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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.'"
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_
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