Silicon Valley Hiring Perks: Meals, iPads and a Cubicle for Spot | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley Hiring Perks: Meals, iPads and a Cubicle for Spot

nytimes.com

68 pointsgaurav_v45 comments

"But even with a glut of engineers on the job market, few have the skills that tech companies look for, said Cadir Lee, chief technology officer at Zynga. Colleges rarely teach the newer programming languages like PHP, Ruby and Python, which have become more popular at young Web companies than older ones like Java, he said."

That seems a little demeaning to portray a computer science education as one of languages and syntax. It's not about learning PHP or Ruby; it's about learning programming paradigms, concepts, algorithms, etc to make better software.

Perhaps the author of the article isn't particularly versed on how the CS => Software jobs process works. But to suggest that many engineers can't find jobs because they weren't taught PHP in school is grossly incorrect.

Does anyone actually know of academic programs that teach PHP?

My alma mata's IT department offered a single PHP course - the CS and SE departments didn't offer anything remotely web-related, short of a graduate-level course on XML parsing.

I was desperate, so I took it. Man, was it terrible. I learned more from two weeks of part-time self study.

(It's also kind of funny hearing Zynga complain about unqualified candidates - I haven't exactly heard good things about their hiring practices.)

The problem isn't that universities don't teach Blurb. The problem is that at most schools, computer science students go into the field because it pays well, and aren't otherwise interested in programming.

If you aren't interested in programming, you aren't going to take the time to play around with new languages. You won't spend thousands of hours outside the classroom, hacking on your own projects just for the sake of creating something you think is cool.

The end result is that there are two strata of programmers; those with passion, and those without. In my experience, it's easy to spot the difference with one question during the interview process: "What's the coolest thing you've ever built?"

If the answer to this question is something they built because they were told to, they lack passion. If, on the other hand, they built something because it scratched an itch (at school, work, or otherwise), then that's something else entirely.

My best hires have always been programmers with less on-paper experience, but a ton of hours building stuff because they wanted to.

I agree with your theory, though maybe not so much its implementation.

The coolest thing I've ever built was indeed something I was "told" to create as a part of my job. That doesn't dilute the fact that what I created took lots of creativity, careful thought and developed into an elegant, scalable solution for the problem at hand. I was very passionate about building it.

I think your litmus test is correct, but I think that regardless of _why_ someone built something, it's fairly easy to tell if they're passionate about having done it.

That said, the good ones almost always build things to scratch their own itch. Those things just may not be the coolest things.

You could also make the argument that managing to get paid to do what you would do on your own time anyway - that shows a certain amount of drive and intelligence.

My main resume to interview filter is finding out what projects they have worked on in their spare time. They usually have a homepage, blog, github or bitbucket account, or something similar.

On the other hand, there is a class of 'rockstar' developer who are actually not very good. The best way I can explain this is by giving an example.

I was hiring for a new higher-level dev, a Rails role. I was referred to a developer whos name I knew by somebody internal. I thought 95% of the task would be me convincing him to join us, and his profile was lots of twitter followers, a good following on HN and other forums, a high profile as a developer, attached his name to a lot of open source projects and spec work etc.

Turned out he knew none of the basics. He had 'C' on his resume yet he could skype chat me the simplest C routine. I asked him to scp a file up to a dev server, and he said 'I had no idea that you could FTP over SSH' - which he said after a 3-4 minute pause where it was obvious that he was googling. I learnt then that a public profile and being involved in such projects sometimes also isn't the best indicator.

Unix and and C expertise seem like lousy litmus tests for a Rails dev. How was his rails work?

Terrible - he mixed controller and view code. I was only testing what his resume said, and since we are small the role also requires a bit of everything

Maybe it's just my age showing, but going to work somewhere because they're buying you an iPad seems totally ludicrous. One would think that with a $90,000 salary, a $500 tablet should not be a deciding factor.

In fact, to me, it would be a bit of a red flag. Unless you were actually doing iOS development.

I think the haircut part is much stranger. The iPad is about moving people into the multitouch paradigm.

The haircut part is about not having to leave campus and go do errands on a weekend, so your weekends can be about having fun (or more realistically, doing more work for the startup ;-)). It's actually pretty handy, being able to tuck away a 20-minute haircut appointment in between two meetings.

There are also laundry (Facebook), massages (Google), mini-day spas (Microsoft; maybe? private to employees but not clear on pricing), etc. Haircuts are very much in theme with "work and live on-campus" approach.

Kids are cheap these days. Back in my day we were offered BMWs as signing bonuses. (True story.)

you know they’d do great in a small environment working a million hours a week

Erm, no. That may be just great for a spotty kid in his first or second job, but someone seasoned with a wife and kids isn't really going to be thrilled with putting in startup hours for an iPad2, or the kind of stock options startups are offering. This is another reason why they're having trouble recruiting: the small pool of young people with few responsibilities that have the right skillset.

Looking over the jobs pages of some of these companies it's interesting to note how many of them expect you to make your new job there "the primary focus of your life". For instance, go google for

"primary focus of your life" intitle:jobs

and you get:

Quora: "You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"

Udemy: "You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"

GoPollGo: "you should be ready to make working on GoPollGo the primary focus of your life."

Bubbli: "you should be ready to make Bubbli the primary focus of your life."

So yeah, probably not a good fit for someone with a wife and kids.

Wow. Although giving your life this is implied, I never caught that that statement was so ubiquitous for recent startup job postings.

I hope this turn into the new job postings fax pau of "rockstar/ninja" proportions.

Could be more of a corporate culture statement than compensation...

I remember one of the promises my manager made me at IBM in the early 90s crisis was that he couldn't necessary be competitive in compensation but I would always have access to the coolest equipment and people... Yes he actually kept that promise, I managed to get one of almost every RS/6000 before they were publicly released in my lab...

"Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a few months ago."

That's a pretty remarkable stat.

Everyone got a fairly substantial raise in response to heavy poaching by Facebook and others.

I do wish we could get rid of the "poaching" term for at-will employees. Either it's easier to bag trophy talent on the Google reserve than in the open field (in which case, good on those employees for improving their lot) or it's harder (in which case, good on Facebook and others for figuring out how to compete for them.) Either way, it's hardly a situation for which an external observer needs a judgmental descriptor.

Good perspective on the term, you're right.

It is simply competition over the girl and one factor is who can take her out for the more expensive dinners. (Another being who makes her laugh more.)

Yup, that's the way to win women - be the one who spends the most money on them.

Read: Your comment shows A) poor taste B) poor logic. Tack-y.

Come on, that's not fair. jonah's citing two ways men try to woo women (expensive dinners and making her laugh) and using them at as analogies for ways that companies try to woo employees -- either paying them better salaries or being a more rewarding place to work.

Thanks Miller. That was exactly my point. Also to point out that pay alone may not always be the main reason to choose a job.

Actually I disagree - the poaching between FB and Google actually sets difficult precedents for pretty much everyone else.

You get FB enticing talent from google, and google giving raises to keep people and this makes all other companies at a disadvantage.

Further, paying college grads 100K+ sets them up to be prima donnas almost immediately.

Last, it is against the stance that when starting your own company, and taking on money, the VCs want you to take smaller salaries to show that you have skin in the game, that you're hungry etc... This makes it such that lifestyles become set and the likelihood of anyone willing to take less is not going to happen.

Over time - the overall market salary expectations increase, but now the available talent pool that is actually worth those salary levels shrinks - putting both talent and employers in a catch 22.

Every single entrepreneur in the valley should see Google, and even more, Facebook as nothing but their enemy (until they try to acquire you, that is)

Considering inflation over the past 20 years, $100K salary is not prima donna material. Engineers aren't overpaid; they are fortunate enough to have salary keeping pace with inflation.

Much of the rest of the educated working class is underpaid, with real wages falling, due to weak bargaining power against the aristocracy.

Based on your comment then, do you believe that the only thing anyone should be really interested in is stock?

Here is why I ask, my salary ranges between 110K and 175K depending on the project, position, how interested I am in it etc...

I am a very senior infrastructure deisgner and PM.

I am 36.

To say that someone out of college getting 100K as an expected base salary is not pirma donna material -- then you are setting them up to believe that, as an engineer, their salary expectations should grow over time to say ~350K.

However - nobody pays that.

We can argue that everyone is underpaid, sure, I feel underpaid. But the truth is that the only way I am going to get a comfortable windfall is to build / sell somethinf of my own.

The fact seems to be that the mean salary is fairly flat regardless of experience in general - but in the relatively more rare cases that people cash out, there i wild profit to be made.

This is clear in SV where it is far more common for people to make out on their stock -- but that clearly indicates at least some sort of bubble for silicon valley as compared to the rest of the country/world.

Eeeh, what would you say to paying them $85k plus in seattle, which is what microsoft starts out at? Because 100k+ is equivalent to that $85k+ wage.

Salaries since 2008 went up mostly in reaction to US DOJ finding that Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar had an anti-competitive agreement to not hire each others employees, in order to depress wages. (http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-at-1076.html)

Inflation is higher in SV than elsewhere in the US. I imagine all that money going almost directly into real-estate prices.

Remarkable indeed. Also in need of a citation.

This has been happening for the past 12 years. At ArsDigita you got 100k, free food, massages and weekend drives in a Ferarri. And that was to compete with places like "Sapient" who offered more money. Even further back in ancient history, I believe Symbolics used the same approach to recruiting. I guess the new twist is that Google and Facebook can actually afford these salaries and perks.

"Shannon Callahan, who recruits engineers for the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio of companies, said a third of the engineers she called ask for financing to start their own companies instead."

This seems like it would be the biggest problem in finding top talent.

Not every talented engineer wants to be a CEO.

Nor does every entrepreneur.

I think a lot of entrepreneurial engineers just want to be CTO or VP of Engineering or Product. There's a lot of selling and all that goes around that I think many entrepreneurial engineers are not predisposed to even when they can be good at it.

I know a lot of startup execs and enterprise execs step back after a while to rejoin the ranks of individual contributors for a while to catch their breathe. It was worse during the IPO dotcom boom where I had friends that really felt that as execs they were forced into ethical compromise in handling the finances and misleading analysts when they were running public companies.

90k for entry level is pretty crazy. Any Googlers in the Atlanta area who can give the range in those parts now?

From another HN discussion a while back: "entry level", as in starting position at a company is not the same as "entry level" as in first job ever. Yes, the article mentions recent grads, but I bet most of those who end up hired already have industry experience (through internships or otherwise).

Ehhh, high california taxes and high cost of living in SV make that 90k fairly equivalent to the $60k-$70k grads start out with in atlanta.

"cubicle for spot"? What does that mean?

Companies let their employees bring their dogs to work. Dog=spot (popular name for a dog, google "see spot run")

Not a bubble!

So proud to be working with two of the startups mentioned in the article.

This article makes many claims. A few of the claims I am in a position to verify, and all of these are false.

This observation does not give me confidence that the other claims are true.

Care to elaborate?

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