the best talent.

------
moremonkeys
I've done both and I have to say distributed is guaranteed to win in the long
run.

In my last venture we had the Palo Alto office on University Ave, and I've
walked a few miles up and down SandHill Rd, so when I say distributed works
I'm contrasting it against past experience of trying to hire developers,
architects and (worse) project managers in SV.

The challenges raised above in many of the comments about "being within
shouting distance" and "eye contact" \- together with the fear of distributed
workers being passed over for promotions because of their lack of water cooler
time - goes away when the ENTIRE team is distributed.

In a situation where the "core team" is within a fun, social campus and George
is working from Seattle in his bunny slippers then it is very difficult to
convince the in-office workers not to have chats over their cubicle walls and
innovate during lunch on the bean bag chairs. Using the collaboration
platforms like GitHub and Basecamp becomes a pain in the ass to them. But,
when EVERYONE is distributed, then a lot of that goes away, and we've found
adoption and proficiency with Google Hangouts (wired or WiFi, sorry) and all
the other tools go way up.

In our current team for Infinite Monkeys[1] we've built the entire venture
with funding from founders and SV sources, but a team that is purely
distributed using over 200 contractors through oDesk[2], literally on six
continents. It has allowed us to move beyond "hiring the best people who
coincidentally live within 30 miles of San Mateo" to just hiring the best
people. And so we have designers in Bulgaria, developers in Spain and India,
marketers in Singapore, a bookeeper in Mauritius and a PR Lead in Michigan. It
has allowed us faster release cycles and massive savings in our GoToMarket
burn.

There are still challenges no doubt, and the fact is building this kind of
startup even 36 months ago would have been almost impossible, but tools like
Google Drive, oDesk, GitHub and Hangouts, I think are making it possible.

We have replaced the water cooler with 15five[3] (ironically a SFO startup) -
asking each team member to write a 15 minute shared report of what went well
this week, what challenges there are, and what ideas they have for improving
the business. I'm getting better feedback now through my distributed team than
I ever did with our hub and spoke teams before.

Lastly, and only because it hasn't been mentioned above, but I think another
example of a long-term distributed company that has done it well is Mozilla.
Say what you may about their products and direction, but the fact is their
developer base is massively distributed and has been for years.

[1] Infinite Monkeys - www.monk.ee [2] oDesk - www.oDesk.com [3] 15five -
www.15five.com

------
michaelochurch
Devil's Advocate here.

Most Silicon Valley startups don't need top talent. They're marketing
experiments with a small bit of technology and a lot of painful support work
(due to massive, accumulating technical debt) that can only be done out of VC-
istan dues-paying as young people take on pager duty for the job they think
will get them investor connections in 6 months so they can do their own gigs
(ha!)

They need some flashy talent (young, clueless Ivy/Stanford grads) so they can
tell investors that they bought a bunch of Ivy stock on the cheap. They don't
need _top_ talent.

On the other hand, _hungry_ talent (in a world where most people will never
buy a house) and prestige-seeking talent and clueless/young talent are useful
to them, especially if it congeals in one metropolitan area (such as Silicon
Valley).

The Valley's more than good enough for most of these firms. They complain
about the "talent shortage". There isn't one. They're just complaining about
paying more for talent than they think it should cost, and "what they think it
should cost" is Dickensian.

Of course, there are companies out there (if few) that demand extremely high
levels of talent, but at that rarefied level, you're either (a) going to be
small enough that you can do it within one location, or (b) going to ignore
location outright, as OP suggests.

~~~
johnrob
You often refer to something called "VC-istan". That name implies that the VCs
have some sort of scam going on where founders/employees are the victims. Am I
correct?

~~~
colkassad
I've always understood that term as a play on Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,
etc...i.e. implying a distasteful regime.

