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).
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?
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.
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?
Actually I included taxes, my pass on it was take base 65% of base pay as 'take home' pay and start from there. (I included both state and federal and no dependents as my guess). Dual engineer couples clearly with no kids are in a better spot.
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.
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.
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?
NYC is not a software development hub. However, there are a lot of programming jobs there because media, finance, fashion and other "New York" industries all need programmers. These industries all have a lot of money so salaries for programmers are good.
(A) The weather in NYC is definitely not as extreme as ANY of the places you listed. I have lived in all five for varying lengths of time.
(B) Many more creative types than just developers are attracted to NYC such as fashion, tv, finance (if you don't think CDOs are creative then look closer).
(C) Because of the diversity of people you get really interesting experiences and ideas you couldn't get anywhere else. The Bay Area's idea of diversity is hackers that like to wear black t-shirts vs VCs that like to wear Polos.
(D) For being a much bigger city, New York is much more compact time-wise because you don't have to drive everywhere, which makes it fundamentally more liveable.
And (E) as for Boston, as an MIT alum currently still in the Boston area, I can tell you that nobody wants to stay here after graduation....the city is tiny and the bars close at 1 AND it's freezing 8 months out of the year.
"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.
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.
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;<).
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?
To be honest, most people that are great developers didn't just turn middle-aged, think "I want to be a great developer," and spend a few years becoming one. Most of these developers have been hacking since they were literally single-digit age. Read Notch's AMA on Reddit (creator of Minecraft) - he was only 9 when he started hacking and he's 31 years old now. So, if you're asking how do I become a great developer now, it's probably too late.
Ok, but something doesn't jive here. When people complain that it's hard to retain/find talent, are they seriously complaining about how hard it is to find developers who've been hacking since single-digit age?
They may not say it, but if they want the very best they will have to look for someone whose brain has developed in the hacking(in a general sense, thus leaving a lot of leeway) direction since early age.
It is all about the unconscious mastery.
I'll use the chess analogy, it is very hard to be a top class player, if every time you ponder the position you have to think about how the horsey moves.
No, when companies "complain that it's hard to retain/find talent" they mean that they are paying far below market rate, have poor working conditions, don't pay relocation or interview expenses, have poor benefits, are in a god forsaken location, and believe they are entitled to top talent for bargain basement rates.
There is no such thing as a company paying true market rate, with acceptable working conditions and terms, who cannot find talent. The problem is there are many companies that are in denial about the realities of the competitive market.
All this silly nonsense about only hiring people who started programming at age 8 is just a distraction to avoid contending with the real issues here.
The problem in 1997-2000 was idiotic investment, not a strong job market. Amazon wasn't one of those overvalued companies then, and I certainly don't think it's overvalued now.
They may not have been "overvalued" then, in hindsight, but they quickly became even less overvalued, dropping from over 100 in late 1999 to below 10 in late 2001.
There were more than enough crappy dot com companies hiring executive chefs turned "programmers" after taking a community college class on MS Front Page to say that the job market was also inflated. The number of unqualified people that were employed in some type of IT position during the boom was very apparent to anyone that had to deal with filtering resumes during the beginning of the bust.
It was a weird time. I remember briefly feeling like a celebrity at parties when I said I was a programmer. All kinds of people that had never expressed an interest in software before were suddenly chasing after tech certifications.
Yes and no. Developer shortages are caused by company creation outpacing new developers entering the market. Generally its a leading indicator of growth, and precedes an inflationary trend in salaries.
If the increase in startups is do to economic expansion around new markets, then the overall increase in jobs can be durable in the sense that they are for viable businesses. If it turns out that the creation of startups is due to rampant speculation from capitol chasing better returns in an irrational way, then the jobs will disappear again when the market corrects.
So far, in this 'extremely reminiscent of previous bubble' non-bubble expansion, the source of capital has been, in theory, from investors who are making risk / value assessments in line with information about the business models they are investing in.
However, there is also evidence to suggest that people who have acquired excess capital but did not experience, nor learn the lessons of, that previous bubble, are in the process of redistributing their new found wealth in unsound ways.
As the previous explosion lasted about 6 years ('95 with 'Netscape' to '01 with 'nuclear winter'), and it was sustained in part by the unbridled enthusiasm of untrained investors, investing in IPOs. If this particular trend continues with simply VC/Angel money we should no in a shorter period whether or not the expansion is durable or illusory.
Check back in 2015, you'll know if it was like 99 or not.
Gosh that is an extremely nice post. Very rational and puts in words a lot of good points clearly and concisely. Please make more of them, your contributions raise the bar here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right, but Google is one of the biggest websites in the world, operating in nearly every country, etc. etc., it shouldn't be at all surprising that they have thousands of engineers, even though the productivity of each will be lower than it would in a smaller organization.
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...
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.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 96.4 ms ] threadhttp://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/the-war-for-talent.html
'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...
Also, if hackers were 1/10 as unionized as teachers or other public sector employees OR GM employees the median salary would be double that.
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.
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.
(B) Many more creative types than just developers are attracted to NYC such as fashion, tv, finance (if you don't think CDOs are creative then look closer).
(C) Because of the diversity of people you get really interesting experiences and ideas you couldn't get anywhere else. The Bay Area's idea of diversity is hackers that like to wear black t-shirts vs VCs that like to wear Polos.
(D) For being a much bigger city, New York is much more compact time-wise because you don't have to drive everywhere, which makes it fundamentally more liveable.
And (E) as for Boston, as an MIT alum currently still in the Boston area, I can tell you that nobody wants to stay here after graduation....the city is tiny and the bars close at 1 AND it's freezing 8 months out of the year.
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.
My friends tell me it's pretty strong in Austin, TX too.
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...
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;<).
The problem is not that great developers are expensive, it's that they're expensive and very rare.
It is all about the unconscious mastery.
I'll use the chess analogy, it is very hard to be a top class player, if every time you ponder the position you have to think about how the horsey moves.
There is no such thing as a company paying true market rate, with acceptable working conditions and terms, who cannot find talent. The problem is there are many companies that are in denial about the realities of the competitive market.
All this silly nonsense about only hiring people who started programming at age 8 is just a distraction to avoid contending with the real issues here.
If the increase in startups is do to economic expansion around new markets, then the overall increase in jobs can be durable in the sense that they are for viable businesses. If it turns out that the creation of startups is due to rampant speculation from capitol chasing better returns in an irrational way, then the jobs will disappear again when the market corrects.
So far, in this 'extremely reminiscent of previous bubble' non-bubble expansion, the source of capital has been, in theory, from investors who are making risk / value assessments in line with information about the business models they are investing in.
However, there is also evidence to suggest that people who have acquired excess capital but did not experience, nor learn the lessons of, that previous bubble, are in the process of redistributing their new found wealth in unsound ways.
As the previous explosion lasted about 6 years ('95 with 'Netscape' to '01 with 'nuclear winter'), and it was sustained in part by the unbridled enthusiasm of untrained investors, investing in IPOs. If this particular trend continues with simply VC/Angel money we should no in a shorter period whether or not the expansion is durable or illusory.
Check back in 2015, you'll know if it was like 99 or not.
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.
People always talk about Apple, Google and (less now) Microsoft. But Amazon is a huge sleeping dragon.
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.
Ask a random Googler what he works on at Google. In my experience 9/10 times it's something they could easily do without.
Taking a look at the site, all the jobs are for less than $500... the war rages on.
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.