10% unemployment yet every startup in NYC struggling to hire
jonsteinberg.com
jonsteinberg.com
I know more people who have offshored engineering/dev work to India and the like than send work to developers in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, etc. Then they complain about the less than stellar work, with timezone diffs, English proficiency, cultural differences and so on.
There's a pretty large pool of people who are willing to work remote and - gasp - even travel to your main office sometimes, but who simply aren't going to uproot and live in NYC to make $100k. For someone raising a family, they could make $75k in Omaha or Tupelo and have a much better quality of life.
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&l=nyc http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=nyc
9400 Java jobs in NYC, but only 900 are estimated at $150k or higher.
Cost of living between Omaha (at 75k) and NYC: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&city1=531370...
Cost of living between Nashville (at 80k) and NYC: http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&city1=547520...
You need roughly $150k in NYC to have an approximate lifestyle. Yet only 10% of the jobs pay that.
The concept of 'hiring' itself may be due for a makeover, and a 'JIT' approach to company development may be in the cards for companies struggling to hire the right people (which they'll likely lay off the moment things go south again).
We've also had a housing crisis which is keeping many people chained to their current regions due to underwater mortgages and no housing sales. 5 years ago people could move their families across country for a good job. Even if they want to now, they can't. This is just not acknowledged by most companies.
I was approached a couple years ago by a company that was starting up - 'ex google founders' and all that. The product/service was pitched to me as a collaboration/communication tool to help remote teams work more effectively. Sounded great, but I was not allowed to work remote. I had to upsticks and move to SF. To work on a remote collaboration tool. WTF?
It doesn't really surprise me that ex-Googlers would insist you work in person. As a large multinational, Google feels the pain of distributed teams more than many companies, which is probably why they're founding their startup. It'd probably sink their startup if one of their key employees was not working in person with them.
Are they things that wouldn't have similarly been resolved by remote pairing?
You also miss out a lot on serendipity. Many of the best ideas that eventually become actual Google products happen because a bunch of folks are hanging out over beers, or they're sharing the latest cool thing they've stumbled across on the Internet, or they're shooting each other with nerf darts before going home. This sort of relaxed socialization seems to be exactly what you need to get creative ideas to bubble up to the surface. When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.
VNC, emacs
>> and real-time voice communication,
telephone
>> and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video
projector, webcams, monitor
>> The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.
When you are considering $75k versus $150k per year, the above is not expensive
>real-time voice communication Webmeeting
>remote whiteboards, Webmeeting
>ideally real-time video skype
> When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.
Some of our best ideas at a previous startup came straight out of our Scrum meetings: when we had the CEO, the COO, and everyone all arguing (no bruises, but close sometimes) about what we should/could do next. I'd like to try that over web conf.
Plus, you still get the idea generation from external techie meetings. I'm in San Diego. I'm not moving to NYC. But we still have a great tech scene.
I've felt those "week vs 15 minute" issues. Some of that is developer-specific, no doubt, but that's fundamentally a communication issue that needs to be managed.
I've also worked gigs where people were in the same room and didn't talk to each other, or wouldn't answer emails due to office politics, and in general stuff that should have taken 15 minutes still took a week, even though everyone was in the same building.
All these bloody people play armchair economists with macroecon, which is genuinely difficult, but refuse to do the same with micro:
If you can't hire people at a given wage, raise the wage. Or whine online about the lack of employees.
I'm totally not against people coming in to the country - legally. One of my first tech jobs was at a company that sponsored a number of Polish and Czech engineers. They were all effectively captive - they were paid a barely livable wage (relative to US-born people doing the same job) but couldn't easily go out and take another job due to immigration status. But that meant the company 'saved' so much, and could use it to help keep other wages in line - 'you're already paid $x more than person Y!' sort of thing.
Or move your operations closer to the less expensive areas of the country (there's 48 other states besides CA and NY!).
Some industries are lauded for moving entires factories overseas and making a killing on wage arbitrage. But somehow 'the money' likes to keep 'blessed' startup activity within 10 minutes drive from all VC offices, and this is seen as 'the way things have to be'.
When talent concentrates like it does in SF and NY, it creates a culture that becomes more valuable than the sum of it's parts. You've got people who are constantly meeting and exchanging ideas, often by coincidence or near accident. This doesn't happen when in areas without enough talent density to create a concentration. The same pattern is repeated in many forms of art and business.
THANK YOU.
They simply aren't paying enough.
If they pay the same as everyone else, they don't stand out. And they require MORE work than other jobs with the same salary.
If the absolute level of remuneration isn't high enough, people with the necessary skills will just do their OWN startup.
They have to pay enough that the surety of the wage OUTWEIGHS the possibility of striking it rich, for people who could do their own startups.
This is pretty easy to see -- take the founders, and ask them if they'd switch to someone else's company for what they are offering new employees.
Or, ask them if they'd switch their OWN compensation package with whoever it is they are trying to hire.
No, THEY won't work for that little, even on their own baby. So why would anyone else?
Average wage = Average worker
It basically comes down to greed. If they MUST have rock star ninjas, but they REFUSE to pay for it, they aren't serious about succeeding.
If they CAN'T pay for it, then they need to raise money so that they can. If they can't raise money, they aren't any more stable than anyone else's random startup. Why bother working for them at all?
Better to combine salaries to get ONE expert than two or three or four middling employees.
Really the problem is there's too much glorification of FOUNDERS. We see time and time again that they don't have the skills needed to do whatever it is the company is supposed to do, so it's usually the early employees who do it. People think it's their god-given right as a "Founder" with a capital "F" to be king of the hill and get the lion's share of everything, and command an army of peons (who actually do the vast majority of the work) who are obligated to fulfill the "F"ounder's aspirations.
ViaWeb started with the people they needed. It's a lot easier to hire for the non-critical positions.
That said, many hackers just aren't into the sort of startup projects that get funded and pay well in NYC. That's a bigger factor in the "talent shortage." The startups there just aren't that cool. If someone in Brooklyn started a company making life-sized Gundam robots you could control with your web browser, everyone would quit working at whatever foodie-blog-ad-network they're currently stuck at and work at the robot place for half their previous salary.
It's hard to do outsourced work in an early stage startup because stuff changes so frequently. The last startup I worked for in NYC actually did have a half dozen outsourced employees in places like Oregon and Hawaii and all but one of them quit because they were so frustrated about changing priorities and miscommunication.
Ultimately, it's just not a lifestyle tradeoff most engineering talent seems to want to make at those price points. Upping base to $150k (with something closer to $200k for sr-level talent) for startup engineers (vs ~$100k) would attract more talent the companies are claiming they need. If that's too expensive, perhaps 'startups' should locate themselves closer to where the resources they need are actually located?
Those issues of 'miscommunication' and 'changing priorities' are happening regardless of where the workers are, and I bet many people working at the main office were similarly frustrated.
I've worked on site and remotely, and understand the challenges in each. Neither is perfect, and having a remote team (and being a remote developer) requires certain skills. I'm dismayed, but perhaps not surprised, that these skills aren't actively developed and nurtured at more companies. The long term rewards will be great.
If you value living space, you'll be happiest out of NYC.
But if you value meeting a lot of cool people, great things to see and do, great mass transit, etc then NYC is great even at a lesser overall level of purchasing power.
Am I as happy as I was in Boston? No. There's some perks (garage to park my motorcycle and a room for my office) but that's about it. Oh, and things are just easy here. No traffic, the DMV's 'bad' waits are 30 minutes, not 4 hours. That type of thing.
Meeting cool people happens much less frequently here, and the culture (even around OSU) is simply as not as academically focuses as hanging around Cambridge.
Purchasing power way up. Quality of life? A draw at best, probably a loss. If I had my way, I'd be back in Boston tomorrow.
Just taking a rude guess here (sorry if I'm wrong) but it sounds like you might be making a sacrifice for your family or partner? If so, you need to factor in how much they mean to you into your quality of life score for Columbus vs living alone in Boston. (I'm not judging you - a lot of us are in a similar situation!)
Right that makes sense, because top talent would like to live in a craphole just so they can have the privilege of taking a massive salary cut.
However, using remote workers is not the only solution. As a remote worker, I can tell you that I have to expend more effort communicating than I would if I was co-lo'd. Granted, I'm an extrovert so I don't mind terribly.
For more on this, see: http://evan.tiggerpalace.com/articles/2010/12/10/rule-0-choo...
http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=50000&city1=531370...
Also, your data on Indeed is a significant undercount of the higher paid programming jobs. If you are looking for a good programmer, you will pay $150k and you won't bother posting it on Indeed or Monster.
If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with English degrees and teach them programming, they would probably do really, really well. But nobody is willing to do that, so college grads go without jobs and startups go without employees.
(Also, startups expect you to really drink that Kool-Aid. They want you to work 12 hour days, skip weekends, not take vacation, and "be loyal" to the company. Why would anyone do that when they can work 9-5 for 4x as much money at an investment bank?
Ironically, even the investment banks can't hire anyone, but that is for other reasons.)
Companies will often pay for relo expenses for someone, providing they stay for X years (else they repay the relo money back). Companies could do something similar with education, whether it's local college classes, inhouse training, etc. If you leave within the first year, you pay the company back those expenses. Or... have retention bonuses for people for staying past 1 year, and invest in education for people at lower wages. Many companies would find some real gems out there, waiting to be discovered, and would engender far more loyalty than most currently get.
As far as having to pay back if you are laid off or the company is otherwise dissatisfied due to their own lack of having a decent vetting process, ha ha ha. Indentured servitude. That's a new one. I'm sure that will get the best of the best. Not.
The vast majority of my friends did not get relo packages, because this is their first job out of school. Companies don't typically offer relo for fresh college grads.
I thought this discussion was about junior engineers?
Or keep whining there's no employees.
One of these paths is more productive than the other.
The problem that you'll then have though, is that when you encounter a tough technical challenge, you won't have the benefit of having someone on your team who has seen it before.
So there must be some golden ratio. A solid emphasis on college recruiting to serve immediate needs, with a focus on building out a technical knowledge base accompanied by many years of experience.
I'd argue the opposite case — if it's true that a good programmer is at least 5-10x more productive than an average programmer[1], you'd actually save money by paying the experienced programmer significantly more when compared to hiring a team of beginning or average programmers.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_surg...
So honestly, I don't think your approach is too bad.
You mean in the sense that both approaches work horribly?
Your way gets you 10 programmers that do a really good job. Now find the other 69,990 programmers. (I like to think I get a lot of work done, but I can't get 7,000 people's work done.)
(If it was my company, would I have a bunch of unrelated development departments with no common standards on 5 continents? No. But it's not my company, so I don't get to decide, I can only observe.)
All I am saying is that using open source as a way to find talented individuals who love what they do and are really good is one solid way I have found to find new talent. If that can only get me X number of devs a year than that is X number I don't have to hunt through resumes for.
You can start here: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=223259...
or glassdoor
or virtually any former dev there
With all the OSS projects going on, I can’t believe anyone serious about development wouldn’t just use that for experience.
I agree with the blogpost that colleges aren't doing a good job of transitioning students to the challenges of startup/modern tech workforce. But, it seems to me that the solution would be a number of big employers like Google and others who are more able to take the risks should hire up the most qualified and teach them those skills. Simply, if the undergraduate education isn't good enough, someone's gotta teach em.
From what I've seen, you've got a lot of developers commanding 60-80k salaries. From a startup perspective, I don't really understand why this is the only acceptable path.
It just seems smarter to locate near some technical colleges in cities that have a lower cost of living, and pay entry level developers a salary between 35-45k to start. As they improve their skills, you up their salary... assuming that improvement comes with an increase in revenues/profits.
At that level, they hire for aptitude, not experience. The $60-80K that Google pays for beginning hires is on the anticipation that after training, they'll be worth at least that much, and Google can retain them long enough for them to make it back. It's fairly common knowledge that a new Google engineer won't be productive for 6-8 months at least.
The risk that a startup runs by paying $35-45K is that they'll get people with lower aptitude who'll never turn into experienced engineers. That's a pretty big financial risk to take, particularly for a startup with much less runway than Google.
Actual developers cost much more than that.
Body shop consulting firms like Accenture have done this for decades.
Except for the government of course
In a startup every person has to pull their weight and there really isn't time for a formal training. I'd venture to guess that in almost all cases, this new hire will decrease the value of your company as a programmer.
That said, this approach could work at a large firm with stable revenues, a formal training program, and relatively straightforward IT requirements.
* Nobody to hire
* No jobsHowever, they seem to run into problems when they want to find senor people to mentor the entry level hires. Entry level developers are rarely able to lead a team much less handle the various technology decisions of the contemporary tech startup.
It worked, well, terribly. The startup folded in a year and a half mostly because of code-quality issues. I remember talking to the founders near the end of my gap year, where they said that of the 10-ish or so high schoolers they hired, only two of us really produced more than we cost (even on our piddly $20-30k/year salaries), and even then we needed a fair bit of management support.
These were also not random people - one of the founders had been a teacher at my high school (he'd been an entrepreneur with a successful exit before then), and he basically skimmed the top of the class off and got them to work for him. Many of us later had successful careers at Google, Bain, or hedge funds.
But there's only so much that you can do to compensate for inexperience. There's a lot that you learn in your first job or two, even if you already know how to program. And until you learn it, there's a good chance that you'll be negatively productive.
If you have to hire the senior engineers anyway, why not hire only the senior engineers, at least in the early stages of the company? They'll be able to get actual work done, you'll have a decent codebase, and you might actually be able to ship a product that can get you additional funding and revenue. Then, once you've taken care of the money problem and the startup is no longer fighting for its life, you can hire some junior devs to flesh out the product and exploit market opportunities that you didn't have the resources to explore in the startup phase.
Over longer timescales (years), this relationship doesn't hold true. This is why Google, Microsoft, and many of the other big players in the industry can afford to hire junior engineers. That one senior engineer and five junior engineers will turn into six senior engineers, all of whom have worked closely together, and then you have a gelled team that can accomplish great things.
But you have to get there first. When a startup's fighting for its existence daily, it's not cost effective or prudent to make an investment that will take a couple years to pay off, when there's a good chance that your company will be out of business in six months.
You jump from that stage to Google as if there's nothing in between, but almost every other company is in between. Plenty of startups have been around for years, and plenty of them have enough funding to ensure that they'll still be around for years. At that point it becomes possible to make the short-term sacrifices necessary to ensure long-term success, like training.
However, I've never met anyone below the MD at an investment bank who's working anywhere close to 9a-5p (unless you meant 9a to 5a which is more often the case with analysts).
Do you have experience hiring someone with no technical experience and turning them into a productive employee? How did you train them? How long did it take?
Startups have two options: they can choose to be lazy and risk-averse or they can complain about not being able to find workers. They can't do both.
What startups should be more open to is CS types that don't have years of experience in certain languages but have the ability to learn quickly. Too much focus on minor technologies that could be picked up in a few days.
English degrees? The number of English grads I've bumped into in the software industry has been small (in comparison to just how many English grads there are). Math grads would be better since most would have had to do some programming already (even if just in Mathematica). Even physics grads..
I have a degree in Comparative Literature (which is not an English degree, btw). I would consider someone with a serious music degree, maybe philosophy (e.g. PG). Most liberal arts majors are not cut out to be engineers.
I do agree that there are a lot of silly startups these days, but it doesn't mean that there isn't also a shortage of quality hackers.
However, soda, coffee and toilet paper and soap in the bathroom are very small things. Listing them in an ad as one of the key benefits of working for a company is also a mine canary, one that says the company has very little to brag about.
They are not exactly putting on the table things that good engineers do not have at their current job. Also, perks like "free soda" only attract the young and inexperienced.
The thing that seems (in my experience) to drive engineering loyalty the most is making it known to the coders that their opinions are valued by the non-engineers, and that the engineers can drive actual product change (as long as they can prove their ideas legitimate.)
Hiring blindingly smart people and then telling them to stop thinking about the aspects of the business that don't involve writing code is short-sighted and demoralizing to the staff.
And is it really news that many companies are poorly run by clueless douchebags with MBAs? Surely this is just as true at larger companies as it is with startups. Larger companies are just better at covering it up.
Technology is very good at creating value, but not very good at creating jobs. All 72 tech companies in the S&P 500 combined employ about 2.3m people [1], whereas just Wal-mart employes about 2.1m people. Those numbers are worldwide employment, but for reference, the US had 15m unemployed in November.
Even the breakout, unimaginable success that is Google only employs about 28,000 people. And I'm sure that for every hire Google has made, they've displaced many more people that used to depend on print advertising. (To be clear, I'm not saying that technology is net bad for the economy. Technology creates a lot of value for the individuals that work and invest in it, and for the economy as a whole. However, technology is not a massive creator of jobs.)
So unless startups become a multiple of the size of the entire S&P 500 technology sector, they're not going to make a noticeable dent on unemployment.
[1] I compiled a spreadsheet (https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEt...) based on information available on Wikipedia[2] and through Google searches
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies and individual company pages
Also, I wasn't arguing in my post that this was a solution to 10%; just that in my world and sector there's lots of jobs despite this big unemployment number. And we need more technical literacy (not just programming skills as some commenters have misinterpreted) throughout our education system.
For example, every business class I took as recently as 2003 involved products in boxes and shipping.
It's pretty fucking hard to automate programming. Heck, we can't even solve voice and character recognition.
I think it will be still be a long time before robots replace humans, even at Wal-Mart-like jobs. There are a few places where it's appropriate (self checkout, for instance), but there are things that humans do without batting an eyes are very very hard or expensive for robots (spoken communications, visual and auditory classification, spatial navigation and obstacle negotiation).
Humans aren't really that expensive honestly. Considering that the rent on a few servers from EC2 can equal the hourly wage of a Wal-Mart employee, it's going to be a while before these equations start working out.
You're absolutely right about people not being very expensive though. Labor costs actually make manual manufacturing in China less expensive than in fully roboticized factories in Japan or the USA for many things.
> Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science &
> engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes
(Note: 'you' is a generic you, not the poster. My comment was just inspired by misreading his first sentence on first glance.)
I agree with your point completely. Outside of the present day situation, perhaps startups can do more for their campus & recruiting presence by incenting their engineers to host technology sessions and exposing students to topics not covered in their curriculum. This would be a huge benefit for smaller companies that find it hard to compete for mindshare with large, established organizations during campus job fairs. Even companies outside of the boutique category just completely rule out great schools with talented engineers because they can't justify the recruiting budget spend considering the amount of competition for talent during those career fairs.
College is not job training, it is a place where you learn how to learn stuff. The reason people believe otherwise is because college is really expensive, so it has to be viewed as an investment that will get you a job and deliver appropriate training.
Learning how to learn is important, it lets you move forward in whatever you take on. College as it is, is not a trade school, which seems to be what employers are expecting.
A degree in engineering or CS will churn out someone who has a strong analytical mind and the ability to learn more. Places that are hiring may need to adjust and accept that this is what the market is at the entry level, instead of complaining that the skills are not available at the price that they're offering. Companies might be better off offering less and expecting less (at the start, you might not get someone who can start churning on your application immediately) and growing talent in the process.
Also I've started seeing a lot of companies acting like the work they're doing is on the level of Google, when it's not and interviewing like they are and that's what they need.
Basically, it seems like a lot of employers have expectations that are way off the mark.
Why not just try to inject a little tech and software thinking into the economics, marketing, sales-oriented, and management classes taught both undergraduate and graduate.
And why not teach code, as a way of learning to learn, in middle and high schools?
Regarding education at the high school and middle school level, I never had required programming courses, but we did have a Pascal course in middle school, and in high school we were offered (and I took) C++ computer programming courses at the Honors and AP level. This was at a public school, and I don't see why that can't happen at more schools.
I think introducing some type of programming into the college level for ALL majors would be valuable. I don't know if you need to inject that directly into the curriculum, maybe a series of "Development For Dummies" clubs taught/marketed by young CS and Engineering students could help bridge the gap. Maybe in exchange those students could run clubs that might open CS/Engineering students to more than analytical thinking as well.
Maybe having teachers that teach single classes on a volunteer basis?
Plenty of people aren't cut out for programming or just don't like it. Trying to force them into jobs where there not a good fit isn't good for anyone.
Business schools should teach a wide range of case studies from a range of sectors. Yes that includes farming and food logistics.
The beer company InBev ships $36 billion dollars a year of beer. That's more than market cap of Facebook. The Beer industry is probably worth more than the combined value of every startup featured on Techcrunch in the last year.
Let's not exaggerate the importance of our industry in the wider scheme of things.
Similar story at petrochemical firms; my dad is a process engineer mainly for PTA- and polyethylene-manufacturing units, and they surely don't expect most incoming hires to know how the PTA synthesis process works, or even necessarily to know what PTA is (it's a chemical used to make polyester). They just expect a general chemical-engineering background; they don't want to have to teach the entirety of what engineering means, what process modeling is and how you might use it, what debottlenecking is, etc., but they don't expect incoming knowledge to be very specific.
They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on.
So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them.
Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.
It is a giant trap for those that aren't aware of it from day 1.
There were a couple of submissions here in the past about a certain UK firm-- name escapes me now-- that takes Oxbridge grads in English and other liberal arts with no programming experience and trains them. I understand they are very successful in developing productive employees. Anybody remember the name of that corp.?
With that said, schooling at all levels, even when liber arts and fundamental, prepares people for the world they will work in. At the most basic level, writing and math prepare students for the workforce.
I'm simply arguing that we swap out a lot of industrial and unnecessary coursework (i.e. Latin) for technical thinking, examples, and coursework.
"Despite all this unemployment, every startup I know needs to hire not only engineers, but also sales and operations team members. And this is not just bubble seed startup dollars at work."
In 2008 I tried to find a good marketer to work with a client of mine. This is a difficult task. There are many people who claim they understand online marketing. Finding anyone who is any good is very difficult. The noise to signal ratio is amazing.
Likewise when it comes to fundraising, pitching to investors, etc. It is tough to find the few people who are good.
Possibly part of the problem is that, even in this economy, the folks who are truly good are making really good money and don't want to invest time with a startup.
No doubt there are many folks out there who will one day prove their talent but they have not yet had the chance. The question then becomes, how to find them?
If we generalize the desired startup labor pool as college-educated adults over the age of 25, the national unemployment rate drops to 5.1% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm). I can't find a great source, but I'd also wager that when you factor location (NY metro) and industry (technology), the unemployment rate drops even further--almost to the point of natural unemployment.
If you fit this profile you shouldn't have a difficult time finding work, and hence we have a "war for talent" in the face of high, national unemployment.
Geographical distance is a major problem for small startups.
I worked on a project last year where the project manager was thrilled at the idea that he could hire Indian programmers for $10 an hour. I was in New York City, we had another programmer in North Carolina and another in Europe. The "CEO" was an investor who attended meetings 2 or 3 times a month. The project manager was basically the CEO, but he had no real power, since everything needed to be decided by the CEO. Myself and the project manager would have 3 hour conversations and decide on something, but then need to explain it to the CEO, whom we only saw a few times a month.
The project went nowhere.
From this, I conclude, it is best to have small team working in the same room, when doing a startup.
The team in India was unusually bad. Every time they committed code to Subversion, something broke and I would have to fix it.
I am building (http://solaro.com) and we just launched our application out of beta. Development happens from India and surely there are kinks and warts, but at the end of day it works.
I think there are lot of things people get wrong when doing outsourcing:
1. Going cheap. Good programmers are costly. In India you will have to fight with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and likes for the talent, you can't pay cheap and expect good programmers.So, please do not come to India, if goal is to stay cheap.
2. Not involving the team. You will have to bring down your walls and involve everyone intellectually. This is real, if people aren't involved with the product, you are going to get crappy result. I am saying nothing new, but what already Jim McCarthy said in Dynamics of software development. But this is more true for projects, where your team is spread across different geographical locations.
3. Iterate. Short iterations, deliver, continuous integration and continuous deployment. Do not sleep on the project.
4. Small teams, do not build a large team just because it is cheap. I know I am saying the obvious here, but I have seen people getting it wrong too often.
5. If the client (or product owner) is located in different geographical location, he/she has to work harder than everyone else.
2) Practically anyone who lives within 100 miles of Wall Street and can program, and isn't a completely dysfunctional human (and many who are), is doing something in the financial sector. It's a huge brain drain, and it's practically impossible to compete with on the basis of salary. To boot, you can't easily motivate these folks with options because A) NY doesn't have a reputation for churning out tech winners and B) these same people study finance for a living, so when you offer them some options or founder's stock, suddenly you're into a discussion of volatility premiums and Black/Scholes analysis of the present-day value of said stock/options.
It's just not a suitable place for a vibrant startup community.
But everyone thinks they're the special case.
There're lots of ways for a startup to die and relatively few for it to succeed. The value of having a skilled senior engineer (or "rockstar ninja" as you put it, though that term has connotations that don't really describe the type of early engineers you want) is that they can see many of those failure modes ahead of time and avoid them. And when they do end up in a dead-end, they can quickly backtrack and fix the problem instead of wondering "what do we do now?"
However, to succeed you do need to be able to hire the 0.5% of developers that is competent and capable of bringing value.
A years ago, I was in the states under a F1 visa. I was looking forward to do an internship in NYC. I couldn't even get an interview. I spoke with at least twenty recruiters.
I was at that time an active OS contributor, I had commit access in projects like Rubinius or in Sputnik Tests (Google conformance test suite to test V8). I had also two years of commercial java programming experience, and personal projects in rails, sinatra and django. This was just after I finished a internship at Google.
What compensation was I asking for? Enough money two rent a room and buy food.
The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office, most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work.
"...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.
Looking at the College Board's numbers for test takers, there are about 19,000 who take the AP CS exam per year, less than one-tenth the number of students who take the calculus exam.
I got my first job at a startup writing code when I was a freshman in college.
I was an engineering major, and I taught myself how to program in middle school, but never did I ever take a class on it.
Of all the various things I have learned, learning programming has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any. I really think it is a waste of money to focus on it in school. Most of the kids that I knew who took AP Comp Sci were ruined by it. A multiple choice test for basic programming? Yuck.
I disagree with the rest, though. I would agree if I thought the other classes were worthwhile, but about 70% of my junior high and high school was filler at best. At least if there had been programming classes I could have taken those instead of truly pointless stuff like the JV girls volleyball coach teaching "social studies" via VHS tapes.
I don't, I just think the Rent Is Too Damn High.
Maybe someday they will learn that the only developers aren't young and just out of college.
There are plenty of good developers that are self taught, and there are also plenty of good developers who aren't in their 20's, but if you every look at the "about us" of these startups, and they have pictures, what do you see?
You don't need to answer me, just answer these honestly to yourself and that will tell you why you can't find anyone competent.
Has your hiring experience been substantially different from mine?
Hiring a very good developer is like hiring a very good actor, which doesn't come for peanuts and which will be worth much more than their salary, whereas hiring an average one will be worth less than their salary. 7/8 of the people that get CS degrees in the US are not fit to develop software at all. Of the remaining 1/8, nearly all of them have found a place they like and are not looking to move without incentive. But that doesn't mean there's a shortage. It just means you have to pay market rate and treat them respectfully and make sure all hygienic issues are dealt with. Low pay is poor hygiene. Lack of full relocation is poor hygiene (Why should the new employee subsidize the cost of coming to work for you? They shouldn't.) Absurd contractual terms such as claiming ownership of things they do on their own time is poor hygiene. An office full of dimwits is poor hygiene. Clueless management is poor hygiene. Not providing proper tools is poor hygiene. Hygiene issues are ones that need to be taken care just to not be a lousy place to work. Get all this taken care of and then one can start thinking of actually making it a good place to work. Having a good reputation as a place to work is hard to get, easy to screw up, and is worth a lot to convince someone with skills that it is worth the massive risk to uproot their life, leave a job they like and come work for a new venture.
High School dropouts are 15.7% unemployed. College grads are at 5.1%, basically full employment given job changes. http://bit.ly/3FWnbX
Here's a BLS report that shows that more clearly: http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?request_...
"The idea that the full-employment unemployment rate (NAIRU) is not a unique number has been seen in recent empirical research. Staiger, Stock, and Watson found that the range of possible values of the NAIRU (from 4.3 to 7.3% unemployment) was too large to be useful to macroeconomic policy-makers. Robert Eisner suggested that for 1956-95 there was a zone from about 5% to about 10% unemployment between the low-unemployment realm of accelerating inflation and the high-unemployment realm of disinflation. In between, he found that inflation falls with falling unemployment."
I agree, but I'd say that all good developers who want to be employed are employed.
Companies bring up 10% unemployment because they think "Gosh with all this unemployment there will be lots of 'hungry' developers and we should be able to hire top talent for $80k or some other piddling sum."
The fact is that unemployment among competent developers (and marketers and sales) is 0%, so if a company wants to hire one they've have to pay more than the other guy and offer better working conditions. The incompetently run companies don't comprehend this, they are much too "bargain" oriented on non-commodity products.
I am really weary of hiring someone with zero programming experience. But not as apprehensive about hiring a programmer with little experience but some experience.
I'd be more likely to hire someone who was a self starter when it comes to learning programing over and English major who just couldn't find a job.
You're going to let other people make your living decisions for you?
What is there for developers? Almost nothing, plus high costs.
The Bay area has way better restaurants, culture, diversity and intellectuals plus nearby beaches, mountains, wineries, skiing, it goes on and on.
More importantly though, you can get to a lot of Asia from SFO without changing a plane, that's not true of NYC.
Having a bunch of ways to travel doesn't do any good for people who are spending most of their time holed up in one spot. They won't be flying all over the place.
Night life? Have you MET many geeks? Plus that would cut into work hours.
Drop-off laundry? That means I have to take it somewhere. I'd rather have washer/dryer in the apt., then I don't have to lug it anywhere. Who cares about folding.
A diverse and interesting population -- very few of whom work in or understand startups. You don't have time to socialize anyway, and if you did, listening to people talk about finance or fashion is not "interesting".
Incredible food... This can be had in ANY major city. But nobody in a startup wants a 3 month waiting list to get into NY's trendiest new spot, so none of that stuff matters at all.
Culture... again, staring at a computer all day.
Parks? Yeah, like they don't have that anywhere else.
Not compelling in the least.
Look at Google's perks to get an idea of what developers want. Basically: get everything else out of the way so I can develop! Get rid of interruptions and distractions and extraneous TRAVEL -- I don't want to spend my time carting my jiggly fat physical body from place to place so that I can physically do the same thing in another place.
It's the same for ANY discipline. Olympic swimmers have the same deal -- eat, sleep, train. Being "well-rounded" is essentially training for social skills.