Om Malik: Silicon Valley's Talent Crunch | Hacker News Reader

Om Malik: Silicon Valley's Talent Crunch

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19 pointsneodude12 comments

I think another factor Om didn't mention, which is also at play, is that an increasing number of talented engineers and designers are striking off on their own and building their own startups. It's not so much they're being poached by other companies as they are poaching themselves. There's so much cheap infrastructure, frameworks and open source packages today that I think the balance of power in software startups is shifting more towards talent inputs, and away from mere cash inputs.

Yeah, I think top engineers have realized that even if they don't succeed as a business, companies like Facebook will often buy them for their talent with more upside than they would have gotten being hired through the normal means.

But at some point that will stop being true, so now more than ever I think it's important to be trying to build real, sustainable businesses.

yep, plus when you work for somebody else in a traditional job you get put in a narrow slot. just an engineer. just a designer. whereas if you start your own business or (sometimes) work at a startup you can be an engineer, graphic designer, UI, product, writer, marketing, sales, biz dev, bookkeeper, etc. plus pick your own tech, tools, office, hours, dress code, etc. And even when you "lose" at a startup or self-employment venture you still win in many ways because of all the skills and experience you exercised and how much better your resume can look.

Why is no one mentioning the somewhat obvious aspect that people might not want to live in CA?

At some point, all of the available in state talent is going to be employed. Now you have to look outside. Much of your senior talent are not going to be able to up and move. There's a big difference between working insane startup worloads with a company in your home town vice doing the same AND doing it a new city after having moved your family across the country.

people might not want to live in CA

And suddenly a lot of people can't. The financial crisis has toughened up immigration everywhere.

Personally, I am at a crossroads. I have suitable spare time to start pursuing ideas I think will provide the basis for a good idea or even work on the side with an interesting startup. I'm into boring backend things like pipes, data, security and infrastructure (software not hardware). However, owning a house and living in the South Bay puts geographic limits on where I am willing to engage with companies on a daily basis.

In addition to people starting their own thing, I've also noticed that a number of people are trying to focus a bit more on the work / life balance. Trying to get out more and enjoy nature/work out/etc. instead of working 20 hours a day. And, in some ways, this is impacting their decisions between startups and large companies.

> More startups competing for fewer talent resources will mean that the cost of doing business is going to go up, which in this era of on-demand infrastructure from the likes of Amazon Web Services means SALARIES, which are essentially the single biggest component of any startups’s spending.

Reading that sentence alone, and then thinking about how much big corporate CEO's are paid, and banksters and Wall Street types, hedge fund managers, etc. and as a software engineer I tell ya my heart just bleeds for them. What a horrible tragedy, having salaries for talent go up. So irrational! :) Heck, at least the engineers and designers are actually building something, and adding to society, which is more than many of those other types can say.

Maybe now tech companies will wake up and start to re-think their ageist hiring policies.

I don't know that it's ageism. Yeah, I'm sure that's a valid concern but it's not "this person is too old for our company culture".

It's more "can this person commit in the same way that at unattached 25 year old could commit?".

Typically that answer is "no" but it's not fair to make that assumption for them and it is quite honestly a stupid assumption to make.

If, as you say, "typically that answer is 'no'", then why do you also say it's a stupid assumption to make? I agree with the second part, not with the first.

Even if the odds are that the answer is "no", it's still stupid to make ANY assumption. There's a truism in the whole ass-you-me thing.

Instead of assuming, you should find out first if that's the case, and secondly why.

In my case, it's not a lack of ability but a refactoring of my priorities around my family and young children.

Maybe there are some allowances that can be made. If the person is really the best fit, then you should do whatever is reasonable to get them. You won't even get that far in the discussion if you stereotype based on age.

There are tactful and entirely legal ways to ask those questions without actually asking them:

i.e. "We have a pretty intense timeline right now. Are you able to put in X hours a day for the next X months?"

Honestly, I tend to make some bad assumptions as well. In my past experience, that type of "intensity" isn't because of trying to rush to market or because of pressure from external forces so much as poor planning internally. I have some pretty vivid memories of one company where the reason for the long hours were solely based on bad management decisions around over-catering to customers. Things like "Sure we can have that done in a week" combined with "We don't have time to do proper testing" which resulted in late nights massaging broken data back into the database or performing releases only to realize 2 hours into the process (don't ask why it took 2 hours), that the build was bad.

I've learned to watch for those signs and ask questions up front to suss that information from potential employers.

I think it's generally accepted that, regardless of age, after 16 hours of non-stop work people make stupid mistakes. I like to say "If it has to be done in 10 minutes, can we spend 20 minutes making sure we do it right?" If you can't spare an additional 10 minutes for even a tiny amount of discovery, that's an antipattern.

There is a direct relationship between uncertainty about the economy and the problem of finding/retaining talent for startups and small businesses.

The current U.S. government's "tax the rich" attitude can't be helping small business, either. It just adds to the uncertainty.

Some have been running for cover, but some of us are running against the crowd.

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