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Google and Yahoo Creating Brain Drain?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jul 30, 2005 01:50 AM
from the slipping-googleward dept.
from the slipping-googleward dept.
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.'"
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Fortunately none of those drained post on /. (Score:5, Funny)
Great news for those not in the top percentiles (Score:5, Interesting)
In short: Good news if you're a B-rank engineer
Bad news if you're trying to diversify the industry
Re:Great news for those not in the top percentiles (Score:5, Insightful)
Brain drain only truly occurs when there's a lack of brains flowing to the industry or region, not simply because of a 'cornering of the market' on brains.
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Re:Great news for those not in the top percentiles (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Great news for those not in the top percentiles (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great news for those not in the top percentiles (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be afraid to submit your resume. If you have talent, Google knows how to recognize it.
(Oblig: These are my words and opinions, not Google's.)
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Re:Great news for those not in the top percentiles (Score:3, Informative)
Brain Drain = good for workers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Want a job? Suddenly you're not being selected from one of 1500 applicants, and it's not a case where employers can put any old conditions on work because everyone is just desperate for any old work.
Now employees are the ones who can pick & choose.
Not that much of a drain... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's that much of an issue....
Re:Not that much of a drain... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's that much of an issue....
When you are talking about engineers generally, 500 is a drop in the bucket. When you are talking about the top notch engineers, that's a massive brain drain.
Most engineers go about their lives, doing more/less commodity work, often of high quality, and live un-notable lives producing good works.
But there are a few, a very, very few, that have what it takes to really upset the apple cart. These are the top notch folks - those who change not only industries, but ways of life. For millions of people.
It takes a very small number of these guys to change the world. And, right now, they're all flocking to google/yahoo.
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Re:Not that much of a drain... (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right about the small number, but we won't know just who will be among those who change the world until they suck it up and just do it.
Re:Not that much of a drain... (Score:4, Insightful)
As it is, most people have to work for a living, working in fucked up organizations, for fucked up bosses, being frustrated all the way.
Google isn't really doing anything no-one has thought about doing before, it's just that their propellorheads are given an ability to execute.
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Re:Not that much of a drain... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Um... okay (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they want to work there because they're competing against Google.
PR article for Yahoo (Score:5, Insightful)
It kind of seems to me like they mentioned Yahoo for a lark in this article.
Actually, I'd bet you dollars to donuts that this article was "seeded" by a PR firm in the employ of Yahoo. Their goal: create the impression that Yahoo is second only to Google as a search engine and an employer of Smart People. Make Yahoo seem cool like Google is. For example, the sentence "Yahoo also carries substantial geek cred."
Paul Graham unveils this concept in great detail in his essay The Submarine [paulgraham.com].
Notice the number of quotes from Yahoo employees vs. the number from Google employees, the insider information about Yahoo's future plans vs. the use of facts you already knew about Google anyway.
Bet.
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You're Kidding... (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft can hire anyone but their product sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has good pull to get people, but even better management. There are tons of talented people - the whole superstar thing can be folly. It's about a culture that permits creativity and innovation.
When you've got people at Microsoft worrying about uttering the word podcast, you can see that they are losing their relevance by the moment. It has happened to many giant companies - as they phase from entrepreneurial and flexible - to arrogant and rigid.
Layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Layoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM and HP both recently laid off 14,000 workers each. There should be plenty of brains out there, available for work.
IBM and HP didn't fire their top engineers.
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Re:Layoffs (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Layoffs (Score:3, Informative)
Your new to layoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Layoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering the huge number of layoffs over the last five years, that was my thought, too. There is no shortage of software engineers, and there hasn't been one for well over a decade.
What there is a shortage of is American developers willing to work for the same wages as receptionists. Every time large companies start bitching about a shortage of tech workers, it's a lead-up to increasing the H1B quota.
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Re:Layoffs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Layoffs (Score:3, Insightful)
Engineering is applied physics. Development is applied mathematics. So, you are correct. Developers are incorrect to call themselves engineers.
Secondly, there is a difference between software development and computer programming, which I think you are attempting to blur.
Secondly, why would a programmer have a right to work for more than a receptionist. Receptionists have a much worse job, it's only fair and democratic that those with more stimulating j
Brains Not Draining (Score:4, Insightful)
The emigration of a large proportion of highly skilled and educated professionals...
The emigration of highly educated workers...
The migration of skilled workers out of a country...
depletion or loss of intellectual and technical personnel...
A "brain drain" is caused by the depleted organization. In all of these definitions the emphasis is on the loss of brains. Where they go and what they go on to do isn't specified. An oppresive communist regime could see its top intellectuals flee the country, and have those intellectuals go somewhere free and just live normal non-intellectual lives and it would be "brain drain". What's described in this story isn't so much about companies losing out on talent, "brain drain", rather it's about the companies gaining it, i.e. Google and Yahoo. Besides, brains aren't in limited supply. It's not like one's gain is another's loss. If anything this means that brains become more economically in demand.
So what's the problem exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Google and Yahoo can attract the nerds, and you can't, that's your problem, isn't it?
Yeah right... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Some companies bitch about some other companies who are paying more than they want to pay their own employees, employees leave, and outsourcing to India doesn't work that well. MBAs have to double their prozac dose to cope."
Re:Yeah right... (Score:5, Insightful)
To keep your rent below 40% of your takehome pay, you need to be making 70 grand a year after taxes, so like 100 grand gross.
And heaven help you want to want actually buy a place...
So yeah, you're damn tootin' I'd hop on to a higher-paying, more successful company under these circumstances..
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Re:Yeah right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Japanese engineers can impose technically-motivated decisions on the MBAs. This has happened with auto features: the engineers insisted on certain features, while the Japanese equivalents of the MBAs said "they cost too much". In Detroit it goes the other way.
So I'm missing your point about "incompetent, raw-fish eating yes men." The Japanese car companies are better run companies (and better to work for) than Detroit.
And I suggest you try working for/with a bunch of Indians (or greasy American MBAs who see them as the way to get away from crabs like me). Maybe you'll sing a different, less-PC tune. India has around a billion people. There are many smart, driven ones in there. And there are a lot of striving liars who will say anything to make a buck.
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That's about right (Score:5, Funny)
So provide equality (Score:4, Interesting)
- Free high quality lunches instead of reducing lunch hours etc as many presently try to do.
- Gave something comprable to the 20% personal project time.
- Treated techs that "keep the $100'000 network thats critical to the business from screaming to a grinding halt" with respect at least equal to the tool with the MBA that just tossed 100 blue collars out on the street after 40 years so he could get his xmas bonus.
The manager and the engineer (Score:4, Insightful)
* If you can enthuse your team as to what they're doing, that's a point. Enthusiastic people produce much better output than uninterested people. That's different from just enjoying the job -- having a jacuzzi in the office may make the job more enjoyable, but it doesn't necessarily make people enthusiastic about what they're doing.
* If you can pick up on what people's various triggers are, and adapt to them, that's a point. Some people like being presented with competitive environments, some people feel overwhelmed by them. Some people hate being told what to do -- it may be better to "guide" these people, ask them the same problems that you're trying to solve and let them come to the same conclusions you've reached, and other people feel more comfortable if they have clear instruction. Some people don't get work done without a clear schedule, and other people can't stand not having flexibility. Some people work best in serial -- one task at a time -- other people prefer being able to switch around between tasks. A good manager is going to be able to treat different employees differently, each as a different tool he can use to solve a problem, rather than try to force everyone to follow a particular mold.
High-level execs get a lot of flack on Slashdot. I haven't had to interact with these folks much, so I'm not really informed enough to make too much of a judgement. But consider, for a moment, what their role is (and ask yourself whether there is skill involved in it).
When an engineer is working on a problem, he usually gets to work on something that he's had the ability to specialize fairly much around. If someone, say, a vendor, starts feeding him technical bullshit, it's easier for him to figure out that something is up, because he's got a good deal of knowledge in the field. He has to know his field *intimately*, and there is generally little room for error -- if you're wrong about something from a technical standpoint, you are *wrong*. On the other hand, he does have some advantages. The things he's working with are fairly straightforward -- complex, perhaps, but they do something, are intended to do something, and if they aren't, something is wrong. It might be material used in a bridge or chips in a product, but this pretty much holds. He generally has tools that can let him get accurate information about any problems -- it may consume time to do so, or even be somewhat difficult, but if he wants to he can probably diagnose problems to a high degree of accuracy.
An exec has to run organizations that deal with things that he does not have the luxury of specializing in. He *knows* that he doesn't know the details of what he's working with, so he's essentially blind-fighting a bit. A vendor *can* sell him a line of bullshit on technical matters, because he hasn't had the time to specialize in a field. The things he's working with are usually groups of people that have all sorts of agendas, and frequently are not giving him accurate information -- how much funding they *really* could get by with, whether they really believe that they can still finish their project, people who are busy passing the buck and so forth. If he wants to have an engineer review a vendor's claims, he doesn't know whether or not the engineer may be claiming more knowledge than he really has, or may have bias, or whatnot. So he lacks the precision diagnostic tools of the engineer, and has no hard guarantee of being able to obtain accurate information. The upside of being an exec is that mistakes may lead to softer failures than technical mistakes -- you can do something "sort of right" and still have it work quite well, and not have anyone really be able to easily call you out on it. Someone who's really good at handling these tools and working within this kind of system *can* be really v
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I don't and do feel sorry for these companies (Score:3, Insightful)
-M
aw... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is Google the next Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google the offers most popular network features, the OS, and the applications.
Every time something new comes along Google ties its version of that into its vast array of other services, and people gravitate towards it by default.
How is this different then Microsoft bundling IE?
Consider that others had map systems before Google. In the future, will Google get criticized for abuse when conglomerating new services into it's site?
I ask this because the line between application and website is getting blurred, and it seems to me that popular opinion on slashdot is that a monopoly should not bundle applications. How will we reconcile this in the future?
Re:Is Google the next Microsoft? (Score:4, Funny)
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Google is evil, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Google sued for firing executive pregnant with quadruplets
News.com is running the story Google hit with job discrimination lawsuit [com.com], which describes how
"Christina Elwell, who was promoted to national sales director in late 2003, alleges her supervisor began discriminating against her in May 2004, a month after informing him of her pregnancy and the medical complications she was encountering, according to the lawsuit filed July 17 in a U.S. District Court in New York."
In May 2004, after she became pregnant with quadruplets and during the same month that she lost two of the unborn children, her superior told her that her job as VP of national sales had been eliminated and requested that she take a job in Google's operations division, a position for which she had no experience. Google refused to allow her to take the lower position of East Coast regional sales director, instead firing her and hiring someone with no Internet sales experience.
In mid-June, another Google executive offered to place Christina in the operations job she had already rejected, while in the same email accused Christina's husband of "acting under false pretenses by telling Google that Elwell was having a health crisis".
After Google's director of HR confirmed that Christina had been terminated improperly, she accepted the lower ranking position offered, but then lost a third unborn child and within two days of returning to work on July 19, her doctors ordered her to cease her work because the stress that Google and her supervisor were putting her under created an even higher risk of losing her remaining unborn child.
After she returned from disability leave, rather than allow her to work in sales, Google fired her.
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Re:Google is evil, too (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the pregnancy turned out to be demanding as well, making it so that she could not perform up to her prior level. They tried to do the right thing by moving her to a less demanding position rather than fire her for dec
At risk of being modded a troll... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for start-ups, well, it seems just that tad unlikely that many start-ups could afford the former Vice President of Amazon.com. So it's hard for me to cry too hard.
The other important thing to consider is that most IT folk do their best work young and fresh out of college. They're not "old hands", they're "young minds". The real innovators are almost invariably people who haven't learned yet that what they're coding is impossible.
There ARE coders who know something is impossible, but code it anyway, but they are relatively rare. If a start-up wants the absolute best (and at rock-bottom prices), then it needs to go after the recently-graduated. Better yet, the start-up should find hot talent prior to University and sponsor them through it in exchange for part-time work during University and a contract at the end.
The reason youth is important is that old-hands tend to get stuck in a rut. They get used to doing things a particular way and loose the ability to step back and see what it is that is really going on. Look at any online resume of an experienced coder. Odds are, most such folk have a very few skills they have honed to perfection - with the consequence that they can do next to nothing with them.
Now, look at the people who are experienced but who are ALSO doing some damn good work. Odds are high that they'll have a much more diverse range of skills, are much less in some mould or other and likely have a more "Classical" background or education, where diversity rather than finesse was appreciated.
Also, America's work habits burn people out very quickly. No real vacation, no time to recharge, the ideal is to "produce" not learn and the Corporate Culture is king. It is doubtful America's high-tech industry can take much more of this kind of abuse. Something has to give.
Re:At risk of being modded a troll... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason youth is important is that old-hands tend to get stuck in a rut. They get used to doing things a particular way and loose the ability to step back and see what it is that is really going on. Look at any online resume of an experienced coder. Odds are, most such folk have a very few skills they have honed to perfection - with the consequence that they can do next to nothing with them.
In my experience, people get stuck in some niche as a "specialist" because of the people around them perceiving the
this is good (Score:4, Insightful)
And CS enrollment is declining too. And interest rates are low.
This is better than a bubble. Companies in the black are in a bidding war for us and the competition 5 years out is evaporating. Interest rates are still at "OMG if we hike it we die" levels.
Good times man, Good times.
I survived the last bubble and I'd have to say that the waters are chummed. Prepare yourselves for some forced coding marches and invest the spoils for the long haul.
Lets Face Facts (Score:3, Insightful)
Now days, companies are looking for competent people. That means you will often have to prove that you are what you say you are.
The hordes of people, on Slashdot even, who sit here and balk at having to take relatively simple CS proficency tests and claim that there are no jobs for CS at all are the ones who got their CS degrees without really learning anything or having any actual proficency in the first place. On the other hand, the real geeks are getting jobs left and right and companies want more people like them - they can't find enough! The only people who need to worry about outsourcing are those who don't make the cut.
This is the market at work. It is a great time as ever to go into CS. Its just that this time, you will not be able to slack off and make it. You're going to have to prove yourself.
Nothing a start-up can do (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who does't want his own talent product marked with "Google®" or "Microsoft®" should go for a start-up. That's all anyone can do about this brain-drain.
In India, M$ is paying a fresh graduate around Rs. 7,50,000 which is way higher than the average of Rs. 2,80,000. Not to say anything about extremely flexible work hours, relaxed/no dress-code etc etc. Now, which one would you chose? A start-up with no guarentee to see light in next decade or a high-paying software giant?
Not to worry.... (Score:3, Funny)
Unfortunately, it's with unskilled labor, takes 9 months to produce and over 20 years to even start being useful.
How do you spell horseshit? (Score:3, Insightful)
boo fucking hoo. If there's only 250 competant engineers in the US looking for work then there's a much bigger problem than a 'brain drain' between companies.
There was a time when companies actually trained people out of college. Actually, now that I think about it, there was a time when companies actually hired people out of college.
New engineering logo of america:
Build us a bomb, or live with your mom.
Re:I smell bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Frankly? (Score:3, Interesting)
For every one of t
Larry Tesler (Score:5, Informative)
Larry Tesler is about as far from a PHB as they get. He worked on the Xerox GUI machines back in the glory days of PARC. Then he worked as Cheif Scientist at Apple for almost two decades. The dude ported most of the Newton code to DYLAN during his 6 week sabatical. More recently he was involved with some Smalltalk based early childhood GUI "programming language". Stagecast software I think it was called. I didn't realize he ended up at Amazon for awhile.
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Yahoo! search has surpassed Google search. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've spent the last few days doing some very important searching - we're thinking about launching a new product in a rather arcane field, and I want to be absolutely certain who the potential competition might be - hence I decided to search both Google & Yahoo!.
Guess what? Yahoo! search beats Google search, hands down. Not even close.
Two thoughts: