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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.'"
You know how America gets over this outsourcing thing? By stopping the kneejerk racism and xenophobia and realizing that India is actually huge numbers of smart, educated, and driven competition.
Or you could just move to Detroit and bitch about shitty cars made by incompetent, raw-fish eating yes men.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Hey guys, software engineering is not the most intellectually demanding thing (modern math, bioengineering, and like a hundred other things come first) on the planet. Yahoo and Google are hiring now and they'll fire later. Big deal.
What have these so 'hot' software engineers done for the world? Have they created a new software development method that minimizes flaws and bugs? have they created some new programming language that allows for bug-free programming? have they created a new "internet" O/S that is also a database and solves the problem of data access and replication? Have they created a new compiler that incorporates all the latest programming language developments? Have they developed a truly innovative library for programming the web that does away with the millions of little domain-specific-languages that dominate web-based software development?
The answer to the above is a clear 'no'. This is not a trolling post, and not a flamebait post. I just want to point out that there is a great misunderstanding on what is a great software engineer: a truly great software engineer is the one that creates a new programming abstraction that solves elegantly a class of previously difficult-to-solve problems; a great software engineer is not the one that knows 100% of the details of a problematic implementation and toolset.
The above-described definition is very important, because true progress comes from people that are pioneers in discovering/making new paradigms, not from people that are the best in using current tools. Anyone can learn all the tools of the world, but if they are not capable of making suggestions on how to improve the tools, then they are clearly not great: having clear ideas on what is wrong with current tools and improving them (including the introduction of new programming languages!) is what makes someone a truly great software engineer.
The people that Google hires may be the greatest users of current technology, but what good has come out of Google? have we got a new revolutionary method that makes web programming a breeze? have we solved the various problems that plug web-app development? do we still need to go through multiple layers of XML and HTML in order to create the slightest web application?