The War for Developers is on. Can you compete?

http://blog.loftjobs.com/post/4400804234/the-war-for-developers-is-on-can-you-compete

by trorer • 15 years ago

30 54 15 years ago

blog.loftjobs.com

mellery451• 15 years ago

Is this "war for talent" local to the Bay Area? I departed the Bay Area ten years ago due to lack of affordable housing, but I'm genuinely curious if a strong developer job market exists anywhere else (I haven't found it where I am now).

bartonfink• 15 years ago

Things aren't so bad in Denver where I live.

trorer3• 15 years ago

NYC seems to be a hot area as well -

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/the-war-for-talent.html

consultutah• 15 years ago

Even little old Provo, UT is getting competitive. No lambos or anything like that, but finding good people is hard.

dstein• 15 years ago

That brings up a good related question: does the average SV tech salary afford you a decent quality of life? What's the point of a 6 figure starting salary if you can't afford a house and need to commute for an hour just to scrape by?

rdouble3• 15 years ago

If you are young or single and dont mind renting it is pretty good. I've done the math numerous times and always come out ahead financially with jobs in the bay area. If you have kids and/or feel the need to buy a house it is probably an entirely different story.

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

So you can buy a house in the south bay for $600K, using that as a baseline and a 6% Mortgage you're talking $3,500 house payment which is 60% -> 40% of your take home pay vs 100K -> 150K salary. Leaving you 2K -> 5k / month for other stuff. (car/insurance/phone/cable/utilities/food/etc).

'Average' salary for tech workers is $110K [1] so can you live on $2K/month?

[1] http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-20/business/17829511_1_si...

unfug• 15 years ago

I'm in Louisville and we have had a hell of a time trying to hire quality developers. The pool of quality talent here is much smaller than the demand.

bugsy6• 15 years ago

Google-stalking you just now, it looks like you work at a place called ignew which has seven employees and annual revenue of $1 million.

The company site doesn't even have job listings though. This is a problem. In a search I found a single job listing for your company on the web for an iPhone+Android developer. This was on a set of sites under something called MyCareerNetwork.com, which I had never heard of before as a job board. Checking for jobs within 100 miles of Louisville on Joel's board, where many microsoft developers hang out and which is much more well known, there are 0 search results anywhere near your city so I know you are not currently advertising there.

If I've guessed correctly about where you work, then you guys should probably at least advertise in known locations if you are really having problems finding people.

I would assume of course that since you can't find anyone locally you are doing the basic hygiene issues such as offering good packages, full relocation, and paying for interview expenses. But the one ad I found specifically says you won't pay relocation. This sort of thing is a huge red flag.

So, you say you are having trouble finding people. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the market though based on my brief investigation but is a problem with not trying hard and not providing even the minimal incentive necessary.

You should be aware that iPhone and Android skills are both quite hot right now and developers that are expert in both are extremely rare and command a premium. You should be looking at paying full relocation and salary in the $250k range. That's the market.

rdouble3• 15 years ago

The only other place is NYC.

Other locales have spokespeople who talk about how they are desperate for programmers and how great it would be to work there. Then you find out the reality and it's 50k top salary programming tps reports in an office park in the suburbs.

blahblahblah• 15 years ago

I've always been somewhat puzzled as to why NYC is the software development hub that it is. It's easy to get why the Bay area is such a powerful draw for developers. It's the one place in the continental U.S. where the climate is perpetually perfect, so it's only natural that people want to live there and it's inevitable that people with rare and valuable skills that can command high salaries will congregate there. It's not as clear to me what the draw is for NYC since the weather there is as bad or worse than Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, or Milwaukee and the cost of living is higher than those Midwestern cities. It seems like Boston should be a bigger software hub than NYC just on the basis of the proximity of MIT and Harvard and the intellectual community that fosters. On the basis of desirable climate (and astonishing natural beauty), it seems like Honolulu ought to be a major software hub, but it isn't. What's NYC's secret of success as a software hub?

bugsy6• 15 years ago

"Other locales have spokespeople who talk about how they are desperate for programmers and how great it would be to work there."

Another amazing thing about those jobs is that they want you to sell your house, probably at a loss, and move to their obscure location, but they don't want to pay any relocation expenses.

spamizbad• 15 years ago

It's "strong" here in Chicago, although employers aren't anywhere near as generous as they are in the Bay Area.

My friends tell me it's pretty strong in Austin, TX too.

rickd• 15 years ago

I wouldn't say there's anything resembling a "war" out here (I'm in Denver). But I will say that my employer hasn't been able to find ANY quality devs locally.

While the job scene here is tiny, there's still a lot of demand. Our last 2 hires have been from out of state.

Also, you get to live in the mountains...

rmason• 15 years ago

You could do all that stuff. Or you could switch to an entirely different playing field. How about hiring your developers in the Rust Belt where they work for a third less and are unlikely to be poached by other startups?

Surely you're joking right? Create a billion dollar company where it snows four months out of the year? Yes and a recent example rhymes with coupon;<).

trorer3• 15 years ago

Obviously there are other great places to locate, but the Bay Area remains the hub. Startups have to compete with several 800 lb gorillas!

runT1ME• 15 years ago

I know a few developers there. If they're good enough, they still work there and get a very high salary...

The problem is not that great developers are expensive, it's that they're expensive and very rare.

invalidOrTaken2• 15 years ago

I've heard this before and it makes basic sense. So here's my question: what do I do to become a "great" developer? Are we talking "any specialty beyond PHP?" Hadoop knowhow? Advanced statistical algorithm knowledge? Database theory? Or is the bar absurdly low, and if we can just find a !@#$% developer who can code fizzbuzz and isn't an idiot is the thought process?

z92• 15 years ago

Bad contrast of font color. Can't read it without pressing ctrl-a.

rwolf• 15 years ago

Thank god for readability.

erickhill2• 15 years ago

Seattle is booming, too. Amazon alone has around 1900 open positions.

trorer3• 15 years ago

So many people are hiring, this is a good time to be a developer! Big companies and startups alike.

cageface2• 15 years ago

Makes me a bit uncomfortable. I hope this doesn't play out like 1997-2000 and trash the job market for several years again.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Really, what can Amazon even do with 1900 developers?

Oh well. Who wants to hire me? I got a fancy-lookin' PhD and I can code quantum mechanical simulation codes in my sleep, so I figure whatever you're doing can't be much harder. I know absolutely nothing about Rails, SQL or Lisp, but how fricking hard can it be? And I'm willing to accept any offer in excess of One Shitload.

btcoal3• 15 years ago

Hedge fund.

erickhill2• 15 years ago

They aren't all 1,900 developer jobs. But a ton are engineering related. Amazon owns so many products/sites beyond the store it's incredible (e.g. woot, imdb, kindle, S3, audible, etc.).

People always talk about Apple, Google and (less now) Microsoft. But Amazon is a huge sleeping dragon.

bugsy6• 15 years ago

Well... amazon at this point has a pretty long established reputation as being an underpaid hellhole for developers. So I am not surprised they have 1900 open positions. If you are any good, you'll have better places to apply to. So they get the useless dregs. Amazon's story in this regard is a good lesson to tech firms about what happens if you treat developers like crap so long that word gets out about how bad it is at your place. The good ones will avoid you forever. You'll never again be able to hire the top talent, at any price. No one trusts you. Reputation is important. There's good reputation like Google, there's neither good or bad, like a lot of places, and then there are the places with the bad reputation.

In hardware for example, HP used to have the best possible reputation. But then Fiorina as CEO destroyed the company's reputation among engineers. They are now permanently crippled.

Word gets out.

Maybe everything there has changed and things are better. That's possible. But it doesn't matter. It's like the story of the reformed born again wife beater. Sure, he feels bad about what happened to all his previous spouses and swears he has changed. But does a solid down to earth woman who isn't emotionally damaged really want to be the one to find out if it is true? No.

staunch3• 15 years ago

It's one of my pet conspiracy theories that Google has hired tens of thousands of the best programmers not because they actually need them for anything, but primarily to keep them out of the hands of rivals and potential killer startups.

qq662• 15 years ago

Why would you think they don't need them?

staunch3• 15 years ago

Because more programmers != more productivity. Brook's Law, etc.

earl• 15 years ago

Has anyone noticed salaries rising in correlation with this supposed demand? I personally haven't seen salaries rising as much as I would have thought...

metaprinter• 15 years ago

Yeah I got an email today from elance(i've never used them) telling me they have thousands of web developer jobs that have only been bid on by a few people and they need more developers.

Taking a look at the site, all the jobs are for less than $500... the war rages on.

bugsy6• 15 years ago

The article says "early stage startups need to compete". I agree with this. I haven't really seen much movement in that direction though. So many startups try to get early employees to shoulder all risk themselves with no hope of reward, bogus equity deals, no benefits, etc. You hear about these VCs buying substantial slices of ownership for $12,000 or $6,000 or other such trivial amounts less than their weekly cost of first class airfare, which makes it impossible to offer real salaries to new hires.

Very little action going on that indicates there is a true understanding in the start up community that top talent is needed to invent top products that draw customers.

Heck, there was recently an announcement here from some company that was telling startups they didn't even need to have developers, they had plugin disposable cog developers in india that could do whatever was needed remotely, as if killer product development was a solved problem now handled by line workers. Obviously these nameless overseas developers won't be getting equity.

Really has seemed like amateur hour in the startup community for some time. So little activity is consistent with a desire to build solid companies with good products that are sustainable. Instead, more and more VC funds are run by guys with little successful business experience, who seem mostly interested in living the high life at the expense of the investors they are fleecing.

The War for Developers is on. Can you compete?

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