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Google and Yahoo Creating Brain Drain?
Searchbistro writes "Software-engineering talent is flocking to Google and Yahoo. Business Week explores the possibility that the big two search companies are creating a brain drain on the rest of the industry. Google snapped up about 230 engineers last quarter. Some stolen superstars are Louis Monier, director of eBay, advanced technology research, and Kai-Fu Lee, a top-flight researcher at Microsoft. Yahoo hired dozens of top engineers, including Larry Tesler, former vice-president at Amazon.com. 'While the Internet leaders snatch up top tech talent, that creates headaches elsewhere. Some startups, for instance, say the talent drain has made their own hiring more difficult.'"
There are more than, say 500 good engineers in the US (supposing Google and Yahoo hired 500 people). Sure, not many VPs of big dot-coms are easy to hire but would a startup be able to afford the salaries/perks they demand?
I don't think it's that much of an issue....
You can hire almost anyone and still create crap, just as Microsoft does.
Apple has good pull to get people, but even better management. There are tons of talented people - the whole superstar thing can be folly. It's about a culture that permits creativity and innovation.
When you've got people at Microsoft worrying about uttering the word podcast, you can see that they are losing their relevance by the moment. It has happened to many giant companies - as they phase from entrepreneurial and flexible - to arrogant and rigid.
Retranslate this as:
"Some companies bitch about some other companies who are paying more than they want to pay their own employees, employees leave, and outsourcing to India doesn't work that well. MBAs have to double their prozac dose to cope."
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
More precisely, it's good news for the quality engineers that haven't made huge discoveries, or the engineers looking for their break.
Brain drain only truly occurs when there's a lack of brains flowing to the industry or region, not simply because of a 'cornering of the market' on brains.
Fast-forward to 2014.
Google the offers most popular network features, the OS, and the applications.
Every time something new comes along Google ties its version of that into its vast array of other services, and people gravitate towards it by default.
How is this different then Microsoft bundling IE?
Consider that others had map systems before Google. In the future, will Google get criticized for abuse when conglomerating new services into it's site?
I ask this because the line between application and website is getting blurred, and it seems to me that popular opinion on slashdot is that a monopoly should not bundle applications. How will we reconcile this in the future?
As for start-ups, well, it seems just that tad unlikely that many start-ups could afford the former Vice President of Amazon.com. So it's hard for me to cry too hard.
The other important thing to consider is that most IT folk do their best work young and fresh out of college. They're not "old hands", they're "young minds". The real innovators are almost invariably people who haven't learned yet that what they're coding is impossible.
There ARE coders who know something is impossible, but code it anyway, but they are relatively rare. If a start-up wants the absolute best (and at rock-bottom prices), then it needs to go after the recently-graduated. Better yet, the start-up should find hot talent prior to University and sponsor them through it in exchange for part-time work during University and a contract at the end.
The reason youth is important is that old-hands tend to get stuck in a rut. They get used to doing things a particular way and loose the ability to step back and see what it is that is really going on. Look at any online resume of an experienced coder. Odds are, most such folk have a very few skills they have honed to perfection - with the consequence that they can do next to nothing with them.
Now, look at the people who are experienced but who are ALSO doing some damn good work. Odds are high that they'll have a much more diverse range of skills, are much less in some mould or other and likely have a more "Classical" background or education, where diversity rather than finesse was appreciated.
Also, America's work habits burn people out very quickly. No real vacation, no time to recharge, the ideal is to "produce" not learn and the Corporate Culture is king. It is doubtful America's high-tech industry can take much more of this kind of abuse. Something has to give.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This article presupposes that there is a large gap between the elite engineers and the plebes. It seems to suggest that there are a handful of really great programmers, and the rest are a bunch of retards. In reality, there is a large population of very talented engineers who do not have the PhD's from the big schools, and who do not have the impressive pedigree that places like Google look for. These people are just as likely to come up with the Next Big Thing (tm) as the MIT PhD's are, but they're far less likely to be taken seriously by the likes of Google.
IBM and HP both recently laid off 14,000 workers each. There should be plenty of brains out there, available for work.
IBM and HP didn't fire their top engineers.
It kind of seems to me like they mentioned Yahoo for a lark in this article.
Actually, I'd bet you dollars to donuts that this article was "seeded" by a PR firm in the employ of Yahoo. Their goal: create the impression that Yahoo is second only to Google as a search engine and an employer of Smart People. Make Yahoo seem cool like Google is. For example, the sentence "Yahoo also carries substantial geek cred."
Paul Graham unveils this concept in great detail in his essay The Submarine.
Notice the number of quotes from Yahoo employees vs. the number from Google employees, the insider information about Yahoo's future plans vs. the use of facts you already knew about Google anyway.
Bet.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS