War for tech talent in NYC
wired.com
wired.com
Working on Wall Street--or most large companies for that matter--is largely transactional. You provide a service. You get paid for that service. You tend to get paid quite well to make up for the abuse you often end up taking. This is particularly true if you work in financial markets (as most Wall Street programmers do) where there are two kinds of people: traders and people who don't matter (being everyone else).
With a startup--particularly an early stage startup--you're taking a long term stake in the company, possibly a significant stake. If it's particularly early that stake but will largely be in lieu of a market wage (or any wage at all).
In my experience the profiles of the people in both categories (in an ideal sense from the company's point of view) don't quite match.
In the case of these grads, it's not an issue of profile but simple arithmetic that results in Wall St winning.
If you're a senior C++ lead dev working in the front office of an Investment Bank you can make 250k-500k/year.
If you join a startup as an early employee and get 1% equity , assuming a 10% chance of exit after three years, the company would need to have a $1 billion dollar exit for the risk-reward equation to break-even.
There are a lot of ex-finance developers in the startup world, but overwhelming they're there as founders, as that's the only way they'll get enough equity for it to be worthwhile.
Sure there are other factors at play such as lifestyle, corporate culture, etc. But when it comes down to hard money startups can't compete with investment banks.
1.) IT Admin stuff (Creating accounts, internal admin tools)
2.) Backoffice Dev (plumbing code to book trades, query databases, feed data to risk and PNL reporting tools)
3.) Infrastructure (writing fast code that talks to exchanges to trade autonomously, or writing tools to help people run lots of regressions, experiments, and simulations with ease)
4.) Desk Quant / Quant Dev (writing valuation models, trader UI, tools for trading, tech support for traders, structuring new products, building the grand unified system that processes financial instruments)
5.) Prop Trading (finding new ways to trade for profit; systematizing that into software)
I'd say anyone who is skilled at either 3,4,5 is going to generate more value to the Wall Street firms than what most startups budget for hacker employees.
Software development as we know is an inherently unstable activity - it's very hard to gauge how much a project will cost in time and money. Supposedly 50% of IT projects fail and 70% don't meet all their targets (or something catastrophic like that).
Well here's my theory. When you can't tell how much something will cost or even whether it's really possible, when there are no guarantees, the only thing that can comfort you is that your competition wont fair any better. To ensure this, you just need to employ the top programmers/architects. If you have people of the best calibre, you can rest easy, because if they can't deliver, nobody can.
Thus, companies looking to launch risky software ventures need what is by definition a scarce resource (the best developers). Unless the nature of software changes drastically, there will always be a shortage of the 'experienced engineers' necessary to placate the anxiety of this high risk business. Human expertise is finite, the capacity of software projects to fail is infinite.
(particularly if you're talking about launching web apps and new platforms and such... if you just need some simple engineering then not so much)
I noticed this is the same for sports. I play soccer frequently, and I noticed that in order to win, you really need few good players in the team (way above average). Not everybody has to be really good, but you need few good pl
In a team of 11 you need a great: Goalie Defender 2 Midfielder (one center and one runner on the sides) One great Scorer/Forward
The rest of the team can be OK, (i.e good enough or average), but with good organization this team will excel.
Now think of a startup that instead of being able to field 11 players on the field, they can field only 7-8. Then everybody on the team has to be really good from the get go for it to have a chance.
Once it grows, it can afford more warm bodies. People that can do useful work (fix bugs, create additional features), but that are not able to do groundbreaking work by themselves.
Failing that, I guess I'll move back to civilization.
Ummm, did they get the quote from 1997 too? I find these stacks to be in the minority these days for a startup anyways. Or is this a NYC trend?
I'm a PHP developer, and I don't think I'd consider my current NY employer (worked here for about a month now) a startup.
Furthermore, it's very unsettling that even on hacker news there's this prevalent anti-PHP attitude. With the release of PHP 5.3, and the current maturity of the numerous frameworks there's never been a better time to use PHP.
Scala seems to be the other growing area in NY right now---Foursquare obviously but a number of other companies like Obikosh (http://obikosh.com/job_pg.html) are pushing to grab Scala people.
Java, PHP and Perl are still strong.
Are there any that might be interested in folks who would start remotely (but willing to come out for bits of onsite time) and then relocate to NYC in a few months?
Python, Java, C++, etc
We'd love on site, but would consider the remote option if the fit is great, and the remote location is near NYC.
http://plantly.com amit at plantly dot com
Sounds bubble-icious to me ...
The problem with calling everything a bubble is the implication that bubbles inevitably pop.
In our industry, good programmers tend to create a vastly disproportionate amount of value compared to what they're paid. It's easy to pay programmers hundreds of thousands of dollars because with programmers, a few thousands of dollars of computers and some electricity you can make millions.
Maybe it's a bubble but I think it's simply a market correction. If your output is valuable you can and should be compensated well for it.
Great programmers can create a lot of value, in the right context. Boo.com ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com ) might have had developers as bright as Amazon's, working just as hard - but in the end they created $0 value.
What I was arguing is not that bubbles don't pop but rather that you can't call everything a bubble because that implies that it's going to go down.
Maybe it's because I'm a programmer myself and therefore I'm too biased but I see very few jobs right now that are in such high demand and whose demand is only going to rise even more in the near term.
Basically I was saying it's not a bubble, it's a normal market correction. We had the dot-com bust that devalued programmers massively because of completely artificial conditions and this "white hot" we're currently in really should be the norm.
Their technical people did pull off some great feats but ultimately it was a shambles from start to finish.
And yes, bubbles pop.
Is there any NYC-specific tech job board out there?
Kind of a weird situation, relocated from LA a month ago. I've been an independent contractor my entire career (10 years), huge range of skills including founded a startup, early stage product consulting, frontend dev, UI/UX design, Django & PHP dev, project management, social media marketing etc.
Not sure how to approach this employment thing on new territory, especially with such a weird career path.
Also, if you attend meetups in your field (eg NY Python/PHP/Android/etc meetup) they often allocate a few minutes for job offers/seekers. The article's right, there's a strong demand now. Make sure to save some of your income once you get a job (NYC can easily eat up any wad of cash you'll throw at it ;) - the bubble will inevitably pop, make sure you can wait the next one comfortably.
Yea the cash-eating qualities of NYC have kept me dealing with job hunt from the economic safety of my family home 3 hours away in PA. Not so easy to do under 2ft of snow ;)
Definitely a little wary of super early startups if only for the inevitable bubble pop. Under-capitalized and in a competitive talent market is a surefire pathway to quick collapse when the investment starts to dry up...
When the bubble pops, you can use your savings and take advantage of the lower costs (and the fact you might not have a job anyway..) to start your own thing.
(Edit: I guess the downmodding means I need to add some disclaimers here... There are also smart rich kids and ex-bankers. Sometimes working for under-market wage does make sense, eg. if you're trying to break in to a new field. Some things are not overhyped in NYC. Your dreams may vary from those of Globex Corporation, its subsidiaries and shareholders)