d**n
发帖数: 3172 | 1 Silicon Valley Hiring Perks: Meals, iPads and a Cubicle for Spot
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and JENNA WORTHAM
Published: March 25, 2011
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SAN FRANCISCO — Eric Firestone began a new job at a Web start-up here three
weeks ago, and he’s already thinking about what he might do next. But that
’s
just fine with his new employer.
Enlarge This Image
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Keith Rabois, third from right, Eric Firestone, fourth from right, with
engineers at Square.
Enlarge This Image
Ben Sklar for The New York Times
Jeffery Kissinger and Danielle Trencher at a tech company recruiting party
at the South by Southwest festival in Texas.
The company, a service to turn cellphones into credit card readers, lured
Mr. Firestone from Apple partly with an unusual pitch: it promised to give
him weekly lessons about starting his own business someday, including how to
find venture capitalists to finance it.
Mr. Firestone, a 28-year-old software engineer, said he could try to get
financing for a start-up from venture capital firms now, “but I feel like
I’d be having a hard time. Here you get to learn.”
Computer whiz kids have long been prize hires in Silicon Valley. But these
days tech companies are dreaming up new perks and incentives as the industry
wages its fiercest war for talent in more than a decade.
Free meals, shuttle buses and stock options are de rigueur. So the game
maker Zynga dangles free haircuts and iPads to recruits, who are also told
that they can bring their dogs to work. Path, a photo-sharing site, moved
its offices so it could offer sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. At
Instagram, another photo-sharing start-up, workers take personal food and
drink orders from employees, fill them at Costco and keep the supplies on
hand for lunches and snacks.
Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out
of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a
few months ago. That is so far above the industry average of $80,000 that
start-ups cannot match Google salaries. Google declined to comment.
Two executives at a small start-up who spoke on the condition of anonymity
said it recently lost an intern when one of the biggest start-ups offered
the candidate a 40 percent bump in stock options, potentially worth hundreds
of thousands of dollars — but only if the candidate accepted the job before
hanging up the phone.
“The atmosphere is brutally competitive,” said Keith Rabois, a Silicon
Valley veteran and chief operating officer at Square, where Mr. Firestone
works. “Recruiting in Silicon Valley is more competitive and intense and
furious than college football recruiting of high school athletes.”
As the rest of the country fights stubbornly high unemployment, the shortage
of qualified engineers has grown acute in the last six months, tech
executives and recruiters say, as the flow of personal or venture capital
investing has picked up. In Silicon Valley, along the southern portion of
the San Francisco Bay in California, and other tech hubs like New York,
Seattle and Austin, Tex., start-ups are sprouting by the dozen, competing
with well-established companies for the best engineers, programmers and
designers. At the same time, all the companies are seeking ever more
specialized skills.
And there has been a psychological shift; many of the most talented
engineers want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, not work for him.
Shannon Callahan, who recruits engineers for the venture capital firm
Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio of companies, said a third of the engineers
she called ask for financing to start their own companies instead.
“They have that entrepreneurial spirit and you want to talk to them because
you know they’d do great in a small environment working a million hours a
week, but those folks are saying, ‘Actually, I think I want to do my own
thing,’ ” she said.
In an only-in-Silicon-Valley twist, start-ups are acknowledging this
phenomenon by recruiting ambitious engineers with promises to help them to
leave someday to start their own, potentially competitive companies.
“It’s less about us competing against start-ups and more against the
person
who wants to start their own thing,” said Dave Morin, co-founder and chief
executive of Path. Mr. Morin, an early Facebook employee, knows the type
because he was one of them. He tells recruits that he will help them start
their own companies down the road, by advising or investing in them.
Redfin, an online real estate brokerage in Seattle, sets up one-on-one
meetings between recruits and venture capitalists on its board to talk about
starting their own companies, and runs twice-monthly classes on
entrepreneurship — a perk that Redfin says has helped attract and retain
recruits.
“It helps people stay but also helps them to go,” said Glenn Kelman,
Redfin’s chief executive.
At Square, the co-founder and chief executive, Jack Dorsey, who also co-
founded Twitter, gives employees 20-minute lessons on topics like how to
raise venture capital. Every employee can view Square’s product plans and
financials to learn about building a business.
Nationwide unemployment among computer scientists and programmers is higher
than in other white-collar professions — around 5 percent — in part
because
many jobs have vanished overseas. But even with a glut of engineers on the
job market, few have the skills that tech companies look for, said Cadir
Lee, chief technology officer at Zynga.
Colleges rarely teach the newer programming languages like PHP, Ruby and
Python, which have become more popular at young Web companies than older
ones like Java, he said. Other skills, like working with large amounts of
data and analytics, can be acquired only at a few companies.
“There are few programs that actually teach those things, and yet that’s
the
primary people we hire,” Mr. Lee said.
Tech recruiters have also expanded their searches. They still scout college
campuses, particularly Stanford’s computer science department, where this
year it was common for seniors to receive half a dozen offers by the end of
first semester. But since college degrees are not mandatory, recruiters are
also going to computer coding competitions and parties, in search of talent
that is reminiscent of the dot-com mania.
The push to impress recruits was fully evident at the dozens of parties
hosted by tech companies at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex.,
this month, where start-ups tried to one-up each other with free beer,
sushi, cocktails, ice sculptures, costumed acrobats and big-name bands and
D.J.’s.
SimpleGeo, which makes tools for smartphones, was co-host at a dance party
at the festival. Jay Adelson, chief executive of the company, explained that
the festival was an ideal place to find talented engineers.
“The message being sent is that this is a cool, cool place to work,” Mr.
Adelson said. “That matters when you are a young, hipster developer.”
A version of this article appeared in print on March 26, 2011, on page | d**n
发帖数: 3172 | 2 KEY POINTS: 本科八万是差的了。
Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out
of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a
few months ago. That is so far above the industry average of $80,000 that
start-ups cannot match Google salaries. Google declined to comment. | d**n
发帖数: 3172 | 3 上级指示在这里：
Nationwide unemployment among computer scientists and programmers is higher
than in other white-collar professions — around 5 percent — in part
because many jobs have vanished overseas. But even with a glut of engineers
on the job market, few have the skills that tech companies look for, said
Cadir Lee, chief technology officer at Zynga.
Colleges rarely teach the newer programming languages like PHP, Ruby and
Python, which have become more popular at young Web companies than older
ones like Java, he said. Other skills, like working with large amounts of
data and analytics, can be acquired only at a few companies. | m*******i
发帖数: 8711 | | d**n
发帖数: 3172 | 5 几个月钱进GOOG的，一把就比现在进的少两万，虽然赚钱，但很不是滋味阿？//SOUR
GRAPES | z******i
发帖数: 19 | 6 几个月前刚进的据说都赶上了25% raise 现在新进的，其实比几个月前进的工资还低点
【在 d**n 的大作中提到】
: 几个月钱进GOOG的，一把就比现在进的少两万，虽然赚钱，但很不是滋味阿？//SOUR
: GRAPES
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