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.

Comments

Exactly this.

[fyngyrz]

Also, stop being anal about degrees, credit scores, old convictions, age, and health.

There's no programmer shortage. That's utter BS.

There's just a hiring pathology.

Re: Exactly this.

[Anonymous Coward]

If these companies were hiring a cook they would require 3 years experience working on an Ace cooktop, 5-years experience with Acme Food Supply, and be able to demonstrate the restaurant's recipe for their signature meat dish before being considered.

Companies didn't come into existence with their particular toolsets: they learned them, and quickly. Then they refuse to consider hiring anyone who doesn't already know them in depth.

Re: Exactly this.

[Shados]

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.

Re: Exactly this.

[ATMAvatar]

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.

Re: Exactly this.

[melchoir55]

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.

Re:No. Reciprocal loyalty is dead.

[phantomfive]

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.