Is The Silicon Valley Talent Shortage Getting Worse?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/arms-race/

by kacy • 16 years ago

76 101 16 years ago

kacy• 16 years ago

Is it time for this soon-to-be computer science grad to move to the Valley? Is this a good or a bad thing for new grads?

moultano6• 16 years ago

If you are looking for a big company job, it shouldn't be too hard to get one before moving. The burn rate on living expenses is pretty high out here unless you have a valley-sized salary too, so I recommend that. Apply to Google. :) You can always leave for a startup once your short-term finances are secure.

staunch• 16 years ago

Or just rent a room in an apartment with roommates for $700/mo and don't get a car. Now you can get a job at an exciting startup instead of a 12 year old advertising company with 15,000 programmers.

ScottBurson• 16 years ago

If you're smart and ambitious, I think yes, you should move here. The reason I make the advice conditional is that it's an expensive place to live; if you don't burn to work for a startup, you might be better off elsewhere.

My sense is that the demand is skewed toward the top end of the market, i.e., the best developers are getting much more difficult to find; I don't know if you'll see the same demand/supply imbalance at the entry level. Still, if you intend to get to be one of the best, this is the place to do it.

cageface• 16 years ago

If you're looking for a first job then probably yes.

Quality of life for a young, single male in the Valley is pretty low though. After 10 years in the Bay Area I'm moving to NYC where women actually exist.

queensnake• 16 years ago

'Sunnymale'; 'Man Jose'. (Well /I/ laughed when I heard them :) )

jscore2• 16 years ago

I almost thought I wrote that.

When you get to NYC, lemme buy you a beer.

aneth4• 16 years ago

In the Valley maybe. San Francisco proper is filled with women and has a great quality of life on par with, but different from, NYC.

rdouble• 16 years ago

I did this. If you are a single, straight guy, NYC is indeed better for dating. I didn't find dating in San Francisco to be completely horrible, just kinda weird. For example, in SF the women I would meet were very averse to 1-on-1 dating and everything had to be done as part of a group outing. On the other hand, I've gone on a lot of dates in NYC, but have not been successful in locating a crew of friends to hang out with. I guess one of the beneficial side-effects of "group dating" was that I ended up meeting a bunch of bros.

In San Francisco, he numbers were definitely not in favor of the male. I remember going into any bar in SF and it would be groups of say, 6 guys, sitting with 1 woman. Certain bars, like Toronado, did not have any women in them, ever. In NYC I've actually gone into a bar during happy hour and been the only male in there... an experience I've never had before in my life.

sabat• 16 years ago

Definitely been seeing a serious uptick in hiring around here -- and I've been on and off the job market for over a year. Things were looking up last Spring (around the time I picked up my current consulting gig) but things are noticeably better now.

I should point out that in normal, 'healthy' years, November is a time of declining job openings. Companies generally wait until January for budgets to turn around, etc. Not this year, though.

colinsidoti• 16 years ago

This article seems to imply that "acqui-hires" are a tool to bring in great engineers, but I feel like Facebook and others are after great entrepreneurs.

Perhaps the final sentence should be changed to: "Now might be a good time to leave school and start a company."

carterac2• 16 years ago

The valley?? The real story of talent drought is in New York City. Recently there has been a gigantic explosion of startups with lots of funding, but _very_ few great engineers available.

As CEO of a just-funded tech startup, I am budgeting ~70% of my time to personally recruit a Lead Developer and Senior Software Engineer (despite having a technical background myself).

smiler• 16 years ago

Have you considered hiring remote workers? Surely your money will go further hiring a remote developer in the Mid West with the cheaper cost of living than NYC? I'm sure you could even fly them in a few times if you needed to and still save money

gaustin2• 16 years ago

It seems that despite the ever decreasing barriers, people just don't want to hire, or aren't comfortable hiring, remote workers.

I live in Montana. I grew up in Kansas City, and went to school in NY. There is no language barrier, I'm a skilled developer and a pretty good communicator. I'm willing to relocate sometime in the next 2 years.

It seems I might as well be a non-English speaker in Siberia, when it comes to getting my foot in the door at an SV, NYC, etc. startup.

wyclif• 16 years ago

It could be because you are not paying enough. NYC is an expensive and unpleasant place to live for some people, esp. if they are from other cities in the US.

jswinghammer• 16 years ago

Yeah this was the problem I ran into when I was being recruited by a few companies in NYC a few years ago. I live in Boston but they weren't willing or able to help me relocate and weren't willing to pay me anything close to what I could make at another job here in Boston.

kunjaan• 16 years ago

I am graduating this December and I am divided in between moving to the Bay Area vs. working in NY. Is it better for my career to stay around technology companies or is it better to burn harder in a financial company?

carterac2• 16 years ago

Better to come to NYC and work on one of the many exciting tech startups desperately looking for tech talent, but I may be biased :).

Seriously though, ping me and I'll help make sure you find a great job in NYC.

wheaties• 16 years ago

Have you tried recruiting from other areas to NYC? I'm thinking about areas like DC where there's plenty of government focused work but very little on the start-up type work that's happening in and around Boston, NYC, and the Valley.

illumin84• 16 years ago

As an engineer from the NYC market myself, I know what you are going through. We have a hard time finding good engineers because the banks are paying $50-100K annual bonuses, plus six-digit base salaries.

It's hard for a startup to compete with that.

variety• 16 years ago

Could you define what you mean by a great engineer, please?

rgrieselhuber2• 16 years ago

I had emails from 7 different recruiters today so people are definitely hiring experienced developers right now.

aberkowitz2• 16 years ago

If startups branched out from Silicon Valley more often, new technological epicenters would form, alleviating the shortage.

LogicX• 16 years ago

Right... like the talent shortage is any better in Boston. We've been trying to hire a Ruby on Rails developer for nearly 6 months: Everyone is happily employed, or doing their own startup.

chopsueyar2• 16 years ago

Have you tried increasing the salary offering, or advertising the position on the website itself?

aberkowitz2• 16 years ago

Would you mind linking to a job listing?

davidw• 16 years ago

The guy who started Funambol talks very highly of having the company HQ in silicon valley, and development elsewhere. In his case, Italy, which really does have a lot of bright people who tend not to have as many exciting options locally. So building a 'bridge' like that can get the SV company good talent at good prices, and give the 'locals' a better job, perhaps at better wages, and with more interesting work to do.

EdwardMSmith• 16 years ago

In all the discussions of "startup culture" we've had here in the Twin Cities, this lack of mentorship by seasoned startup veterans always comes up as the main thing that we're lacking.

iamelgringo5• 16 years ago

Running Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley, I get asked all the time if I know of people who are looking for work, and startups are having to work increasingly hard to hire. A few months ago, I was offered a $5k referral bonus for a Python/Django engineer. ( That's not the business I want to be in, btw. And it's not why I do H&F. )

There's easily been 100 startups getting angel money in the Valley in the last 5 months. And, if all of those are looking for 2-3 RoR/PyDjango/JQuery/iOS devs, that means startups alone are competing for 300 engineers. And, that's not mentioning Yelp, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Google. The Valley could easily accomodate 1000 new engineers in the next 6 months.

From what I've seen of the Hackers and Founders NYC scene, the situation is similar, except startups have to compete for engineering talent with finance companies, which pay a lot better than your average startup.

What does that mean? Founders, always be hiring. Devs, our value as an engineer is going up. Founders, build on more productive languages/platforms. Dev, consider joining a startup as an angel investment where you're pouring in time and effort instead of cash. So, interview a lot, and join carefully.

lbrandy• 16 years ago

I suppose by the mathematical nature of the situation, people and their social graph end up at one of the two "equilibria". 1) either they know a bunch of people who can't find any good people to hire, or 2) they know a bunch of smart people who work at crappy jobs they'd love to leave.

I have a group of friends (from University of Florida) who mostly graduated just before the west coast was really recruiting there. One works at HP doing server stuff, but that's about as "far" as they got. Another one is the smartest dude at his job at bigco where he puts out fires of bad devs every day, cleaning up $20,000 contracting messes with one SQL query that no one there thought could be written.

To these people, trying to get a "cool" job is borderline impossible because, first, they don't know anyone (their social graph converged the wrong way), and second the combination of being far-away and having to blindly email resumes into the blackhole that is domain.com/apply is just plain discouraging (not to mention ineffective).

I don't know of a good solution to this problem, but if anyone is willing to relocate some of these people, I might be able to refer some really smart people ;)

rgrieselhuber2• 16 years ago

The best advice I can give to people looking for a "cool" job in the valley is to simply move there and get to know people. If they aren't willing to take that admittedly risky step (almost a rite of passage) then the valley might not be the best fit for them. From what everything on this thread is saying, this is a great time to do it.

illumin84• 16 years ago

What that says to me is that there is another tech bubble starting.

Right now the hiring standards (hopefully) haven't slipped too much. When the only requirement to get a Python/Django job is that you read a Python for dummies book and can fog a mirror, welcome to 2001 again.

kls7• 16 years ago

It may be starting, but with at about 20 years in the industry, I would say that we have reached what has been about the norm. With the greater economy in the state it is in though, it is almost certain to bubble again. Development or Nursing are about the only two decent prospects of drawing a decent salary now without a decade of education investment. It is only a matter of time until people smell blood again and start running this way. Which will mean a return to the worse than bad developers of the .com boom. We are a few years out if it happens though as it takes some time to go from, I know how to power a computer on to slapping together some code.

nhashem• 16 years ago

I have a theory that the dot-com bust in 2000 and the outsourcing/offshoring hype in 2004ish basically wiped out two generations of computer science students. I graduated in 2004 and I remember the number of students in my major decreased dramatically between my freshman and sophomore year (some of that is the usual engineering major attrition, but I didn't see nearly the same decline as my friends in electrical/mechanical/etc). A coworker who graduated in 2007 told me his friends kept telling him to change his major "because all the jobs are going to India anyway." Meanwhile, the exact opposite thing happened. Growth on the web continues to explode and the demand for skill workers to support that growth continues to climb. Could this by why the shortage seems especially pronounced?

hga2• 16 years ago

Could be. For hard numbers, the dot.com/fiber-telecom bust caused MIT's EECS enrollment to crash from 400 students per class, a number that had been stable for more than 2 decades, to less than 200. It's now gotten a bit better (a bit over 200), but no one expects a return to the glory days. As I recall reading somewhere recently, overall nationally the effect was the same, from 20,000 to 10,000 majors annually granted.

I'd also add one big factor: despite the poo-pooing by some of age discrimination, it's very real and when your parents or friends of your parents tell you from harsh experience that your career will be over when you reach 35-40 years of age, you listen if you have any sense.

Of course, now the name of the game is to get a good starting job, period. I suspect that has more than a little to do with the slight recent upturn.

jmspring• 16 years ago

As someone who has been an early engineer (sixth employee at two and ninth at most current) at a couple of startups, watching the current talent situation is interesting. Companies are definitely hiring with smaller or more agile companies being more proactive about the diversity of people the bring in. Some of the larger networking/software firms are continuing to stick to their laundry lists.

I enjoy seeing the plethora of dmaller startups and the ideas and enthusiasm they bring. Things definitely have a different feel than dotcom bubble one. I hope that this job recovery is longer and more sustained.

For me, it is an interesting crossroad - having a house and marital responsibilities, do I jump on someone else's startup bandwagon again, try and get an idea funded (knowing angels, etc) or go the big company route to give personal time to flesh out ideas.

There certainly are options out there.

seldo• 16 years ago

The national unemployment rate is over 9% while Silicon Valley is fighting tooth-and-claw to hire. What's wrong with this picture?

Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard -- if some of the idiots I've worked with in the past could hold down jobs, then anyone can. Which dying industries should we be looking at to fill the gaps in the software industry?

jscore2• 16 years ago

I have never met anyone who was not technical and then became a coder.

In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but nowadays you should at least know decent coding.

Seth_Kriticos• 16 years ago

Yup. There are people with the logical mindset and problem solving ability to just naturally pick up coding. But most are not, and that's just an ability that's very hard to develop in later phases of life. In most cases it develops during teen age. Guess the last few decades did not really encourage these kind of developments, which is why we are running short now. It's not easy to fix though.

iamelgringo5• 16 years ago

Mind you, I was programming Basic when I was 7, but I left it behind for years. I went back to school for software engineering when I was 33. I've been working as an ER/Critical Care nurse for 18 years.

I'm currently bootstrapping a search engine for economic/financial news at http://Newsley.com. (alpha of search is here: http://newsley.com/search )

GFischer3• 16 years ago

My googling skills are failing me, but there was an article that had some data on the number of people in the "hard" sciences moving into the "soft" sciences, and the number of people that went the other way.

Not surprisingly, it was basically a one-way street.

(It also reminds me of http://xkcd.com/435/ )

Addendum: For the difference between hard and soft science, see http://clustertwo.org/articles/Strong%20Inference%20%28Platt... - the hard sciences are the ones based on the "strong inference" defined there

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

Really good software engineering is that hard. If you want to argue the point, compare mundane, "easy" software engineering with the average desk job that people can slide into without much training. Companies fight tooth-and-claw to hire good engineers because they don't want the idiots you worked with in the past. A good developer is 10x more productive than an average one, and a bad developer can be a net negative.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

It properly takes 3 years of work before you can program well enough to be hired - looking at the calendar, it still hasn't been 3 years since the economy tanked.

Adding time for people to realize that there is actual jobs, coupled with the "we only hire the best" and not that many people become software engineers.

vorg• 16 years ago

To become a successful software engineer you need ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little logical ability.

kls7• 16 years ago

Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard

It actually is, have you ever notices the absolute void of developers over the age of 40? People yell age discrimination but it is not true, it is the constant churn in ones life. From constantly reeducating yourself to stay relevant to the next emergency that requires 16 hrs 7 days a week for 2 months. It requires a passion for technology just to fulfill the reeducation requirement not to mention the hours. It burns developers out. The worst part is those on the outside don't get it, they think we pay them all this money and they still whine complain and won't take our jobs. So we have a profession with a high reeducation to relevance cycle and extreme requirements of time. Those two alone knock out a good deal of the population from even entering the profession. Then you have to deal with the burn out once you are in the grinder which always take a few of the good ones every year.

So if you couple the education needs, burnout and with the fact that it is really hard to be a good developer you find that even the good one are out of the industry by 40. Usually through earning enough money to "drop out" start a worm farm in Texas. Or they hitched their star to the right wagon and have become very successful.

I know because I have seen it, as a 36 year old who has suffered two burnouts, I have seen every one of my contemporaries fall. I remain because I set my terms, I made a agreement to myself that I would get out of the corporate grind and work for myself.

I found a niche that was under-served (web accessibility, HCI for JS based web apps). So in a sense I am off the market, I don't think that I would go back to a corp gig for anything below 2x what the market is paying. But lets not fool ourselves as a freelancer, I am still for hire it just allows me to set some terms on how and when I work. It seems for me at least that this was enough to stave off a third bout of burn out. Being able to work from home and set my own hours has done a lot for my ability to refresh, recharge and reeducate.

Retric2• 16 years ago

The real issues is the total number of Software dev's has increased dramatically over time so if you look for someone with 25 years of experience you need to realize 25 years ago the industry was smaller. Also while there are plenty of older developers the good ones are expensive because they know they are really worth every penny.

PS: It's a true eye opener to see someone making 500$ an hour working a 40 hour week and know they could raise their rates and keep their job and they also get more done than the average small team.

krschultz• 16 years ago

I worked with a guy who was over 65 and still working at a tech startup, and he was the best guy we had. Unfortunately passed away about a year ago but they do exist, there are just a lot fewer of them.

matwood• 16 years ago

Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard

It's easy for you or I or most anyone on HN to say that, but my experience proves that it's not true in the general population.

Orca• 16 years ago

I've noticed a surge in contacts from recruiters, almost daily now from linkedin asking if I'm looking. Last year was a very different story.

aneth4• 16 years ago

The developers I know are mostly trying to be founder level at a startup. I actually feel sorry every time I run into a company trying to hire a Rails developer because I feel their pain.

What's the solution for you companies desperate to hire? In my opinion, your outlook on equity needs to change. It's regular practice to offer a "rock star" developer 0.25% of your pre-diluted shares when you have $2M dollars in the bank. I've had this debate a number of times with arrogant founders and been told how that's just the way it is - investors this, B round that, $1B exit blah. Fine - but your offer is not appealing to me. I can make $100K+/year consulting part time, usually with a small equity stake, plus have a founder share of my own startup. Why would I take $100k plus 0.1% to work 12 hours a day at your startup?

Offer several percent, maybe 10% if you don't have a product yet. Get a few good people committed to your company on the inside. This is particularly true if you are very early or have a less "cool" startup. You are going to wallow in crappy developer misery and your product will fail if you don't have awesome techs who are TRULY dedicated to your vision.

mindsetlabs2• 16 years ago

This is a realization that I hope business founders will soon come to realize, because without the engineers there is no company, there is no innovation or product to sell. So i agree, and developers should get equity!

GFischer3• 16 years ago

"What's the solution for you companies desperate to hire?"

How about looking abroad? I know, it's fraught with perils, but as someone from "abroad" from the U.S. point of view, it needn't be that bad.

And your dollars will go a LONG way in hiring top talent (of course, you need someone local or whom you trust to choose the top talent. 90% of the local programmers are crappy too!).

illumin84• 16 years ago

You can't hire an H1B unless you are willing to document that you were unable to find local talent that had the required skill set. HR departments usually work around this by wording the job requirement in such a way that only their hand-picked H1B applicant has every exact skill. "Oh, you need a Python/Django/Ruby/Java guy with 2 years .NET? I just happen to have a resume with that exact skill set in front of me; so strange that we wrote the job opening like that...<wink wink>"

Expect to pay about $10-20K extra just to hire an H1B because of all of this extra paperwork and documentation, as well as hope he wins the H1B lottery.

aneth4• 16 years ago

Looking abroad can be a good solution in some cases, but it generally slows development time, quality, and is never as cheap as it seems. Also employees in another country will generally not be part of the culture of a company and thus are less loyal and committed. A startup needs dedicated engineers who understand the whole problem. If the founders don't qualify, there need to be major stakeholders who do.

aneth4• 16 years ago

I'm an RoR/Java/etc developer/entrepreneur. I get recruited heavily 2-3 times a week, and yet half my non-tech friends (which comprises most of my friends) are under-employed or jobless. That dichotomy is disturbing and very difficult personally to deal with. Here I am making 10 times what the employed ones make hourly, while talking about making millions on a startup. I try to encourage them to get some product or internet marketing skills, generally to no avail.

Even so, I feel that web development is a commodity and that to stay ahead I need to develop a better design and product background.

Sukotto• 16 years ago

I suggest you try to add some high achievers to your circle of friends. People who are successful in the way you you dream of becoming.

If your current group of friends are not interested in actually working hard to make those dreams a reality, there's a very real danger they will inadvertently poison your own chances of success.

gte910h• 16 years ago

He's not exaggerating the market there for people of other skillsets.

Fresh new young people trained in other professions are having a very hard time of it as their more experienced peers in industry are taking the entry level positions rather than nothing at all.

Now his friends might be unmotivated tools, have the wrong skillset for the area in which they live, or any number of things, but the economy is hard for some highly trained people even these days.

mindsetlabs2• 16 years ago

Companies need to start taking on the virtual office model and start hiring developers from remote cities and even countries, you miss out on the social interaction of an office but good developers tend to get more done quicker when they can work from home and with flexible hours.

steilpass• 16 years ago

So how do I benefit back from Europe?

iamelgringo5• 16 years ago

The engineer shortage will spread. It's hitting SV and NYC first, but give it a year or two, and you'll see it as well.

awt• 16 years ago

As a programmer it's always fun to be in a good job market. However, I do get a bit concerned about bubbles when things get overheated like this. I suppose the best one can do is save for the downturn and build up some great experience for when the market inevitably gets tougher and the rounds of layoffs start.

rrival• 16 years ago

Bubble? Overheated? Aren't we recovering from a broader downturn? Or are you suggesting that we're in the 3rd or 4th quadrant of the VC investment-ease curve (~2000, ~2007)?

illumin84• 16 years ago

The federal reserve is printing almost $1 trillion in "easy money" that will be lent out to businesses at close to 0% interest rates. Don't fool yourself into thinking that this money won't end up creating a bubble somewhere. It might not be a tech bubble, but it very well could be.

arnorhs• 16 years ago

I was contemplating moving to the US to join a startup, but getting a visa is pretty hard, isn't it? I can get a 3 month traveler's/business visa. Then there are work permits, etc, right?

So currently, I'm just working on my own project.

untamedmedley• 16 years ago

There is no pipeline. I see lots of comments about how entry level developers are useless. No one wants to train the next gen of developers, so companies are fighting over a smaller and smaller pool of people.

The only way to get any experience seems to be to start your own company. Which is great for the person who goes off and does it, but not smart for the company trying to hire them.

If employers don't want to waste money investing in entry-level positions, why waste it investing in someone who has made it clear they want to work for themselves?

Pay less, train more.

flacon2• 16 years ago

Looking for a developer with startup exp?

I am a developer with startup experience and skill in Ruby, JS, and frontend technologies. I have 6+ years experience and a BA from UC Berkeley. I created a post related to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786901

percept• 16 years ago

If you haven't already, check out Authentic Jobs--they appear to have a number of remote jobs listed with your skillset:

http://www.authenticjobs.com/

Good luck with your search.

flacon2• 16 years ago

Thx. Authentic Jobs looks useful. I am currently employed at wellknownstartup.com and looking for a change. Thanks for the tip.

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