Is The Silicon Valley Talent Shortage Getting Worse?
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There's easily been 100 startups getting angel money in the Valley in the last 5 months. And, if all of those are looking for 2-3 RoR/PyDjango/JQuery/iOS devs, that means startups alone are competing for 300 engineers. And, that's not mentioning Yelp, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Google. The Valley could easily accomodate 1000 new engineers in the next 6 months.
From what I've seen of the Hackers and Founders NYC scene, the situation is similar, except startups have to compete for engineering talent with finance companies, which pay a lot better than your average startup.
What does that mean? Founders, always be hiring. Devs, our value as an engineer is going up. Founders, build on more productive languages/platforms. Dev, consider joining a startup as an angel investment where you're pouring in time and effort instead of cash. So, interview a lot, and join carefully.
I have a group of friends (from University of Florida) who mostly graduated just before the west coast was really recruiting there. One works at HP doing server stuff, but that's about as "far" as they got. Another one is the smartest dude at his job at bigco where he puts out fires of bad devs every day, cleaning up $20,000 contracting messes with one SQL query that no one there thought could be written.
To these people, trying to get a "cool" job is borderline impossible because, first, they don't know anyone (their social graph converged the wrong way), and second the combination of being far-away and having to blindly email resumes into the blackhole that is domain.com/apply is just plain discouraging (not to mention ineffective).
I don't know of a good solution to this problem, but if anyone is willing to relocate some of these people, I might be able to refer some really smart people ;)
Right now the hiring standards (hopefully) haven't slipped too much. When the only requirement to get a Python/Django job is that you read a Python for dummies book and can fog a mirror, welcome to 2001 again.
re: Nursing. Jobs are actually really pretty tight right now. (I moonlight as an ER nurse in SV). New graduates with no experience have having to move to get jobs. But, then, this area supports the highest salaries for nurses in the country.
There's also substantial money to be made as a police officer or fireman, but it's extremely hard to get a job in those areas.
I'll stick with nursing for a bit longer because it pays really well, and I only work 3 12 hour shifts a week. It's perfect for boot strapping. I'll quit when we can raise an angel round.
I know what you are saying, and it is true but in the grand scheme of things, right now only having to move to get a job, if you are a recent grad, for people not in either industry, seems like child's play to what they are facing.
I'd also add one big factor: despite the poo-pooing by some of age discrimination, it's very real and when your parents or friends of your parents tell you from harsh experience that your career will be over when you reach 35-40 years of age, you listen if you have any sense.
Of course, now the name of the game is to get a good starting job, period. I suspect that has more than a little to do with the slight recent upturn.
As CEO of a just-funded tech startup, I am budgeting ~70% of my time to personally recruit a Lead Developer and Senior Software Engineer (despite having a technical background myself).
I live in Montana. I grew up in Kansas City, and went to school in NY. There is no language barrier, I'm a skilled developer and a pretty good communicator. I'm willing to relocate sometime in the next 2 years.
It seems I might as well be a non-English speaker in Siberia, when it comes to getting my foot in the door at an SV, NYC, etc. startup.
The good news is, this is changing, and fast. Pretty anecdotal, I get pitched for remote work all the time, but over the last year or so, the number of offers has gone up significantly . Of course plenty of "we'll help you relocate" type offers too. I see many more good devs working for companies in the USA than there used to be (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1879225)
And I live in Bangalore, India where even really good devs are lost in the sea of mediocrity. Kansas is way closer :-)
I suspect you just have to wait a little till the demand supply gap gets painful enough to overcome this particular prejudice/preference.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it IS out there, but remote work is probably the most hidden of hidden job markets - every single one of these roles/projects has come through word of mouth. As you've already pointed out, if you're in the US, you already have some things going in your favour, namely language, timezones, same culture, same currency and banking system, etc. The best advice I can give is start working your network - people you went to school with, mailing lists and IRC channels for technologies you use, etc.
If you want to ask me anything else about working remotely, feel free, I'll try and answer to the best of my ability.
Seriously though, ping me and I'll help make sure you find a great job in NYC.
It's hard for a startup to compete with that.
Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard -- if some of the idiots I've worked with in the past could hold down jobs, then anyone can. Which dying industries should we be looking at to fill the gaps in the software industry?
In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but nowadays you should at least know decent coding.
It was the .com bust along with a few other things. The market was so over-saturated with hacks in for a quick buck that when it popped it took a while to shake out who was who. This ran a lot of good developers out of the market never to return. The outsourcing craze right afterward did nothing to help the situation and just reinforced that the remaining few jobs where going to be further and further constrained. Which is what happened for a while. The schools and their CS programs pretty much became ghost town overnight.
I know, I had went back to finish my degree after 10 years in the industry around that time. I remember what was a full class became me an 2 other guys. I remember saying to one of them. Times are going to get good again in about 5 years.
I'm currently bootstrapping a search engine for economic/financial news at http://Newsley.com. (alpha of search is here: http://newsley.com/search )
Frankly, it's amazing. There's a sandbox where you can play with it here: http://viewer.opencalais.com/ Copy and past a couple paragraphs of text into the text box, and you can see some of what the api can do.
Not surprisingly, it was basically a one-way street.
(It also reminds me of http://xkcd.com/435/ )
Addendum: For the difference between hard and soft science, see http://clustertwo.org/articles/Strong%20Inference%20%28Platt... - the hard sciences are the ones based on the "strong inference" defined there
Adding time for people to realize that there is actual jobs, coupled with the "we only hire the best" and not that many people become software engineers.
It actually is, have you ever notices the absolute void of developers over the age of 40? People yell age discrimination but it is not true, it is the constant churn in ones life. From constantly reeducating yourself to stay relevant to the next emergency that requires 16 hrs 7 days a week for 2 months. It requires a passion for technology just to fulfill the reeducation requirement not to mention the hours. It burns developers out. The worst part is those on the outside don't get it, they think we pay them all this money and they still whine complain and won't take our jobs. So we have a profession with a high reeducation to relevance cycle and extreme requirements of time. Those two alone knock out a good deal of the population from even entering the profession. Then you have to deal with the burn out once you are in the grinder which always take a few of the good ones every year.
So if you couple the education needs, burnout and with the fact that it is really hard to be a good developer you find that even the good one are out of the industry by 40. Usually through earning enough money to "drop out" start a worm farm in Texas. Or they hitched their star to the right wagon and have become very successful.
I know because I have seen it, as a 36 year old who has suffered two burnouts, I have seen every one of my contemporaries fall. I remain because I set my terms, I made a agreement to myself that I would get out of the corporate grind and work for myself.
I found a niche that was under-served (web accessibility, HCI for JS based web apps). So in a sense I am off the market, I don't think that I would go back to a corp gig for anything below 2x what the market is paying. But lets not fool ourselves as a freelancer, I am still for hire it just allows me to set some terms on how and when I work. It seems for me at least that this was enough to stave off a third bout of burn out. Being able to work from home and set my own hours has done a lot for my ability to refresh, recharge and reeducate.
PS: It's a true eye opener to see someone making 500$ an hour working a 40 hour week and know they could raise their rates and keep their job and they also get more done than the average small team.
Right some how we make the moral argument that one person should not be making that much. But when you realize a good developer can do the work of a team. Because the how you do it, is more important than how much you do of it. Couple that with the fact that a developer can automate 100-1000 peoples jobs and the true value of their labor starts to take form.
There was a good article from one of the early Apple guys who wrote the switcher. Apparently both Jobs and Gates where after it and him and both as soon as he entered the room started out with a critique as to why it was not worth that much, how he only put 100 or so hours in to it because he was a "good" developer. It is pretty typical of what you see out there. I will try to dig it up, it has been posted on HN a few times.
The lens of experience allows you to see things very differently. The business knowledge you amass in the various field is extraordinary. It it one of the few industry where you field of primary business while change several times in your carrer.
That breadth really allows you to see thing differently than someone who stays in Real Estate or Manufacturing their entire carrer. As you get older it seems that, that information become more and more interesting to you. You start to connect independent pieces of puzzels people did not even know existed and come up with novel views on how the world works.
It really is a shame that people don't survive but the hyper boom bust nature of software dev is just too much on a good deal of people who just want to make a living.
It's easy for you or I or most anyone on HN to say that, but my experience proves that it's not true in the general population.
I enjoy seeing the plethora of dmaller startups and the ideas and enthusiasm they bring. Things definitely have a different feel than dotcom bubble one. I hope that this job recovery is longer and more sustained.
For me, it is an interesting crossroad - having a house and marital responsibilities, do I jump on someone else's startup bandwagon again, try and get an idea funded (knowing angels, etc) or go the big company route to give personal time to flesh out ideas.
There certainly are options out there.
That's a far cry from what you're talking about in Ohio, and I'm not even in the Valley, and the prices here aren't too far off from prices in Toronto, Ontario.
I'll also note that Ohio isn't known for being a prosperous part of the country either. I'm sure you could find cities around the country where the housing prices are similar to SF (though still maybe less).
The post came off like it was implying that in The Valley $700/month is a bare-basement price, while everywhere else in the country it buys you a mansion and several servants.
I find that hard to believe. Maybe in backwater Georgia. I happen to have some experience with US residents moving temporarily to Europe and they don't even blink at paying local market rate, with some mentioning that it's 'quite cheap compared to home'. Market rate here for a non-luxurious 2-bedroom apartment or semi-detached is 800-1000 USD. (they're not highly paid managers, either, line personnel).
I assume you're referring to Google.
My sense is that the demand is skewed toward the top end of the market, i.e., the best developers are getting much more difficult to find; I don't know if you'll see the same demand/supply imbalance at the entry level. Still, if you intend to get to be one of the best, this is the place to do it.
Quality of life for a young, single male in the Valley is pretty low though. After 10 years in the Bay Area I'm moving to NYC where women actually exist.
When you get to NYC, lemme buy you a beer.
In San Francisco, he numbers were definitely not in favor of the male. I remember going into any bar in SF and it would be groups of say, 6 guys, sitting with 1 woman. Certain bars, like Toronado, did not have any women in them, ever. In NYC I've actually gone into a bar during happy hour and been the only male in there... an experience I've never had before in my life.
I am a developer with startup experience and skill in Ruby, JS, and frontend technologies. I have 6+ years experience and a BA from UC Berkeley. I created a post related to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1786901
Good luck with your search.
Perhaps the final sentence should be changed to: "Now might be a good time to leave school and start a company."
So currently, I'm just working on my own project.
The only way to get any experience seems to be to start your own company. Which is great for the person who goes off and does it, but not smart for the company trying to hire them.
If employers don't want to waste money investing in entry-level positions, why waste it investing in someone who has made it clear they want to work for themselves?
Pay less, train more.
What's the solution for you companies desperate to hire? In my opinion, your outlook on equity needs to change. It's regular practice to offer a "rock star" developer 0.25% of your pre-diluted shares when you have $2M dollars in the bank. I've had this debate a number of times with arrogant founders and been told how that's just the way it is - investors this, B round that, $1B exit blah. Fine - but your offer is not appealing to me. I can make $100K+/year consulting part time, usually with a small equity stake, plus have a founder share of my own startup. Why would I take $100k plus 0.1% to work 12 hours a day at your startup?
Offer several percent, maybe 10% if you don't have a product yet. Get a few good people committed to your company on the inside. This is particularly true if you are very early or have a less "cool" startup. You are going to wallow in crappy developer misery and your product will fail if you don't have awesome techs who are TRULY dedicated to your vision.
How about looking abroad? I know, it's fraught with perils, but as someone from "abroad" from the U.S. point of view, it needn't be that bad.
And your dollars will go a LONG way in hiring top talent (of course, you need someone local or whom you trust to choose the top talent. 90% of the local programmers are crappy too!).
Expect to pay about $10-20K extra just to hire an H1B because of all of this extra paperwork and documentation, as well as hope he wins the H1B lottery.
E.g. (note that the fun begins on April 1):
FY 2009, quota used up in 7 days before beginning the lottery (and as you allude to, this sort of thing used to be the norm).
FY 2010, quota not used up until December 21, 2009.
FY 2011, quota projected to used up right about now.
Even so, I feel that web development is a commodity and that to stay ahead I need to develop a better design and product background.
If your current group of friends are not interested in actually working hard to make those dreams a reality, there's a very real danger they will inadvertently poison your own chances of success.
Fresh new young people trained in other professions are having a very hard time of it as their more experienced peers in industry are taking the entry level positions rather than nothing at all.
Now his friends might be unmotivated tools, have the wrong skillset for the area in which they live, or any number of things, but the economy is hard for some highly trained people even these days.
I should point out that in normal, 'healthy' years, November is a time of declining job openings. Companies generally wait until January for budgets to turn around, etc. Not this year, though.