Google, Facebook and Zynga on a hiring binge in California

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/03/high-tech-industry-on-hiring-binge-in-california-google-facebook-and-zynga-lead-the-pack.html

by pathik • 15 years ago

48 37 15 years ago

latimesblogs.latimes.com

spif• 15 years ago

Which is why for some reason's it's good to be an entrepreneur outside of California. Recently traveling to the US this was quite a revelation: being in Europe (Amsterdam) can also be a competitive advantage.

woan• 15 years ago

I don't follow unless you are saying that other areas are less competitive.

There is a good reason that CA is hot for tech companies. It's the whole ecosystem.

Were it not for the ecosystem, these same folks are smart enough to found or move their companies elsewhere.

nkassis• 15 years ago

I think he meant that not being in California is an advantage because you don't have 3 hulking giants (and more) taking practically 100% of the available engineers. Whatever is left is fiercely battled for by the smaller companies.

samtp• 15 years ago

If you're a small company outside of California, you don't have to compete with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zygna.... for the best engineers. As a startup you can never match their salaries. Sometimes it's good to be a big fish in a small pond.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

I've noticed a spike in emails from recruiters for jobs/gigs in California recently, both from the companies cited (I've had emails from all 3) and from others. I've lost track of how many times in the last week alone I've had to tell recruiters "I'm not willing to move to California at the moment". Thinking of making a macro for it.

Also, I've come close a few times to telling recruiters to tell their clients to please discover the joys of ssh/sftp/dropbox/basecamp/email/irc/phone, ie. telecommuting. I'm increasingly finding it funny that employers care where my body is considering how an extreme gap there is between the demand for qualified engineers and the supply of available+interested+affordable ones.

jedberg2• 15 years ago

99.9% of my job can be done from home. Yet I still commute 2 hours every day to get to the office.

Why? Because there is just something to be said for working in the same room as the other folks on your team.

Sometimes we'll all work from home, and we'll be in IRC all day chatting the same way we do in the office. Yet when we are in the office, we seem to get more done.

The best example is when I hear some of the other folks talking about a new feature or a code change, and I overhear something that sets off my sysadmin alarm bells. If we weren't in the same room, we'd have to wait until the code review phase to find out, "oh hey, the servers can't DO that."

This way we can head off these problems early with minimal overhead. How annoying would it be to have to send an email every time you had an idea, and then wait for everyone to approve it? When everyone is in the office, we just turn around and finish that process in a few seconds.

joe-mccann• 15 years ago

Totally. Trying to get me to leave Austin, TX which is half the cost of living AND has no state income tax is a tough sell to us devs here. Remote work is becoming more and more accepted lately as recruiters and companies are realizing people actually may not want to live in Cali. Granted, monthly in person meetings may be necessary but a flight and a hotel is a reasonable fee, IMO.

jshen4• 15 years ago

And some of us would love to work for company X, but bought houses during the bubble and are now effectively stuck where we're at.

I'd would be great to telecommute, but most aren't up for that as jedberg illustrates.

larsberg2• 15 years ago

If you are a superior candidate (significant years of experience, many successful products that you were one of the couple key dev members on), interview anyway. There are relocation benefits usable to the large players with deeper pockets, one of which includes third-party companies that will buy and resell your house from you via a subsidy provided by your new company.

jedberg2• 15 years ago

No kidding! They keep stealing my people! ;)

Seriously though, it's been making things tough. We've really had to step up our game lately to make compelling arguments. Luckily, we have some advantages over those guys, like being able to push code live to millions of people with pretty much no bureaucracy.

rdtsc3• 15 years ago

Play against their giant corporate structure. They can't adapt and be flexible, but you can. You might not be able to match their salary + bonus, but you can do other things. How about giving your employees more vacation time? A lot of them are not living in the same town as their family, they will value having time to spend with family, or to travel. Google has what? 3 weeks of time off? Give them 6 if you can. Pitch it as, "sure you can make all that money, but will you have time to spend with you kids or to travel?"

Also, let some people work from home if possible. Let them keep flexible hours, make 11 to 3 core hours and let people come in early or leave late ... It is stuff that might take lots of red tape in large companies.

rdouble• 15 years ago

Google does all that stuff already.

jpulgarin• 15 years ago

Facebook has a very unbureaucratic deployment system.

keane• 15 years ago

"San Francisco's Twitter… has more than 400 employees and plans to grow to 3,000 employees by July 2013."

Wow. Planned staff increases:

  Google: 25%
  YouTube: 30%
  Facebook: 50%
  Twitter: 650% (over 2 years)

That is amazing. I am very curious what organization and methods Twitter has planned to manage scaling up like that.

neutronicus• 15 years ago

I don't know, but I think they're desperate for some data mining know how so they can do better targeted advertising. I think it's do or die for them.

whiletruefork• 15 years ago

Also the growth is not necessarily all in engineering. For example, I think Twitter is going to be needing a sales team to help push any pending ad products.

fizx• 15 years ago

I hear Facebook has internal guidelines that say they can't grow by more than 60% y/y.

gwern• 15 years ago

In _Founders at Work_, McKinsey's consultants are quoted as recommending growth be no greater than 25% because past that, the corporate culture is lost.

muhfuhkuh2• 15 years ago

How about the "5 million dollar bonus" (I'm guessing restricted stocks) to retain one top engineer? We must be switching over from brawn to brains in the human value chain, which is apt, as the ENTIRE value of NFL teams doesn't even equal the value of any ONE of the companies mentioned (Total value of Facebook is $50B while total value for combined NFL teams is ~37B for example). Either that, or we're in a bubble. I, being the incurable optimist, vote for the former.

gxs• 15 years ago

Well it depends on how you look at it.

Elite brawn (elite NFL player): 20M / year.

Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year.

Note: I didn't compare brawn to say, Zuckerberg, because that would be more like comparing the owners of the team.

Just my $0.02.

muhfuhkuh2• 15 years ago

"Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year"

"Elite brain" isn't some clean up hitter lighting up code or architecting for you. Elite brain is CTO, or EVP of technology. In terms of e.g., basketball, the Micky Arison of Apple is undoubtedly Steve Jobs, so LeBron is someone like Jony Ives. I'm quite sure Jony is walking away with way more than $20M after designing the iPod, iPhone and iPad (some speculate it's somewhere in the $150-200 Million range).

Tiktaalik• 15 years ago

These three companies have each now opened offices in Seattle too. I suppose that could end up heating up that market as well.

djb_hackernews• 15 years ago

I joined linkedin this week, 16 hours later I was contacted by a Google recruiter "impressed" with my software engineering experience.

I listed my current job title 'Software Developer'. No description, no technical bullet points, nothing, just a title. Thats what they were "impressed" with.

patio11• 15 years ago

Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months? Headlines like this mean the demand curve has shifted. If you don't communicate that fact to your bosses, they will likely not recalculate the market clearing price for your labor for you. (If it had gone down, on the other hand...)

jbarham• 15 years ago

> Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months?

Sure, the suckers on H1B work visas who are waiting for their green cards, which can take several years... Given that your H1B visa is tied to a particular job at a particular company at a particular salary, and your green card application resets if you change jobs, it obviously discourages H1B workers from fully participating in the free labour market.

Not that I'm bitter or anything, ;), but I was exactly in that situation last year, getting hounded by recruiters for jobs much more appealing that the one I was in. But my H1B visa and green card application, not to mention the financial responsibility of providing for my family, prevented me from considering those positions.

So I said adios to the US, played my trump card of being married to an Australian, and I now have permanent residency in Australia without any restrictions on who I can or cannot work for (unless it's a government position that requires I be a citizen, which doesn't interest me anyway).

FWIW, Amazon's Singapore AWS data center is working out just fine from Down Under as I work on my startup...

billpaetzke• 15 years ago

How much of a raise do you suggest? 5%, 10%, more?

Google, Facebook and Zynga on a hiring binge in California

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