from Hacker News

The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

by allangrant on 4/2/13, 9:45 PM with 95 comments

• by ChuckMcM on 4/2/13, 11:00 PM

  You know what is blood thirsty? recruiters are bloodthirsty. Since there is exactly zero barrier to entry when there is a perceived shortage of talent we get a swarm of 'tech recruiters' that looks kind of like Carp do when you through a handful of popcorn into the coy pond.

  There is a shortage of chumps however. For the right price you can hire pretty much immediately. What I don't get are people who are technically talented and not working, mostly because they want too much. Sometimes there is a sad sad story about how they were with big corp for 10+ years, went from starry eyed college grad to large mortgage holding principal engineer, and laid off, and now nobody will hire them as a principal engineer's salary. That is a sad story.

• by PeterisP on 4/2/13, 10:25 PM

  Hire telecommuters outside of SF.

  For example, I personally could get a drastic increase in income by moving to USA/SF, but I won't consider physically moving since it would be a great disruption to my wife and babies and I can afford not to move, as developers are wanted everywhere (though not so piranha-style). And there are many more developers like me. Long-range telecommuting is an option, and it's easier to be competitive financially since practically everywhere has lower cost of living than SF, I believe. (How much would a home for a full family within cycling distance of the office cost?)

• by JimboOmega on 4/2/13, 9:55 PM

  And here I am, a rails developer trying to move to SF, and I only get maybe a few nibbles a week.

  I must not be on the right job boards. Or something. Is the meetup.com ruby list the place to go? Someone also suggested changing my location on LinkedIn to SF - however, I am hoping to relocate, but haven't done so yet, so that seems dishonest.

• by j_baker on 4/2/13, 11:10 PM

  This seems like a pretty worthless test. I mean, who cares how many companies respond to your resume? The real test is how many job offers you can get, and that's a much more difficult than getting responses on your resume.

  Secondly, are entrepreneurs really this out of touch with what it's like to be a jobhunter? This post reads like it was written by an anthropologist studying some strange culture he'd never seen before.

• by VeejayRampay on 4/2/13, 9:54 PM

  In the meantime in France, we can't get past that PHP/Enterprise Java illness that's been afflicting the dynamism of our net ecomomy for a decade now. Sad.

• by cletus on 4/2/13, 10:51 PM

  Honestly this is just a PR piece for DeveloperAuction. "How to win the bloodthirsty battle for tech talent"? Why come use our site of course!

  This strip from 1995 sums it up pretty well:

  http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-22/

  I see a number of problems (on both sides):

  1. There is no shortage of talent. There might well be a shortage of talent for the price you're willing to pay but that's hardly the same thing;

  2. What constitutes "talent" seems to be largely based on social proof. 25 year old Stanford graduate? Offers galore I'm sure compared to, say, the 45 year old University of Iowa graduate. Hell, I get an awful lot of cold calls based simply on listing "Google" on my online profiles (as my employer).

  Social proof can be a useful indicator. The problem is that groups tend to self-select down to nothing this way where you end up with a tiny fraction of the group being over-subscribed and the majority struggling;

  3. People like to employ people like themselves. So find a company full of MIT graduates and they're likely to hire... more MIT graduates. This isn't just a question of social connections or geographical area either (IMHO);

  4. If you pick a high-demand high-cost area like the Bay Area you're obviously going to have a harder time finding and retaining talent and it'll be more expensive;

  5. Larger companies tend to treat talent as interchangeable where the only units are the number of warm bodies, perhaps stratified into "junior", "midrange" and "senior" whereas we all know there can be a 10x or greater difference between two engineers in terms of productivity, hence the more productive talent is harder to attract and retain.

• by cheyne on 4/2/13, 10:07 PM

  ^^ Jimbo, Change your LinkedIn profile to say you live in San Francisco. I just moved here a few months back and I get dozens of emails. I have a job, and dont respond to them, but its generally the same pitch ... "VC backed company, wants ruby/rails people, descent money, benefits, yada yada" ..

• by ameister14 on 4/2/13, 11:03 PM

  Why are there so few rails devs? Its not as if Ruby is super hard to learn or the rails framework is incredibly complex.

  I think I would hire someone for 40k for their first year, train them in RoR and then pay them more their second year. You get 6 months of good work out of them after they're totally trained and at a lower price.

• by HunterV on 4/2/13, 11:44 PM

  I've always wondered why companies aren't recruiting kids out of High School to learn Rails instead of attending college. Understandably there is immaturity to deal with and all that but it seems there is enough demand to overshadow that.

• by cllns on 4/2/13, 11:48 PM

  One agency’s pitch consisted entirely of this: “I saw that your [sic] looking for some work. I have a few posions [sic] in SF that might be a fit, let me know when you have some time to talk.” It provided no last name, phone number or company name.

  The author should remember this is craigslist. This seems like run-of-the-mill spam (likely sent to EVERY new job posting)

• by viseztrance on 4/2/13, 10:42 PM

  It's clear that popping on everyone's radar gets you a lot of attention, but really, how many would follow through all the way?

  The article mentions that none asked for any sort of online presence (Linkedin, Github, etc). Perhaps it's because they weren't serious to begin with.

• by PixelPusher on 4/2/13, 10:39 PM

  We've been hiring for a little while in Los Angeles. The problem is that there are some Rails developers, but most of the ones I've met are pretty entitled. They expect 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, etc. The problem is that most of them are fairly incompetent when it comes to everything else.

  Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares.

  This is good though, because it makes people who know those things that much more valuable as well they should be.

• by guylhem on 4/2/13, 11:41 PM

  After reading that, I can only imagine what this demand curve means for the actually available talent one may buy.

  You know the saying - "the market is so hot even chickens can fly"

  If you have to hire, that'll be a very expansive chicken - or maybe even a lemon. That's the cost of doing business I guess.

• by allinzen on 4/2/13, 9:50 PM

  Too true. The trouble is not enough people are trying to address the underlying problem - the lack of education in our public schools needed to become a desperately desired rails programmer! Computer programming should count as learning another language!

• by jquery on 4/2/13, 10:04 PM

  s/Rails dev/dev/g

• by lifeisstillgood on 4/2/13, 11:25 PM

  I'm finding my own meme here - CI is the key to enabling remote working and so enabling a company to truly select the best

  With CI it's pretty easy to see what needs to be built and whether it works - every few minutes if needed.

  You can see progress happen throughout a day.

  No other metrics matter.

• by rhizome on 4/2/13, 10:25 PM

  This has not been my experience, but I haven't posted to meetup.com either.