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

Top talent is always hard to find

[Taco Cowboy]

The number one problem is many top brains burned too brightly and sometimes they burn out too fast

I've been in the industry since the 1970's, have had worked with geniuses that could out-produce a contingent of code monkeys for any given task, and I've seen too many cases of burn-outs amongst those top brains

Re: Top talent is always hard to find

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not an interesting company to work at unless all you're interested in is a stable income with lots of perks.

Yeah, I hate that. The last thing I want in this world is perks. Or income. Or stability.

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they created (and they created software for pretty much anything) is the best in the world, even when it's painfully outdated.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.

Rubbish.

[Anonymous Coward]

1) This sort of data isn't easy to verify - if there's one thing my experience in recruitment has taught me, it's that a lot of people outright lie, exaggerate, or have a completely distorted opinion of the truth. For example, some of my "I've worked for Google" candidates have, on further exploration, been "I've worked for a company which had a contract with Google";

2) As my physics teacher, who once worked at NASA, put it (metaphorically - he wasn't a toilet cleaner),: "Even NASA needs people to clean their toilets". A big organisation is very likely to have some wonderful talent, but don't expect everyone at that organisation to be amazing. Indeed, for most positions, it's more important to have someone who fits in than it is to have an outstanding performer. You're NOT there to change the world, but to do a little bit of some bigger thing in a yet larger overall plan, and in most cases your creativity will not be exercised nearly to its full potential. The really bright people will thrive in a research position - and you'll find them in academia, in IBM, and even in Microsoft - but not in Pinterest, lol;

3) To follow on from that, "top talent" doesn't equate to a job offer from a major company. That just means you've succeeded in the interview process, which means you were well prepared for the interview process. It doesn't mean you've achieved anything. In the UK, about 50% of people who get into Oxbridge were educated privately (present company included). Yet the interviews are designed to teach potential, and obviously people who went to private school aren't inherently brighter - they're just better prepared. Never underestimate "cultural" bias in an interviewer.

tl;dr Someone who claims to have worked at a well-known brand isn't necessarily brilliant, nor even entirely honest. They will absolutely have desirable qualities for a major corporation, but these qualities may not be what you think they are.

Re: Other things too

[MadKeithV]

Agile is for Teams/projects without a clear goal, vast experience and wÃre nobody knows how to solve it directly.

So basically every project then?

Re:Time for devs to get to work then!

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is this? Some kinda of recruiter fellatio?

Like a recruiter cares if you sent them a nice email years ago? If you go through a recruiter you can expect that to be 10-30% of your salary going to them. No one picked you, they sold you. You are a commodity to a recruiter, you dumbass.

Why does shit like this get modded up?

That story doesnt even make sense. Contract workers with COBRA and vacation time and in-house recruiters?

$100k that this poster is a recruiter or has a significant other who is one. Or they're just trolling to start the day.

Re:There's a lot of jobs out there?

[ebno-10db]

Oops, forgot my main point. One of the most annoying and counterproductive things about Silicon Valley is its provincialism. They seem to be unaware of any part of the US outside of the Bay Area. Ironically, this is the exact opposite of the SV image of being cosmopolitan (or even "globalized", whatever the hell that means). It's also at odds with the way people talk about having broken down communication barriers. Do they think the only places the Internet is connected are the Bay Area and India? There are lots of smaller tech hubs in the US (e.g. Pittsburgh) where you can get top people much easier and cheaper than in SV. Why do these geniuses seem to ignore that?

I know some of the big companies, like Google, have facilities all over, but how much do they actually use them for "core development"? In the case of Google I honestly don't know, and any solid information would be appreciated.