Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Hey, with these top-list people out of the running, doesn't it make it a bit easier to be hired if you were further down the list?
In short: Good news if you're a B-rank engineer
Bad news if you're trying to diversify the industry
When employers are finding it difficult to hire because there aren't thousands more workers than there are positions to fill, that's good for employees
Want a job? Suddenly you're not being selected from one of 1500 applicants, and it's not a case where employers can put any old conditions on work because everyone is just desperate for any old work.
Now employees are the ones who can pick & choose.
It kind of seems to me like they mentioned Yahoo for a lark in this article. The actually interesting and insightful section was about how people want to work at Google because--well, because they're Google-- but then they also sort of passingly mention "Oh, I guess people want to work at Yahoo too?"
Maybe they want to work there because they're competing against Google.
IBM and HP both recently laid off 14,000 workers each. There should be plenty of brains out there, available for work.
If the bitching companies provided an equal work enviroment techs wouldn't be flocking in such massive droves to a company that treats them right. Even the simple things such as:
- Free high quality lunches instead of reducing lunch hours etc as many presently try to do.
- Gave something comprable to the 20% personal project time.
- Treated techs that "keep the $100'000 network thats critical to the business from screaming to a grinding halt" with respect at least equal to the tool with the MBA that just tossed 100 blue collars out on the street after 40 years so he could get his xmas bonus.
Most "Japanese" cars sold in the USA are made in North America by North Americans. More and more they are designed by Americans. The Japanese have imposed a system of management that leads to ever-better, higher quality products at lower and lower prices. The workers are North Americans.
Also, Japanese engineers can impose technically-motivated decisions on the MBAs. This has happened with auto features: the engineers insisted on certain features, while the Japanese equivalents of the MBAs said "they cost too much". In Detroit it goes the other way.
So I'm missing your point about "incompetent, raw-fish eating yes men." The Japanese car companies are better run companies (and better to work for) than Detroit.
And I suggest you try working for/with a bunch of Indians (or greasy American MBAs who see them as the way to get away from crabs like me). Maybe you'll sing a different, less-PC tune. India has around a billion people. There are many smart, driven ones in there. And there are a lot of striving liars who will say anything to make a buck.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
In my experience true startups (which, of course, neither Google or Yahoo have been for a very long time) hire almost exclusively by personal referrals - in part because this way they know what they are getting. I've haven't taken a job anywhere but at a startup for over 20 years and every product I worked on is still being sold. If you ever get an opportunity to even talk to a true startup for a low-senior or higher position and it was not through a personal referal, be suspicious, be very suspicious -- the company likely lacks talent and therefore lacks contacts with talent and is likely to be in the category of startups who never deliver a meaningful product to anyone. Unfortunately, it is very hard to evaluate a senior developer based on a 45 minute interview - there's a lot more to maintainable production quality products than puzzles, programming problems, and passing knowledge of this week's TLAs. As Thomas Edison is purported to day "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent prespiration"
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You are being suckered by the ever more imaginative PR gimmicks from the outsourcing lobby. Since they can't use any more the shortage of programmers to open some more the H1B and outsourcing gates, now some slickster has come up with a 'neat idea' to peddle "lack of smartest programmers" based on few hundred working for Google and Yahoo, and then got some Business Week hack to parrot it.
The top 500 (or top 1000 or top 10,000) will always be working for someone and by the talmudic logic of Mr. Ben Elgin, Mr. Robert Hof (in Silicon) Valley and Mr. Jay Greene (in Seattle), that "means" we have shortage and therefore, we must lay off another two hundred thousands of Americans replacing them with Indians. How 'bout shortage of newspaper hacks, based on the same "logic" and "data".
You're so right. Tech jobs, like jobs in general, have always been almost entirely about getting the right cogs for the corporate machine. Sure, if you do anything creative, they'll demand to own it, but even the richest corporations can't afford to actually develop or explore more than one idea in a hundred, and perhaps one in a hundred of those will actually make it to market. The problem is not coming up with good ideas, but getting the political and financial resources to develop them.
For every one of these "top engineers" there are ten others just as smart and more inventive who, for whatever reason, have never become known to the handful of people making high-level recruiting decisions. I know a guy, Quinn Tyler Jackson who developed the theory of adaptive, context-sensitive grammars and built a fast parser that could handle any language with no ad-hoc cruft. It can naturally parse ambiguous things like "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". Ten years ago, it parsed the Gospel of Mark starting with just a single noun in its tiny dictionary and only a couple of pages of rules. Is Google or Microsoft or Yahoo! knocking on his door? No, of course not. He doesn't already have a top spot in a top firm, so how good can he be, they figure... if they figure.
I have dozens of patentable inventions lying around. They are in various areas - no one company could use them all. I can't afford to patent a single one of them, and even if I could I couldn't expect to make any money from them without far more resources. Without a patent, I can't even tell anyone about them without giving up the rights. (Companies seldom will sign an NDA to see an individual's idea, and even if they did, how could I afford to enforce it if they broke the agreement?)
Companies don't hire inventors much - they want engineers. Inventors think up stuff, which is easy and fun for the inventor but risky for the employer; making it work is difficult and tedious for the engineer and indispensable for the employer. I'm just an inventive technician, not a top engineer who can not only invent but can get the resources or make the invention work all by himself if need be. So, basically, I'm screwed under the current legal and employment situation.
Some of these ideas could make a company with the right resources a lot of money; some already have. I wasn't the first to think of reconfigurable computing in the early '90s or maybe even the 4-bit lookup table as a "supergate", but I certainly did so before these things came on the market. Ultrasonic beat-wave sound projection, same thing. As an 11 year-old kid in 1983 I came up with an idea for a notebook computer design with two hinged flat panel touchscreens that I think is still better for some purposes than what is on the market now. In 1994/5 I invented a tree browser history which I still wish I could get in Firefox or IE. I have a whole class of interface ideas combining the control of the command line with the discoverability of a menu system. I've got all sorts of optic, acousto-optic, superconductor, magnetic, electrostatic, electronic, power-producing, energy saving, inflatable, legal, corporate, psychological, interface and social applications ideas - and unless something changes, no one will get any use out of them. I don't see any jobs out there for some one like me who doesn't want to sell his soul for a salary.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
More evil from Google:
Google sued for firing executive pregnant with quadruplets
News.com is running the story Google hit with job discrimination lawsuit, which describes how
"Christina Elwell, who was promoted to national sales director in late 2003, alleges her supervisor began discriminating against her in May 2004, a month after informing him of her pregnancy and the medical complications she was encountering, according to the lawsuit filed July 17 in a U.S. District Court in New York."
In May 2004, after she became pregnant with quadruplets and during the same month that she lost two of the unborn children, her superior told her that her job as VP of national sales had been eliminated and requested that she take a job in Google's operations division, a position for which she had no experience. Google refused to allow her to take the lower position of East Coast regional sales director, instead firing her and hiring someone with no Internet sales experience.
In mid-June, another Google executive offered to place Christina in the operations job she had already rejected, while in the same email accused Christina's husband of "acting under false pretenses by telling Google that Elwell was having a health crisis".
After Google's director of HR confirmed that Christina had been terminated improperly, she accepted the lower ranking position offered, but then lost a third unborn child and within two days of returning to work on July 19, her doctors ordered her to cease her work because the stress that Google and her supervisor were putting her under created an even higher risk of losing her remaining unborn child.
After she returned from disability leave, rather than allow her to work in sales, Google fired her.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry