Retailers Are Losing the Software Talent Wars

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/retailers-are-losing-the-software-talent-wars-12012011.html

by jongraehl • 15 years ago

64 88 15 years ago

Roboprog9• 15 years ago

Hmm. Rather than spend $180 or $300 million to purchase tech companies, maybe some of these stores could try paying Silicon Valley salaries to a team of 10 or 20 devs.

20 devs * $200 K (loaded) / year = $4 M / year.

... Assuming they had a way to bootstrap an idiot-rejection-filter.

bgentry• 15 years ago

That's a much better plan. It's funny that they are unwilling to pay above-market salaries to a few competent devs.

fleitz• 15 years ago

Big box retail is currently built on an interchangeable parts model. Retailers keep costs down by making people replaceable, unfortunately at this point that model doesn't work well for tech. It's unlikely that this will change as that mindset is built into the culture of the organization and has done well for the industry in the last 30 years.

It's likely that retail will undergo another change such as when sears took over in the late 19th / early 20th century. Retailers arent going to lose the war they will simply be replaced by more nimble competitors who can properly leverage technology. Contrary to popular belief there are good developers outside of sv and some developers are motivated towards well paying 9 to 5 jobs instead of options and sodas.

The article also conveniently ignores the huge logistics infrastructure retailers have and focuses purely on websites, while the web is certainly important the reality of the situation is that currently retailers such as Walmart have huge competitive advantages due to its investment in logistics tech and infrastructure.

ajross• 15 years ago

It's a terrible plan. Paying a bunch of rock star salaries just gets you a bunch of people that say they are rock stars. If you don't have any on staff, you don't actually know if they are or not (pg has an essay about exactly this).

History is filled with these kind of rock star failures.

Buying the company gets you a team that can verifiably build the product you want, because they already did. That kind of conservative risk management is worth a ton of cash in the real world.

buff-a• 15 years ago

LOL. 200k? 20 devs? To build store.target.com? They'd better be awesome, and that awesome doesn't walk for 200K.

That level of awesome builds the product (show don't tell) and then sells it for $180m.

Roboprog9• 15 years ago

How many developers should it take to build an ecommerce site??? Sys-admins + DBAs + "biz logic" devs + "front end" devs and a few artist, project mgr types and entry level supporting developers???

Given a sufficiently inefficient process, an infinite amount of labor can be absorbed, I suppose.

I would think a core tiger team could accomplish wonders simply iteratively triaging their existing operations.

officialchicken• 15 years ago

Or maybe offer a percentage of the online sales revenue, after returns (and avoiding hollywood math).

I've interviewed with several "luxury" retailers within the past year, and my idiot-rejection-filter was usually triggered soon after the beginning of the interview.

It was usually due to the perception of inmates running asylum, or a legacy technology I didn't want anywhere near my resume (VB). Either way, lack of technological leadership, planning, and execution was easy to spot with a phone call or visit to a store.

desireco42• 15 years ago

Not only that they have caps on how much developers can make, they are also heavily miss-managed, full of crazy managers with insane ideas, consulting companies with their own agendas, agile that is not even close to agile, etc. You don't need to be in Silicon Valley to make decent website, you do have to manage it and develop it properly, most don't do that.

jaggederest• 15 years ago

Right, it's not a failure of recruiting, it's a failure of management and environment: nobody wants to work at Target developing software no matter how much money they pay.

reissbaker• 15 years ago

It'd be interesting to know how much they pay, though. And how they adjust salary over time.

prophetjohn• 15 years ago

The fact is that being an engineer at Target is very likely a boring, bureaucratic drag. The best engineers are overwhelmingly the best engineers because they love what they do and hone their craft. Someone who takes so much pride in what they do is not likely to get much satisfaction out of developing a website that helps people buy a mop. It's a fine thing to do; people need mops. But it's not a particularly interesting problem to be solving.

So, I think places like Target will always have this problem unless they're willing to pony up the cash and offer more money than the interesting jobs. After all, there's no reason that some behemoth like Target can't compete with some SV startup in salary.

ams61103• 15 years ago

Basic e-commerce for such things as mop-buying is a solved problem in 2011. Not sure why you would even need a large team of top-notch developers at a place like Target. A few good sysadmins and DBAs, and maybe some graphics/front-end types.

Edit: Upon thinking about this a moment longer, I think that actually there would be (or could be) interesting work at Target, simply because of the scale of the operation. Though sadly you are still probably hitting the mark in the "bureaucratic drag" assessment.

droithomme2• 15 years ago

Target is the third largest brick and mortar retailer in the US. Running a computer network nationally for Target is not a solved problem. Sure, it's a solved problem for #1 WalMart, using entirely custom software that WalMart developed in house. But it's not like WalMart is selling that software to Target.

mdda• 15 years ago

I agree with everything you say, but think it should be emphasized that tech people at (for instance) Amazon are fundamentally in the same 'buy a mop' situation, except that Amazon believes that it is/can be so much more.

Fundamentally, it's clear that Target will never be a company that holds its tech people in awe - whereas at Amazon, you 'just' know that a single mop supplier is lower on the totem pole than a single DBA, for example.

mattdeboard5• 15 years ago

Eh I work at a place that is arguably "boring" (we're not in the buy-a-mop business, but it's definitely not sexy) but the culture & freedom I have to operate make it exciting. I get to call some shots on what I make, which is a huge perk for me.

mwsherman2• 15 years ago

Wouldn’t this state of affairs scream out for simple, off-the-shelf ecommerce? Ecommerce platforms have been around as long as the web, but they are enterprisey behemoths (last I looked, a long time ago).

Where is the Wordpress for retail?

asher• 15 years ago

> Where is the Wordpress for retail? http://www.shopify.com/

ams61103• 15 years ago

Target itself is an enterprisey behemoth.

Not trying to take away from your comment, I think there's definitely a place for a "Wordpress for retail" and would be surprised if it doesn't exist (though it's not something I've really looked into). But I'm not sure something like that would easily scale to what Target would need.

thebrokencube2• 15 years ago

BigCommerce, Shopify, Volusion are probably the closest to 'Wordpress for retail', but they seem to be mostly focused towards small businesses. Not that big businesses can't use them, but yea.

ericingram2• 15 years ago

I'm currently working on something I've called 'wordpress for e-commerce'.

The tenets of wordpress that I think are applicable:

1. Totally free, open source, unrestricted license 2. Ability for developers to form strong community and share 3. Easy to hack, simple architecture

There's more to it sure, but these are on top of my mind.

mwsherman2• 15 years ago

Maybe the limiting factor is the ability to integrate with backend inventory, etc. I suspect there is no lightweight (read: inexpensive developer) way to do this.

(Which makes me wonder if there is a Wordpress for ERP.)

The other way to look at it is that for the 2-3 top players in a sector, there can never be off-the-shelf. WalMart’s differentiation is incredible supply chain, which they had to invent. Being a big guy means you are doing something different, almost by definition.

floppydisk2• 15 years ago

Walmart is also pushing hard into R&D, see http://www.walmartlabs.com/ . Of all the traditional retailers, I'd say Wallyworld is the most invested in 21st century retail tactics and actually doing a decent job of it.

dhs• 15 years ago

There are several candidates for "Wordpress for ERP"; try OpenERP, Openbravo, and Compiere.

TheBiv• 15 years ago

No big box retailer would ever consider an out of the box solution that took minimal amount of effort.

adaml_623• 15 years ago

I think that article is neglecting the posibility that Target (as an example) has the software engineers who are talented enough to fix the site.

But what they almost definitely have is buckets of management and procedures preventing them from fixing the site. The kind of person who is afraid to reboot the server because it hasn't been rebooted in 6 months. Or who says if we do anything then we might make it worse.

codeonfire• 15 years ago

Also lets not forget micromanaging tech managers who's one or two years of development before they went into management (hey they figured out technology in one year unlike all those other saps) entitles them to force their stupid and disastrous ideas onto the engineering team.

sun123• 15 years ago

I have worked in the IT department of a large IT firm. It is frustrating. There is a long irritating procedure for doing even small things.When I decided I'll be using jQuery in one of the screens, the guys at the "top" stopped me saying it may violate copyright laws and stuff like that. Most people are simply not aware of what is going on in the industry.

hkarthik2• 15 years ago

Here in Dallas, lots of retailers have their corporate headquarters here. I've done some consulting work for one of them in the past and a couple years ago one of them was trying to recruit me pretty heavily for their big e-commerce push.

Most of these companies don't have that many full time employees in their IT departments. A handful of full time employees will oversee an army of contractors and consultants. Most of these folks are specialized in SAP, Oracle, Business Objects, etc and don't know the first thing about building scalable web-based e-commerce.

The sites that do exist tend to be old, monolithic .NET or Java apps with antiquated processes to deploy them. An old boss of mine that went to work for one of these retailers said he had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site.

Roboprog9• 15 years ago

"Business Objects" -- <<shudder>>

"What is this ''diff'' you speak of?"

kls10• 15 years ago

had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site

That is a huge issue that developers see when they see an established company. Then you add in existing technical ego's from other teams and you just have a recipe for a stagnant crashing every month disaster. It's a generalization, but we all make them, it is how we make semi-informed decisions based on loose facts. Some large companies are wrongly maligned in the process but it's the reality.

When I took over the web at Marriott, we separated it from IT all together and made it a business division, in doing so we could make decisions independent of IT approval and we I had an independent budget under my discretion. Many companies just don't get how these slight organizational changes can make a huge difference in a teams ability to deliver technology.

hkarthik2• 15 years ago

The retailer that tried to recruit me was led by a former startup CTO that was doing much of what you described to try to change things. Aside from separating IT, the other big change was to create a new campus/location with a better dress code, no Web Sense, and a separate network domain.

This post reminds, I should check in with him and see how things are going.

jtchang• 15 years ago

I can't believe some of you are saying they should put together a bunch of awesome programmers and rewrite their platform from scratch.

Certainly that is an option. But rarely is it ever the correct one. Your new platform could be as riddled with bugs as the old one.

The truth is that finding good engineers is about knowing the right incentives. Retailers are losing the talent wars because they don't know how to compete. And while salary is one lever Target can fiddle with, it certainly isn't the only one.

Target needs to look at the right incentives for the people they want to hire. Is telecommuting an option? How about direct authority to approve changes? Or the chance to build your own team? These are the incentives that matter to engineers.

The problem is cutting through all the rhetoric in hiring. Target can say "we want to revolutionize the ecommerce industry" but do any engineers actually believe them? That's tough.

Roboprog9• 15 years ago

Well said.

Debugging, instrumentation, refactoring and understanding "system integration" are going to be big skills in an environment like this. Making a whiz-bang social-media site on a clean slate is a valuable skill, but it's not what this problem needs solved.

Compensation can be non monetary as well. I telecommute a few days a week at my current position, and the hours are reasonable (important when you have a family!). My compensation is probably quite meager by Bay Area standards, but things are cheap in the Sacramento area.

kls10• 15 years ago

And while salary is one lever Target can fiddle with, it certainly isn't the only one.

I would argue set high enough it is the only lever. Many that play the start up game do so because first and foremost, there is the chance to earn far more than they can at an organization like Target. Sure it's a long shot but, there is at least the chance, if large organizations started to cross that chasm. I believe that they would indeed start to attract talent. If one could become moderately wealthy working for Target then a lot of people would choose that option, sure it's not the fame and fortune of making it in a start up, but a road somewhere in the middle is a road I would imagine that many developers would be willing to travel.

bluedanieru• 15 years ago

That's not very realistic and they almost certainly don't have the money for it. Moreover, increasing salary nets diminishing returns for motivating people after a certain point, and if it sucks to work for you, then no matter how much you pay, people are going to get bored and frustrated and leave.

KevinMS4• 15 years ago

I must be living in some parallel universe. My resume just sits up on dice and monster and the only hits I get every day are from the same useless headhunters about exciting "6 month" ruby or perl gigs. Sure, I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking, but you'd think if all this press is true about a dev talent shortage, I'd be seeing some more outreach, even though I'd probably not be interested.

mattdeboard5• 15 years ago

>I'm not the best at selling myself, and I'm terrible at networking

Yeah if you want a cool job, or however you define the job you feel you deserve, you need to sell yourself and network. Period.

KevinMS4• 15 years ago

Yea, but understand that is not my point, and I'm not asking for your Tony Robbins like advice. If there was such a desperate market for talent out there, I should be seeing it, regardless of whether I was selling myself or not. Either their talent searches are incompetent or this is just manufactured news for somebodies agenda.

yourapostasy• 15 years ago

A resume does not count as participation in the talent wars you read about here on HN. There have been many threads here discussing how useless resumes are for identifying programmers who Get Shit Done, who are the ones that companies are fighting over. You can be as insular as you are now with a passive resume, and still have open source code base commits, Github code, and a personal blog that describes problems you run into and how you reached your solutions just so have a handy reference for yourself that is Google indexed. Others will stumble upon these web presences that give them a better handle on your programming talent than a resume, and are possibly in a hiring role. More likely, when you put these types of resources on your resume, potential employers will look at them and assess your coding skills more thoughtfully than reading some lines on a resume virtually indistinguishable from a zillion other resumes. Hope this helps.

joshwa4• 15 years ago

I work at macys.com, and here's where I recruit you!

Unlike most retailers, our e-commerce division operates on its own, and we have the agility (and capital budget) to move quickly and act on big opportunities. Yes, there's a lot of work and headache that's involved with dealing with massive retail systems, and they have about as much legacy stuff as you'd imagine a 150-year-old company with a history of giant acquisitions, but thankfully most of us never have to think about that stuff except at the edge of some giant diagram.

We have a whole bunch of floors in downtown SF that's just for dotcom--mostly engineers, some QA, some product/management, etc. We're reasonably up to date with new technologies--although we're a Java shop, some stuff gets done in Scala, there's an active Hadoop project, and lots of big, interesting problems in scalability, UX, big data, analytics, SEO, etc.

Example: I work on the internal-facing web product setup apps, primarily on product image stuff. Every product has to get photographed (including getting the physical sample from the manufacturer to the right studios, on the right model, etc), color corrected (we sell items in 60+ colors) mapped to products (is this the primary image? a swatch? a back view? which UPCs does it represent? what happens if the color sells out?). This all happens at scale: 130k physical samples trafficked, 150k products, 250k images.

Too bad this is on a weekend before new year's, otherwise I'd get all my favorite dev leaders in here to pitch you. We're growing (even in a down economy, we're posting significant growth year after year) and hiring like crazy (a current search shows 25 open FTE requisitions in SF, and our contract partners even more).

The work environment is a little BigCorp-ish, but it's relaxed (it's SF, after all), and they take work/life balance seriously, so if you're a hacker with a family you're definitely welcome here. I work with a lot of really smart people who get things done. Yes, we sell pants, but you get a 20% discount, and you get to find out when things go on sale beforehand ;)

Current openings: http://ecommerce.macysjobs.com/ Salaries are Bay-Area competitive, full benefits package, etc.

or if you want to know more you can contact me directly at joshua.wand@macys.com, with "Hacker News" in the subject.

NB going to bed now (11pm PST) but will be up in the morning to answer questions

leak• 15 years ago

I've shopped at macys.com several times because of the awesome deals on there but every time, I've returned everything that arrived. I also shop Zappos a lot and almost never return anything. For me, I think the site is really lacking on general product information through media (pictures/videos). Most of the products I click on usually have 1 picture (zappos has at least 4 and a video) and the picture doesn't even really help at all (ie: the shirt is tucked into the jeans so you can't see the fit).

What are your thoughts on this? I know you guys have a gang of products but I figure if you have to setup a photo shoot for 1 angel, might as well get every angel. I admit that I don't know what i'm talking about when it comes to this stuff (I'm just using Zappos as a reference).

joshwa4• 15 years ago

note: my own opinions, not those of the company, etc

A few reasons:

-- Zappos, to a certain extent, is selling commodities. Every shoe can get photographed exactly the same way, doesn't need to demonstrate fit, doesn't need to communicate a larger style vision. I think they do all their photography when the product enters the warehouse, and the photos don't get much of a touch-up.

-- Macy's, on the other hand, has a creative vision of the various customers and lifestyles we're selling to, and the photos generally have to communicate that. That means: model selection, pairing with pants/shirts, posing, etc. Same with home products like bedding or towels. It's a fine line to walk between making sure to show all the product's features and attributes such as fit, fabric, pattern/embellishment, etc, and communicating the aspirational style vision-- who the customer wants to be when they buy that shirt. It's a tradeoff.

-- Photography is expensive. It takes a lot of people and stuff to create a good fashion photo: model, photographer, hair, makeup, wardrobe stylist, art director, digital capture tech, retoucher, studio, lights, cameras, computers, catering, .. the list goes on. We're ruthless negotiators on this stuff and really efficient, but on a per-product basis it ain't cheap.

-- Macy's fashion is highly seasonal so we might not buy as deep into a given style since it's only good for 6 months or less, so that cost is amortized over a fewer number of sales.

All that said, we're working on it for sure. We're shooting a lot more views of almost everything going forward.

kls10• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, why no remote development positions. In today's market, getting the best talent available at the time is better served by broadening your geographic reach. I am interested in why more large organizations are not embracing remote developers given the maturity of technologies such as Skype and Basecamp.

joshwa4• 15 years ago

note: my own opinions, not those of the company, etc

A few reasons, some good, some not. We have a large dev organization in many different groups, and there's a lot of cross-group coordination that has to happen to make things go. As a result there's a lots of quick hallway whiteboarding, conversations, stuff hashed out over lunch, etc, as well as lots of meetings. We do have a lot of contract developers and QA around the globe (Montreal, Austin, Brazil, Russia, and India, not necessarily in that order), but as someone who does work remotely (I've moved to contractor status after moving abroad), I can testify that the culture of distributed teams is still evolving.

The other reason is that corporate HR is wary. Which IMHO is somewhat misguided but given the first reason above I can see why.

chaostheory• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if these are problems anymore @ macys.com, but here's a list of issues I remember:

1) It is very hard for the company to match market salaries even though its margins are pretty good for a retailer. The only retailer I know of that does well in the salary dept is Amazon.

2) The development culture: I think this is every large retail company, but I feel that you guys tend to favor anything coming out of Big Blue (or Big Company X) as opposed to something technically interesting (but no longer bleeding bleeding edge) in the open source world. You guys tend to buy stuff instead of building. There's definitely nothing wrong with that given the situation and culture, but I feel that it doesn't fit very well with the HN crowd at large.

That being said, Macys.com has some of the coolest, nicest people that you'll ever meet in the workplace; which is really great.

joshwa4• 15 years ago

To the best of my knowledge both of these issues are much improved over a few years ago.

How long ago were you there, and working with what group?

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

So is it just me or does the main example in this article have a glaring flaw? One that appears right in the first sentence?

For a decade, Target (TGT) outsourced its website operations to Amazon.com (AMZN).

I don't know about the other retailers, but Target's recruitment problem begins and ends in this sentence. Target lost the talent war a decade ago; it just took until now for the seeds of their destruction, which they planted and fertilized in Amazon's organization, to grow tall enough to be noticeable.

Oh, well, I'm sure the management genius who scored a short-term boost in profits by feeding the seed corn to Amazon collected a nice bonus.

jeremystine• 15 years ago

Now that you have heard from big-Corp (Macy's) here is where I pitch you! I'm a one man team working for my family biz Stine Home & Yard. We just launched StineHome.com with very limited product (around 100 products) but goal by end of 2012 is to have over 35,000 products online. Looking to bring on board someone who has exerience with this. No bureaucratic bs. Would have a feeling of a startup in a cool city. Preferably would live in New Orleans/Louisiana area. If interested drop me a line at jeremystine@gmail.com with Hacker News in subject.

Retailers Are Losing the Software Talent Wars

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