Slashdot Mirror
If the Programmer Won't Go To Silicon Valley, Should SV Go To the Programmer?
theodp writes: "If 95% of great programmers aren't in the U.S.," Matt Mullenweg advises in How Paul Graham Is Wrong (a rejoinder to Graham's Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In), "and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don't, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like." Microsoft and Google — which hawk the very tools to facilitate remote work that Mullenweg cites — have shuttered remote offices filled with top talent even as they cry the talent sky is falling. So, is "being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located," as Mullenweg puts it, a big part of tech's 'talent shortage' problem?"
Chris Pepper also recently posted another reasoned rebuttal to Graham's post.
SV makes up only a small percentage of software dev firms. They're located all over the place. Instead of going to work in SV, why not work in Irvine? Santa Monica? Denver? Seattle? Phoenix? Huntsville? Hoffman Estates? etc etc etc?
And that's not even getting into the fact that many software dev firms allow you to work remotely. Who cares about working at Microsoft or Google if you can work at ADP or Northrop and live much cheaper?
The problem with the latter approach, is that programmers spend time when they arent working, thinking about the problem they are being paid to work on when they are working.
EG, they may have the sudden epiphany while playing super mario brothers, that they have failed to have while sititng in their cublcle, trying so very hard to push that solution out under great duress from their manager.
Or, as archimedes had his epiphanies-- In the tub.
This is not a new thing, and creative problem solving REQUIRES downtime to be effective. The people that insist "You arent applying yourself all the way, therefor I will ding you on your reviews!" are a problem, not a solution.
No matter what your industry is, some PHB is going to get into a position where they feel out of control and unproductive if they can't get instant gratification popping in on their people to micro-manage them. In-person meetings are a must for these people.
There is a shortage of programmers in the US. There aren't enough of them, in my locality, that will work for what I'm willing to pay. That's a national emergency.
Learn to love Alaska
I've had experience working with people remotely, and my experience has been that the problems scale with distance. Specifically, it's easiest to work with someone in your own office, a little harder to work with someone across the hall, harder still to work with someone across the country, and *quite* hard to work with someone across the ocean. By the time you get that far away, timezones become a major problem, and IT systems don't always work well.
From a business point of view, you have to look at the cost versus the benefits. I once worked with a group of people from India who reportedly cost 1/4 of what we cost. But we did some metrics that showed we were 6x as productive, so we actually cost less overall than them. The main reason we were more productive was that our local group was highly experienced in the specialized technology we were developing, whereas the folks in India were brand new to it. Also, the folks in India ran into numerous network and server problems that slowed them down. Evidently, nobody in The Big Corporation realized that they needed to spend money on IT, since this experiment was supposed to be about "cost savings".
Given time, the IT problems might have gotten ironed out, and the Indians might have developed the necessary experience. However, the India group had so much turnover that they never became experienced in that technology as a group. In contrast, we had some Indian folks who worked with us locally, stuck around (at least until they got their Green Cards), and were ultimately as productive as the rest of us.
Because it doesn't take very long, and the chef is likely to still be working there in 2 years.
In software engineering, the average time you can reasonably expect someone to stay working for you, regardless of salary or conditions/perks, is about 2~ years. Much less in startup hotbeds like SF.
Now, let say you have some reasonably complex stuff, not too crazy, but not trivial either...maybe you use slightly less common languages (let say Scala over Java...not obscure, but not everyone learns Scala in school), and it takes 4 months for someone to be able to be left alone and do their thing (I'm making numbers up) They still won't be amazingly familiar with your particular business/domain and the ins and outs for a year, and because humans generally always improve with time, they'll be at their peek at the end of the 2 year.
If you hire someone who already knows your technologies, you might be able to reduce that 4 months to 2 months instead. That's 2 more months of peek productivity at the tail end when your engineer is at their best. That could translate in hundreds of thousands, of even millions of dollars depending on the size of your business.
And that is why everyone's hunting down pre-trained people. Of course, then you have to weight that with the cost of not hiring anyone at all, and decide whats best.
The USA if full of talent that can't get employed because the cost of credentials in terms of time and money is much too high. Kids that excel in programming while in public school are told that after 12 years of a public education, they now need to slog through years of college and build a mountain of debt before they can apply their talent.
But without credentials, SV won't even look at you -- and they are mostly legally prevented from doing so .
Lots of foreign labor have the credentials, though, in part because their educational system is cheaper, less time consuming, and frankly less demanding of their students.
If SV will take a little time and reach out to high schools, they'll find tons of talent.
Of better, if they can create a credentialing body, they can more easily avoid legal pitfalls.
" is "being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located," as Mullenweg puts it, a big part of tech's 'talent shortage' problem?""
Yes.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Because it doesn't take very long, and the chef is likely to still be working there in 2 years.
In software engineering, the average time you can reasonably expect someone to stay working for you, regardless of salary or conditions/perks, is about 2~ years. Much less in startup hotbeds like SF.
...
And that is why everyone's hunting down pre-trained people. Of course, then you have to weight that with the cost of not hiring anyone at all, and decide whats best.
That's largely of the tech industry's own doing.
It is well-known amongst programmers (and anyone else who cares) that the only way to be paid the prevailing wage is to job hop. Employers refuse to give regular raises to keep their coders in step with market salaries. Furthermore, employers do not invest in their employees - training must be done on a person's own dime and their own time. In a worst case, the tools and technologies used in a workplace will stagnate, causing people to leave just so they're not left behind in the industry as a whole.
This would quickly change if the tech industry executives put more effort into retaining good people and less time into screwing them.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
This is the point of view of PHBs who don't understand human behavior at even basic levels. Humans have things like trust, loyalty, nesting instincts, and all the other things that make staying at a company for many years a reasonable expectation. There are software development shops *in the bay area* which have low turnover rates for their staff. Of course, in order to take advantage of those characteristics, you need to the prime them.
You cannot treat people like cogs in a machine and expect them to treat your organization like anything but a machine to draw resources out of until they can find something better. There is a prevailing attitude among people who run software shops that their people are there to be abused and taken advantage of as much as possible. I left one of those organizations early in my career for something much better, and the difference in my own sustained productivity levels really astonished me. I didn't realize how hard I was dragging my feet out of spite, apathy, and god knows what other negative emotions fostered by maximizing the alienation of your workforce.
PHBs think they're killin' it when they hire someone they know is worth 90k and pay them 60k. In fact, that person is probably hanging out until they can find a better job, and because they know they are doing that, they are contributing at the bare minimum level they think is necessary. Since it is impossible to quantify the productivity of an engineer (no matter how much you try to micromanage), this is NEVER a win for the company. And, no, seeing them in their chair for 50 hours a week doesn't mean they're doing more than 20 minutes of work.
No. Reciprocal loyalty is dead.
Exactly. Be loyal to people but never to corporations. The corporation will never be loyal back: it will lay you off as soon as it benefits the bottom line.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
While ago I worked for a venture-backed company. The code was an awful steaming pile of dog shit. But a few modules were much higher quality than the rest. Logical design, solid implementation, good comments, full test coverage, etc. The programmer who wrote them had only worked for the company a few months before he was canned - apparently management thought he sucked balls.
There's a huge difference between "interrupting yourself" after you've completed a section of code, and someone else interrupting you while you're in the middle of it. Taking a break helps.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.