Google, Facebook and Zynga on a hiring binge in California | Hacker News Reader

Google, Facebook and Zynga on a hiring binge in California

latimesblogs.latimes.com

48 pointspathik37 comments

I joined linkedin this week, 16 hours later I was contacted by a Google recruiter "impressed" with my software engineering experience.

I listed my current job title 'Software Developer'. No description, no technical bullet points, nothing, just a title. Thats what they were "impressed" with.

How about the "5 million dollar bonus" (I'm guessing restricted stocks) to retain one top engineer? We must be switching over from brawn to brains in the human value chain, which is apt, as the ENTIRE value of NFL teams doesn't even equal the value of any ONE of the companies mentioned (Total value of Facebook is $50B while total value for combined NFL teams is ~37B for example). Either that, or we're in a bubble. I, being the incurable optimist, vote for the former.

Well it depends on how you look at it.

Elite brawn (elite NFL player): 20M / year.

Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year.

Note: I didn't compare brawn to say, Zuckerberg, because that would be more like comparing the owners of the team.

Just my $0.02.

"Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year"

"Elite brain" isn't some clean up hitter lighting up code or architecting for you. Elite brain is CTO, or EVP of technology. In terms of e.g., basketball, the Micky Arison of Apple is undoubtedly Steve Jobs, so LeBron is someone like Jony Ives. I'm quite sure Jony is walking away with way more than $20M after designing the iPod, iPhone and iPad (some speculate it's somewhere in the $150-200 Million range).

I've noticed a spike in emails from recruiters for jobs/gigs in California recently, both from the companies cited (I've had emails from all 3) and from others. I've lost track of how many times in the last week alone I've had to tell recruiters "I'm not willing to move to California at the moment". Thinking of making a macro for it.

Also, I've come close a few times to telling recruiters to tell their clients to please discover the joys of ssh/sftp/dropbox/basecamp/email/irc/phone, ie. telecommuting. I'm increasingly finding it funny that employers care where my body is considering how an extreme gap there is between the demand for qualified engineers and the supply of available+interested+affordable ones.

99.9% of my job can be done from home. Yet I still commute 2 hours every day to get to the office.

Why? Because there is just something to be said for working in the same room as the other folks on your team.

Sometimes we'll all work from home, and we'll be in IRC all day chatting the same way we do in the office. Yet when we are in the office, we seem to get more done.

The best example is when I hear some of the other folks talking about a new feature or a code change, and I overhear something that sets off my sysadmin alarm bells. If we weren't in the same room, we'd have to wait until the code review phase to find out, "oh hey, the servers can't DO that."

This way we can head off these problems early with minimal overhead. How annoying would it be to have to send an email every time you had an idea, and then wait for everyone to approve it? When everyone is in the office, we just turn around and finish that process in a few seconds.

Totally. Trying to get me to leave Austin, TX which is half the cost of living AND has no state income tax is a tough sell to us devs here. Remote work is becoming more and more accepted lately as recruiters and companies are realizing people actually may not want to live in Cali. Granted, monthly in person meetings may be necessary but a flight and a hotel is a reasonable fee, IMO.

And some of us would love to work for company X, but bought houses during the bubble and are now effectively stuck where we're at.

I'd would be great to telecommute, but most aren't up for that as jedberg illustrates.

If you are a superior candidate (significant years of experience, many successful products that you were one of the couple key dev members on), interview anyway. There are relocation benefits usable to the large players with deeper pockets, one of which includes third-party companies that will buy and resell your house from you via a subsidy provided by your new company.

I'm over $150k upside down on my house. No one is going to make up that difference.

If you're that far in the hole, does it really make sense to keep throwing good money after bad?

Im not sure what you mean exactly. Sadly I have a recourse loan because i refinanced which means the bank can come after my assets if I default. Being a well paid programmer for a decade means i have assets to take unlike many people in my situation. They aren't limited to taking just the house and ruining my credit, so I'll be gambling to some degree if I try to walk away from it.

Most of the people who are stuck are folks who either have second mortgages or refi-loans which included a recourse. In order to step away from that you'd have to file personal bankruptcy and that can be really hard.

That being said, I don't doubt for a minute that for the right candidate Google or Facebook would pay the difference on what you owed vs what you sold for if you agreed to pay them back if you left in under 3 years. They aren't stupid and the math works in their favor. ($150K is equivalent to 300 shares of 'restricted stock' @ $500/shr price (they call them GSUs) which vest over 4 years) Top engineers should be getting better than that so its worth a shot.

It's possible, if you're a perfect candidate. Crazy relocation bonuses I've been a part of (on the employer side):

- Horse transport

- Premium wine collections

- Luxury automobile collections

- Months of weekly first class flights to/from their prior residence location during the "dark and cold winter months"

But, in all of these cases, the individuals were at/near the CTO or chief architect level at non-trivial corporations.

I'm sure it's possible. It's also possible for me to win the lottery ;)

No kidding! They keep stealing my people! ;)

Seriously though, it's been making things tough. We've really had to step up our game lately to make compelling arguments. Luckily, we have some advantages over those guys, like being able to push code live to millions of people with pretty much no bureaucracy.

Play against their giant corporate structure. They can't adapt and be flexible, but you can. You might not be able to match their salary + bonus, but you can do other things. How about giving your employees more vacation time? A lot of them are not living in the same town as their family, they will value having time to spend with family, or to travel. Google has what? 3 weeks of time off? Give them 6 if you can. Pitch it as, "sure you can make all that money, but will you have time to spend with you kids or to travel?"

Also, let some people work from home if possible. Let them keep flexible hours, make 11 to 3 core hours and let people come in early or leave late ... It is stuff that might take lots of red tape in large companies.

Google does all that stuff already.

6 weeks of vacation? starting up?

3 weeks at start; 4 weeks after 3 years; 5 weeks after 5 years: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/lifeatgoogle/benefits/ind...

By "does this already", rdouble probably meant: work from home, flexible hours, etc.

More vacation time in lieu of salary may also be a tough sell: Google allows up to several (3? 6?) month of unpaid personal time off, making it pretty easy to trade salary for vacation "on demand".

So no 6 weeks starting up then. Yes he might have meant 'work from home' and 'flex hours' but the main point was extra vacation time.

I think it appeals to younger people as they like to travel, and many probably live away from their parents and friends, and it appeals to developers that have children, as they would like to more time with their family, and most importantly, that time is not arbitrarily convertible to cash.

Sure Google would let them take unpaid time off, but paid time off is even better.

The main point is that Google being a large company it is harder for it to adjust and make changes. That vulnerability should be exploited and taken advantage by smaller startups.

Facebook has a very unbureaucratic deployment system.

Which is why for some reason's it's good to be an entrepreneur outside of California. Recently traveling to the US this was quite a revelation: being in Europe (Amsterdam) can also be a competitive advantage.

I don't follow unless you are saying that other areas are less competitive.

There is a good reason that CA is hot for tech companies. It's the whole ecosystem.

Were it not for the ecosystem, these same folks are smart enough to found or move their companies elsewhere.

I think he meant that not being in California is an advantage because you don't have 3 hulking giants (and more) taking practically 100% of the available engineers. Whatever is left is fiercely battled for by the smaller companies.

Some people just want to work in small companies. I get recruited from Google and Facebook regularly. I'm not ready to work in that kind of environment. I know lots of people who aren't. I work with several of them. We want to do things those guys aren't going to do.

ditto here. After my experience with Amazon, it definitely made my mind that big corporation are not happy places in general.

Sure, I could tell people I worked on the Kindle and I did a bunch of the ui and framework (worked well in bars with girls), but the bureaucracy of a large company just sucks your soul. You have to cut through so much b.s. to just get anything done. I remember at some point the documentation of some features were taking more than the implementation and testing itself, just to satisfy some guidelines.

Aslo, unless you are starting your own company, a lot of smaller companies are a crapshoot.

I really think that mid-sized nimble companies are the best (between 50 and 180 people). If they are doing well, and are growing, there is a lot more opportunity in such companies career wise, and friendship/social wise than in a large corp. You just create better bonds with your mates, working towards a common goal, without political bs., and you have the chance to see all parts of the business closer (in large corps, you are just in some part of engineering, with no visibility to the business decisions).

This month I just moved to Yammer, and so far it has been awesome experience. (btw, if any of you guys are looking for something new in SF let me know ardit33@gmail.com. We are looking for great engineers, both server and client side. Also this is a company that practices http://programming-motherfucker.com/ for real. There is no forced scrum, tdd, tbd, or whatever. It is up to the individual engineers in teams to come up with something that works well for them, as long as things go well.

I would say other similar companies to Yammer in the Bay Area are: EventBrite, Square, Evernote, etc...

Stable, growing, real business models, and yet fun to work at.

If you are an up and coming hacker, join one of these companies, work for a while (and get real salaries, and equity), meet great people, and move on to your own thing when you are ready.

Just my 2 cents.

If you're a small company outside of California, you don't have to compete with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zygna.... for the best engineers. As a startup you can never match their salaries. Sometimes it's good to be a big fish in a small pond.

Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months? Headlines like this mean the demand curve has shifted. If you don't communicate that fact to your bosses, they will likely not recalculate the market clearing price for your labor for you. (If it had gone down, on the other hand...)

> Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months?

Sure, the suckers on H1B work visas who are waiting for their green cards, which can take several years... Given that your H1B visa is tied to a particular job at a particular company at a particular salary, and your green card application resets if you change jobs, it obviously discourages H1B workers from fully participating in the free labour market.

Not that I'm bitter or anything, ;), but I was exactly in that situation last year, getting hounded by recruiters for jobs much more appealing that the one I was in. But my H1B visa and green card application, not to mention the financial responsibility of providing for my family, prevented me from considering those positions.

So I said adios to the US, played my trump card of being married to an Australian, and I now have permanent residency in Australia without any restrictions on who I can or cannot work for (unless it's a government position that requires I be a citizen, which doesn't interest me anyway).

FWIW, Amazon's Singapore AWS data center is working out just fine from Down Under as I work on my startup...

How much of a raise do you suggest? 5%, 10%, more?

"San Francisco's Twitter… has more than 400 employees and plans to grow to 3,000 employees by July 2013."

Wow. Planned staff increases:

  Google: 25%
  YouTube: 30%
  Facebook: 50%
  Twitter: 650% (over 2 years)

That is amazing. I am very curious what organization and methods Twitter has planned to manage scaling up like that.

I don't know, but I think they're desperate for some data mining know how so they can do better targeted advertising. I think it's do or die for them.

Also the growth is not necessarily all in engineering. For example, I think Twitter is going to be needing a sales team to help push any pending ad products.

I hear Facebook has internal guidelines that say they can't grow by more than 60% y/y.

In _Founders at Work_, McKinsey's consultants are quoted as recommending growth be no greater than 25% because past that, the corporate culture is lost.

These three companies have each now opened offices in Seattle too. I suppose that could end up heating up that market as well.

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