Inside the War For Top Developer Talent

snydeq writes "With eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings, today's talented developers have their pick of perks, career paths, and more, InfoWorld reports in its inside look at some of the startups and development firms fueling the hottest market for coding talent the tech industry has ever seen. 'Every candidate we look at these days has an offer from at least one of the following companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Square, Pinterest, or Palantir,' says Box's Sam Schillace. 'If you want to play at a high level and recruit the best engineers, every single piece matters. You need to have a good story, compensate fairly, engage directly, and have a good culture they want to come work with. You need to make some kind of human connection. You have to do all of it, and you have to do all of it pretty well. Because everyone else is doing it pretty well.'"

Comments

Re: Top talent is always hard to find

[swillden]

The way Google evaluates talent is pretty bad, and it's not an interesting company to work at unless all you're interested in is a stable income with lots of perks.

Stable income, lots of perks... yep that's terrible :-)

Actually, you forgot my favorite feature of working for Google: A complete lack of idiots. Everyone I work with -- right down to the facilities staff, amazingly enough -- is bright, focused, engaged and rational. In three years, working with hundreds of others (Google is highly collaborative), I found a single counterexample, and he's now gone.

They heavily suffer from NIH syndrome and are convinced that the technology they created (and they created software for pretty much anything) is the best in the world, even when it's painfully outdated.

NIH syndrome... maybe a little, but less than it might appear. It's absolutely true that pretty much all of the Google infrastructure is home-grown. Partly that's NIH, but I think mostly it's because there's fairly little software out there that can function at Google's scale. And even where there are now publicly-available tools that can do the job, they didn't exist when Google created its stuff, and it doesn't make sense to switch.

Frankly, Google does have some pretty amazing tools, and I'm no wet-behind-the-ears pup who never saw what was in the world before joining Google, either; I had over 20 years as a professional software engineer when I started working for them. I went in expecting to roll my eyes regularly at all of the homegrown code that they could have just bought -- but frankly I don't see it much.

I do see a fair number of places that an industrial RDBMS like Oracle or DB/2, could be used and that would be faster for transactional applications than bigtable et al, and more reliable and easier to manage than massively-sharded MySQL (Google uses a lot of massively-sharded MySQL). But I can also see that using a COTS RDBMS would reduce agility and might be hard to integrate into the rest of the infrastructure -- and might run into scalability problems. Google's own stuff runs into scalability limitations, but at least we can fix it.

Outside of that... for dev tools Google uses pretty much the standard open source suite. For massive-scale process management, there just isn't anything out there to compete with borg, or the rest of Google's cluster management suite. I interviewed with a company that builds somewhat similar software, and so did some research on that space... and there's just nothing remotely like borg. Dremel, Borgmon/Monarch, Critique... same story.

For version control, Google uses Perforce, a commercial product, and about the only thing out there that could handle a multi-terabyte codebase which receives thousands of commits per day -- how many code repositories measure their performance in commits per second? However, I understand that Google has had to customize it extensively.

So, on NIH... not so much. Google engineers rarely look outside the company for stuff, but it's because they rarely need to, and if they do need something that none of the available tools can handle, there is rarely anything outside that could work.

To get hired, you have to use the Google way of doing things to solve problems.

Not sure what you're talking about there. To get hired you have to solve some pretty standard types of CS problems.