Tech startups face stiff competition for talent
reuters.com
reuters.com
In light of the quotation from the submitted article in the first reply here, "The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," how does any one graduate from a state university engineering program show that he or she is one of the "right people" who is worth "above-market rates" to bring on board a start-up's team? The one hiring heuristic mentioned here is hiring someone who already has a job. Is there more to look for? What do people with the best talent do to show their talent? What characteristics are tech start-ups looking for to make sure they hire really talented developers?
Edit to respond to a reply below. I'm glad to hear from one of the interview subjects for the submitted story. I'm not a dev myself, and I am still learning about this industry as a matter of curiosity, having an immediate family member who IS a dev. Sure enough, he has an active personal project in development that he contributes to on GitHub and is deeply interested in learning and education. I was drawn to HN because of Paul Graham's essays on education, and my own work is in the content-development aspect of gifted education in mathematics. I rely on my other family member (also an HN participant) for technical advice when he can cram it into his busy schedule.
We tend to prefer people who are 1- Open source contributors to projects that are related to what our project is about 2- Have active Github profiles. 3- Have a deep interest in learning and education 4- Are willing to put up with some experimentation (aren't afraid to rip out features and add new ones quickly) 5- Have worked for other startups
Finally, we start with contract positions before deciding to bring people on full time. Do you have any other suggestions to reach out to devs who fit the bill who are currently still employed? Much harder to find out details about if they're not on github contributing to open source stuff.
You want people who contribute to open source and are active on Github.
That is hard to do is one's job is taking up most of one's time, or
most of one's mental energy.
What steps do you take to ensure that if I'm working for you, I'll have
the time and energy to contribute to open source and be active on
Github?My current employer is a small shop even though I got offers from a lot of companies who were offering to pay more. They enticed me by allowing me to work for lower pay so that I don't have to bust my ass every day.
I work a few hours a day and 8 hour days are rare. Telecommuting is also an option but I like to work at the office.
They also buy a bunch of ipads and android devices I can take home and play with.
This is much better for me than working at a different company at least 8 hours a day and specially in a startup environment where you have to work long hours to get a product out.
As far as wanting to lure people away from good jobs just to take on a temporary contract position, that is amusing. Would love to hear about your fully paid relocation and signing bonuses to cover the cost of selling an underwater house in order to move to your city, also obviously those contract rates are actual going contract rates of $150/hr+ and not employment rates but we call it contracting for tax purposes rates of $75/hr, right? Probably not.
And you can deny it all you like, but it's a very strong correlation. Like I said, I'm not using it as a determining factor, so it's not a tautology (i.e., a strong correlation if I really was using it as a criterion would be expected, not surprising). Yes, it correlates. I don't recommend it as a criterion, and yet, it won't lead you very far astray if you're in a hurry.
It may be helpful for you to review the meaning of the word correlation. I'm not sure you're quite using the right one. You shouldn't find it so shocking.
I'd be interested to see more accurate figures if anyone has them handy. Here is the article mentioning the 11,000 figure: http://www.peacepowerlove.com/archives/5187
"The University of Michigan graduates 8,000 engineers a year," he (Steve Blank) said. "Why don't we fund these companies cheaply in Ann Arbor?"
Why not indeed. But then some of those VCs might have to travel outside the Bay Area.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle - everyone's there because everyone's there, and I don't see that network effect going away any time soon. Everyone was on Windows because everyone else was on Windows. Everyone moves to iPod/iPhone, and the network effect brings everyone over to iPhone (yes, exaggerating a bit, but not much).
(The "8,000 from one school in one year" estimate is too high, though, yes.)
Here's their statistics on graduation rates by degree. It's a few years old but the latest isn't going to be all that different.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_degrsbystudyfi...
Aerospace engineering - 102
Biomedical engineering - 48
Chemical engineering - 68
Civil Engineering - 50
Earth Systems Engineering - 1
Engineering - 9
Engineering Physics - 10
Financial Engineering - 16
Nuclear Engineering - 16
Now I'm going to guess none of the above degrees are the majors we are talking about for these startups, who are looking for software developers.
More relevant:
Computer Engineering - 84
Computer Science - 158
Electrical Engineering - 170
---
Total: 412
Maybe we should throw in all the Math, Physics, Linguistics and Music majors as well? Those are fields that are often sorted through for developers. It's a small number of each that goes into programming, but not insignificant.
In any case, this is Ann Arbor only. Can the claim of 8000 engineering graduates per year be substantiated for the entire system. Seems unlikely, but we need more data, and we'd definitely have to be including every field that has any possible connection, perhaps someone had a statistic that said there were 7002 STEM degrees granted system wide per year, and that turned into "around 8000" and then "8000"?
Ah, here is a year by year summary and one that puts all forms of engineering in one category:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_degrssummary_1...
year - # eng degrees
2006 - 1034
2007 - 1065
2008 - 1150
2009 - 1198
2010 - 1254
That is undergraduate ONLY. There are also on that list comparable numbers of graduate degrees, so double the number for all degrees altogether: 1254 + 1035 = 2289 engineering degrees conferred in 2010. It's kind of amazing that they have the same number of grad students as undergrad, that means there is a near 1:1 ratio between grad students and undergrad, so each undergrad theoretically could be taught privately by a single grad student tutor if they wanted.
So to hit 8000 we need only 3 other U. Michigan campuses the same size as Ann Arbor.
1. Throw wads of money at something.
2. Pay off politicians.
3. Shmoozing.
4. I'm the sales and idea guy.
Things that are very hard to do:
1. Design a product that people find useful and are willing to use.
2. Design a product that people are willing to spend money on.
There's an enormous glut of VC backed companies filled with and powered by the easy trivial stuff. These folks tend not to respect engineering design and inventing skills, which they see as commodities they should be able to buy for a pittance. Then they complain that there is stiff competition for talent when designers don't choose to work for their useless startup.
I know out of the last 3 months only one startup out of 20 made to the almost offer stage, I am awaiting them signing a big client that funds my position..
It came down to: 1 People involved. 2 Product/Company/market vision 3 User/client growth 4 Mixture of honesty and transparency..told me where they could be honest and transparent and where they could not disclose and the reasons why.
(in other words, hiring people is hard work, really hard work, but we pretend that employing arbitrary requirements [e.g. must be employed, must have exact experience in variant x of library y on platform z] equals the necessary hard work)