The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

http://www.fastcompany.com/3007649/how-win-bloodthirsty-battle-tech-talent

by allangrant • 13 years ago

80 95 13 years ago

allinzen• 13 years ago

Too true. The trouble is not enough people are trying to address the underlying problem - the lack of education in our public schools needed to become a desperately desired rails programmer! Computer programming should count as learning another language!

VeejayRampay3• 13 years ago

In the meantime in France, we can't get past that PHP/Enterprise Java illness that's been afflicting the dynamism of our net ecomomy for a decade now. Sad.

thibaut_barrere3• 13 years ago

Not my experience: I'm in France doing Ruby/Rails since 2004/2005, and I'm most likely booked until end of 2014...

So it's more a matter of niches and networks I believe.

VeejayRampay3• 13 years ago

Are you in Paris?

Maybe the market is getting bigger for Rails devs there? I left France 5 years ago and the picture was grim then, Java/PHP had a literal death grip on the market. Well, since I'm coming back I guess that's good news :)

JimboOmega5• 13 years ago

And here I am, a rails developer trying to move to SF, and I only get maybe a few nibbles a week.

I must not be on the right job boards. Or something. Is the meetup.com ruby list the place to go? Someone also suggested changing my location on LinkedIn to SF - however, I am hoping to relocate, but haven't done so yet, so that seems dishonest.

mmanfrin• 13 years ago

Send me your resume, manfrin@gmail.com.

doktrin3• 13 years ago

When I was in the market, I never saw the kind of rabid attention the OP is describing. Sure, occasional recruiter spam, but no more or less than anyone else.

I can't argue with the OP's experience, but I would take all claims of "super massive talent shortage oh em gee" with a good pinch of salt.

ericb3• 13 years ago

It is real. I've had companies calling me after I brush them off.

I do the interviewing for my current company, and we have had a senior role open for 10 months. We have gotten to the offer stage 3 times but lost nonetheless. This is for a rails role.

edit: my boss makes the offers, and I suspect we have been losing out on these positions while making offers around 130-140.

andrewf• 13 years ago

If you're serious about moving it's not dishonest - people looking for candidates for a S.F. role want you to appear in their search results! Maybe mention your plans to move, and your willingness/ability to interview onsite or remotely via Skype, in your profile summary.

JimboOmega5• 13 years ago

Well, is LinkedIn even the best way?

I get a fair amount of (local, I live near DC) recruiter spam through it, but it's often nothing to do with rails, and it is mostly third party recruiters.

I'm looking for a startup or small-company environment that actually uses rails. Big ERP jobs are easy to find, but the startup jobs are, despite the supposed feeding frenzy, a little bit more scarce on the ground. (Or else I'm not looking in the right place!)

This article mentions at least a few engineers passing on leads to companies that I might actually want to work for; that's what I'm trying to find.

cgag• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, I found a job in SF as a rails developer while living in a small town in Georgia via the site mentioned in the article, Developer Auction, and it was a great experience.

bicknergseng• 13 years ago

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the author, Matt Mickiewicz, runs developerauction.com. I imagine it is in their best interest to drum up the "talent war," to make it seem like there are no engineers to hire.

My experience tells me that this talent war exists... for the top few percentile of engineers. Where these people are dogged by recruiters and companies alike, there is a sharp dropoff; engineers who are smart but don't win in a tech bingo interview or didn't work at Google/Facebook or didn't go to Stanford get pinged by headhunters but passed over by companies. Engineers who have held jobs at start ups or less prestigious companies, who have authored plenty of CoffeeScript or ObC code for a corporate code base but don't remember how to implement a quicksort or don't have experience with framework x are rejected in the interview phase.

It's my opinion, but I think the "shortage of talent" is really a shortage of patience and mentorship, and a sign of the complete unwillingness of many companies to take a risk on someone.

JimboOmega5• 13 years ago

Funny. Sounds like me. I went to a decent but "wrong" school (UVA), lured by promises of a free ride. I missed my tech bingo interviews (and I've had a lot of them), for reasons worthy of a blog post. My first, for instance, with MS, went wrong because Alaska Airlines got my flight in around 1 or 2 AM - for an 8 AM interview the next day. I know I was not at my best.

I am also totally done with Google - it's just not worth 4 months of runaround and countless phone interviews just to come in and fail because one of the interviewers hates the whole process. And last time they contacted me, they told me to learn either Java or Python and call them back when I did. No thanks. Nothing against Python, but I am not putting that much effort into the chance at another interview. I would totally work for a company that did Python, and learn as I go - I've done that plenty before. (Edit: Oh, and the number of interviews google puts you through just should not be allowed)

I spent a year working on my own startup, which is what got me into rails, but it ran out of runway and I was then tied to the area by romance, and got a mediocre job at a huge company. I am no longer encumbered, but my resume lacks any recognizable names (of schools or companies). I've had a lot of other personal projects that never went anywhere and which earn me no points, but at least keep me in the game. (I should have put them all on GitHub, I suppose, but was too embarassed about their unfinished nature to do so).

I also don't get what the obsession is with CS 201 questions. But I keep my data structures textbook around just so I can relearn how to implement A* or remind myself what the big-O of a B-tree delete is before interviews. Of course, at Google I'd need to be implementing these data structures daily(?). I don't have a big problem with them, it's just an odd thing to be obsessed with.

pjungwir• 13 years ago

Sign up for the SF Ruby group's mailing list. Write a post that you're hoping to move to SF and are looking for job opportunities. Also try directly contacting any companies you especially want to work for.

jonboutelle• 13 years ago

Hey JimboOmega.

SlideShare is looking for Rails devs and we frequently hire people who are moving to the bay area (from Ohio, Texas, France ...)

You can email me at jon AT slideshare DOT com

jquery• 13 years ago

s/Rails dev/dev/g

cheyne• 13 years ago

^^ Jimbo, Change your LinkedIn profile to say you live in San Francisco. I just moved here a few months back and I get dozens of emails. I have a job, and dont respond to them, but its generally the same pitch ... "VC backed company, wants ruby/rails people, descent money, benefits, yada yada" ..

PeterisP• 13 years ago

Hire telecommuters outside of SF.

For example, I personally could get a drastic increase in income by moving to USA/SF, but I won't consider physically moving since it would be a great disruption to my wife and babies and I can afford not to move, as developers are wanted everywhere (though not so piranha-style). And there are many more developers like me. Long-range telecommuting is an option, and it's easier to be competitive financially since practically everywhere has lower cost of living than SF, I believe. (How much would a home for a full family within cycling distance of the office cost?)

sendob• 13 years ago

I agree! Geography is very valuable to some individuals; Especially with the tools available at this point, it seems strange to value being physically co-located for work.

dirkdk• 13 years ago

Well yes, but for startups that doesn't work. Every day you need to look at the results of your product, talk with your team and adjust course. Having remote workers really kills your ability to do that.

lifeisstillgood3• 13 years ago

Maybe, but not really. Two hours of google hangouts, screen -x, git and CI servers will do you for every conversation you can imagine apart from, let's grab a beer

JoeAltmaier4• 13 years ago

You have clearly not tried any number of tele-worker suites out there. I use/develop Teamspace and its absolutely capable of all of that.

pnathan• 13 years ago

Some/most companies have a real problem with the concept of telecommuting/remote working. It's really quite astounding to me: the internet is in more places than ever before, video conferencing, text conferencing, etc, are at all-time highs, yet for some reason companies simply think remote work is unacceptable.

Blows me away.

yesimahuman3• 13 years ago

I've worked remotely with a strong distributed team. It worked quite well, and I formed relationships on par with the year I worked in-person at another company.

That being said, I'm not very interested in it for my company since it just seems less fun to not be able to hang out with your employees in person. And fun is the reason I do this. I'm still on the fence about it though.

bmelton• 13 years ago

Completely agreed. I work in Mountain View, CA, but live on the other coast in Maryland. At pycon, I had a couple of companies trying to poach me (despite being a relative nobody), all paying good money™ to get me, but none of them were offering telecommute.

Aside from the fact that I love my company, and my job, the raise offers are always worth considering, but knowing that I'd have to move or go into the office every day made the offers much less appealing.

rhizome2• 13 years ago

This has not been my experience, but I haven't posted to meetup.com either.

PixelPusher8• 13 years ago

We've been hiring for a little while in Los Angeles. The problem is that there are some Rails developers, but most of the ones I've met are pretty entitled. They expect 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, etc. The problem is that most of them are fairly incompetent when it comes to everything else.

Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares.

This is good though, because it makes people who know those things that much more valuable as well they should be.

tomp• 13 years ago

Well, I've been programming since I was 13, I know everything about how computers work, from asm to HTTP, I've tried databases, parallelism, Haskell, distributed map/reduce, ... but I'm not a Ruby/Rails developer (yet, I grok Django ATM) and not from the US (so remote is the only option), so mostly uncompatible... :(

PixelPusher8• 13 years ago

Honestly, I'd more likely work w/ someone like you and teach them Rails than the opposite. MVC frameworks are very similar and a good developer should be able to switch easily.

I suspect that employers who only look for Rails developers are hurting themselves.

ericb3• 13 years ago

> 100K+, benefits, telecommuting,

So, a not particularly high salary considering cost of living and benefits too? Where would they get these crazy expectations?

Oh right, the open market.

PixelPusher8• 13 years ago

That's why i said it's a good thing. It bumps up the base developer salary and makes experienced developers even more valuable. At least those who are able to properly market themselves as such.

benjaminwootton4• 13 years ago

I don't think expecting $100k+, benefits, telecommuting etc necessarily indicates entitlement.

Most people in finance, senior managers, doctors, lawyers, architects, management consultants etc wouldn't get out of bed for less than that, especially in a big city with high cost of living.

I think its great that techies are starting to realise their value and grab a piece of that for themselves.

zalew2• 13 years ago

why are you comparing a qualified doctor or lawyer to a web dev who doesn't know anything about database design?

PixelPusher8• 13 years ago

What dictates entitlement is asking or expecting something without actually having earned it.

Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They earned it.

Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts, have not.

epoxyhockey• 13 years ago

Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares.

You might have better success just advertising for someone who has experience with whatever large data requirement you are working with. Senior engineers can learn the framework if they aren't already familiar with it.

I wouldn't expect a RoR engineer to be very concerned with memory allocation, parallelism or sockets. They are busy building sexy CRUD web applications.

viseztrance2• 13 years ago

It's clear that popping on everyone's radar gets you a lot of attention, but really, how many would follow through all the way?

The article mentions that none asked for any sort of online presence (Linkedin, Github, etc). Perhaps it's because they weren't serious to begin with.

viseztrance2• 13 years ago

Why the downvote? I don't live in the States, but I get emails from recruiters across Europe all the time (I'm a rails dev as well). In my experience they're not as serious as you might expect. Sure, the situation is extreme in SF, but is the signal to noise ratio better?

cletus• 13 years ago

Honestly this is just a PR piece for DeveloperAuction. "How to win the bloodthirsty battle for tech talent"? Why come use our site of course!

This strip from 1995 sums it up pretty well:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-22/

I see a number of problems (on both sides):

1. There is no shortage of talent. There might well be a shortage of talent for the price you're willing to pay but that's hardly the same thing;

2. What constitutes "talent" seems to be largely based on social proof. 25 year old Stanford graduate? Offers galore I'm sure compared to, say, the 45 year old University of Iowa graduate. Hell, I get an awful lot of cold calls based simply on listing "Google" on my online profiles (as my employer).

Social proof can be a useful indicator. The problem is that groups tend to self-select down to nothing this way where you end up with a tiny fraction of the group being over-subscribed and the majority struggling;

3. People like to employ people like themselves. So find a company full of MIT graduates and they're likely to hire... more MIT graduates. This isn't just a question of social connections or geographical area either (IMHO);

4. If you pick a high-demand high-cost area like the Bay Area you're obviously going to have a harder time finding and retaining talent and it'll be more expensive;

5. Larger companies tend to treat talent as interchangeable where the only units are the number of warm bodies, perhaps stratified into "junior", "midrange" and "senior" whereas we all know there can be a 10x or greater difference between two engineers in terms of productivity, hence the more productive talent is harder to attract and retain.

lifeisstillgood3• 13 years ago

I would like to think there is a talent shortage.

I pitch that we are in a similar position to Europe post Gutenberg - where they went from 2% literacy rates to 20% in a gut wrenching century. We are going to go from a lot less than 2% of people who are source code literate to that magic 20% in less - in short we are millions of talented people short.

In our generation, the observation talent shortage only occurs at certain ,price points is right - but when you want all companies to have the same code in their DNA as perhaps google or MS, we are so embarrassingly short of people it's a public policy issue not a Market lead one.

But I still laugh at the filbert cartoon - it's just I acknowledge that is true if your definition of talented developer is a software engineer who will write code primarily for a living and perform a sort of back office function. What about the CEO who codes? The deputy CFO?

KaeseEs• 13 years ago

The 10x figure is pseudoknowledge - something we "all know" that isn't actually true (or that at least we have no good reason to believe to be true), cf. http://vimeo.com/9270320 . In brief: the study that it is ultimately derived from had a tiny sample size (on the order of 30, to wit), and for several reasons the experimental design would have invalidated its results outside the very narrow original focus of the study (which was the relative productivity of batch processing vs. interactive processing on the computing systems of 1968) even if the sample size had been larger.

JoeAltmaier4• 13 years ago

The 10X figure is true. My study is 30 years of working with a wide variety of people in startup environments. Adding some people makes a project later. Others can manage a whole project alone (if they are LEFT alone).

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

You know what is blood thirsty? recruiters are bloodthirsty. Since there is exactly zero barrier to entry when there is a perceived shortage of talent we get a swarm of 'tech recruiters' that looks kind of like Carp do when you through a handful of popcorn into the coy pond.

There is a shortage of chumps however. For the right price you can hire pretty much immediately. What I don't get are people who are technically talented and not working, mostly because they want too much. Sometimes there is a sad sad story about how they were with big corp for 10+ years, went from starry eyed college grad to large mortgage holding principal engineer, and laid off, and now nobody will hire them as a principal engineer's salary. That is a sad story.

ameister145• 13 years ago

Why are there so few rails devs? Its not as if Ruby is super hard to learn or the rails framework is incredibly complex.

I think I would hire someone for 40k for their first year, train them in RoR and then pay them more their second year. You get 6 months of good work out of them after they're totally trained and at a lower price.

jdminhbg• 13 years ago

But now you have to hire a Rails trainer as well as a Rails dev!

patio11• 13 years ago

That's an attractive option iff you're training non-programmers and, when you say "pay them more", you are prepared to more than double their wages after they reach journeyman proficiency in Rails. If you expect people to have a CS degree prior to year 1 or react to a 10% raise in year 2 as generous, you would not find the Silicon Valley hiring market offering you as many candidates as you desired positions.

ameister145• 13 years ago

I know that; Let's say it takes 6 months of training to be fairly proficient. you have 6 months after that at a proficiency worth 42k, but you've only paid 40k for the entire year. Then when you raise the salary to 84, you have someone you know works in your company, who is happy with the huge raise, and you've gotten a bargain out of it.

The problem is you have to think a year ahead, but I don't think that's such an issue.

j_baker• 13 years ago

This seems like a pretty worthless test. I mean, who cares how many companies respond to your resume? The real test is how many job offers you can get, and that's a much more difficult than getting responses on your resume.

Secondly, are entrepreneurs really this out of touch with what it's like to be a jobhunter? This post reads like it was written by an anthropologist studying some strange culture he'd never seen before.

lifeisstillgood3• 13 years ago

I'm finding my own meme here - CI is the key to enabling remote working and so enabling a company to truly select the best

With CI it's pretty easy to see what needs to be built and whether it works - every few minutes if needed.

You can see progress happen throughout a day.

No other metrics matter.

chrisbennet2• 13 years ago

What is "Cl"? Thanks.

JoeAltmaier4• 13 years ago

Continuous Integration, any of a number of source control/automated build systems that keep the code working at all times over multiple developers/sites.

guylhem• 13 years ago

After reading that, I can only imagine what this demand curve means for the actually available talent one may buy.

You know the saying - "the market is so hot even chickens can fly"

If you have to hire, that'll be a very expansive chicken - or maybe even a lemon. That's the cost of doing business I guess.

HunterV• 13 years ago

I've always wondered why companies aren't recruiting kids out of High School to learn Rails instead of attending college. Understandably there is immaturity to deal with and all that but it seems there is enough demand to overshadow that.

cllns2• 13 years ago

One agency’s pitch consisted entirely of this: “I saw that your [sic] looking for some work. I have a few posions [sic] in SF that might be a fit, let me know when you have some time to talk.” It provided no last name, phone number or company name.

The author should remember this is craigslist. This seems like run-of-the-mill spam (likely sent to EVERY new job posting)

Matt_Mickiewicz• 13 years ago

It was actually on the Ruby meetup list... I was surprised how many recruiters where monitoring that group, how quickly they responded to the fake message (within 5 minutes), and how little care, thought or attention they paid when asking people to entrust them with their career/job.

cllns2• 13 years ago

Ah okay. I should have read the article more carefully. It still could have been automated spam though :)

The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

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