Google and Yahoo Creating Brain Drain? 307
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.'"
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
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.
Um... okay (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they want to work there because they're competing against Google.
Layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Brain Drain = good for workers. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great news for those not in the top percentiles (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I smell bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
In my experience true startups (which, of course, neither Google or Yahoo have been for a very long time) hire almost exclusively by personal referrals - in part because this way they know what they are getting. I've haven't taken a job anywhere but at a startup for over 20 years and every product I worked on is still being sold. If you ever get an opportunity to even talk to a true startup for a low-senior or higher position and it was not through a personal referal, be suspicious, be very suspicious -- the company likely lacks talent and therefore lacks contacts with talent and is likely to be in the category of startups who never deliver a meaningful product to anyone. Unfortunately, it is very hard to evaluate a senior developer based on a 45 minute interview - there's a lot more to maintainable production quality products than puzzles, programming problems, and passing knowledge of this week's TLAs. As Thomas Edison is purported to day "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent prespiration"
Great news for the rest -- NOT (Score:2, Interesting)
The top 500 (or top 1000 or top 10,000) will always be working for someone and by the talmudic logic of Mr. Ben Elgin, Mr. Robert Hof (in Silicon) Valley and Mr. Jay Greene (in Seattle), that "means" we have shortage and therefore, we must lay off another two hundred thousands of Americans replacing them with Indians. How 'bout shortage of newspaper hacks, based on the same "logic" and "data".
Re:Frankly? (Score:3, Interesting)
For every one of these "top engineers" there are ten others just as smart and more inventive who, for whatever reason, have never become known to the handful of people making high-level recruiting decisions. I know a guy, Quinn Tyler Jackson [members.shaw.ca] who developed the theory of adaptive, context-sensitive grammars and built a fast parser that could handle any language with no ad-hoc cruft. It can naturally parse ambiguous things like "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". Ten years ago, it parsed the Gospel of Mark starting with just a single noun in its tiny dictionary and only a couple of pages of rules. Is Google or Microsoft or Yahoo! knocking on his door? No, of course not. He doesn't already have a top spot in a top firm, so how good can he be, they figure... if they figure.
I have dozens of patentable inventions lying around. They are in various areas - no one company could use them all. I can't afford to patent a single one of them, and even if I could I couldn't expect to make any money from them without far more resources. Without a patent, I can't even tell anyone about them without giving up the rights. (Companies seldom will sign an NDA to see an individual's idea, and even if they did, how could I afford to enforce it if they broke the agreement?)
Companies don't hire inventors much - they want engineers. Inventors think up stuff, which is easy and fun for the inventor but risky for the employer; making it work is difficult and tedious for the engineer and indispensable for the employer. I'm just an inventive technician, not a top engineer who can not only invent but can get the resources or make the invention work all by himself if need be. So, basically, I'm screwed under the current legal and employment situation.
Some of these ideas could make a company with the right resources a lot of money; some already have. I wasn't the first to think of reconfigurable computing in the early '90s or maybe even the 4-bit lookup table as a "supergate", but I certainly did so before these things came on the market. Ultrasonic beat-wave sound projection, same thing. As an 11 year-old kid in 1983 I came up with an idea for a notebook computer design with two hinged flat panel touchscreens that I think is still better for some purposes than what is on the market now. In 1994/5 I invented a tree browser history which I still wish I could get in Firefox or IE. I have a whole class of interface ideas combining the control of the command line with the discoverability of a menu system. I've got all sorts of optic, acousto-optic, superconductor, magnetic, electrostatic, electronic, power-producing, energy saving, inflatable, legal, corporate, psychological, interface and social applications ideas - and unless something changes, no one will get any use out of them. I don't see any jobs out there for some one like me who doesn't want to sell his soul for a salary.
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.
Re:Google is evil, too (Score:2, Interesting)
She could have of course chosen not to have kids with this high stress job or perhaps when deciding to have them to be in a situation better one that is inducive to raising/having kids.
Something tells me that when your doctor says you shouldn't be working because of stress at job is dangerous to your children then perhaps you should think of a career change.
I'm not saying she should give up her working life in order to be a parent, but there are some careers I don't think people either male or female should consider having kids because it is neither beneficial for the job and even detremental for the kids development. The list of jobs include stock traders, world traveling vendors, and people who defuse mines/bombs for a living...
If your job includes so much devotion to the job that it causes problems for your children. Give up that job and find another one that lets you lead a less stressful lifestyle so devote more time to your kids as well as have enough money to raise your kids and send them to college or what have you...
Just because you make $300,000 doesn't make you a good parent... It's because you can be there when they first walk, you can drop them off to school (even if you can't pick them up), read them bed time stories, go to their games or events when they are in highschool and *gasp* even take notice on a daily basis of their schoolwork.
If you think being a great parent by buying your kids nice things to keep them entertained and then you only see them for the most an hour once a week, then perhaps you should re-evaluate your way of life, because that kid might not feel he or she really has you as a parent.
Sometimes this can't be avoid with things like military service, but even then thats only temporary and not a 20 year career in which you willing decide to not see your kids due to your effort at your job.
Re:Layoffs (Score:2, Interesting)
What arrogance. Firstly, computer programming is not engineering. 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 jobs get them in exchange for a lower wage.
There are millions of people who can push buttons on a computer, and millions more Indians who can do it for even less money, it's not the 90s anymore, you're not going to get VCs shoving money up your arse just because you can install Linux.
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 decreased output. But, she fought this logical move.
The point of the grandparent message was that this woman had several choices in this scenario:
- She chose sales, a demanding career by any standard.
- She chose to move up to an executive position, with tons more pressure.
- With all this pressure and the demand to perform, she chose to get pregnant.
- She chose to stay in the position, although she could not maintain her performance.
- She chose to fight a demotion due to lack of performance.
- She ignored her doctor's advice and stayed on the job, raising her stress, and risk to her babies.
This woman knew what she was getting in to, and all of the risks. She should take some responsibility for her actions. If you can't do the job, then you should not expect the position.