Startups, hiring and Xooglers...

I've read with great interest about the struggle many small companies face trying to recruit top engineering talent here in Silicon Valley. I find this surprising since just a short time ago I think I read about these same companies trying to ship their development organizations to India or China? So, which is it?

This is important to me since I expect to be hiring a few developers in the near future and curious about how difficult it's going to be. It's been my experience that it is always hard to hire top people, so why should '06 be any different?

The best people always have alternatives and as an employer you've got to convince a candidate that you are their best one.

One thing I can tell you is that I'm not terribly concerned with competition with GAMEY (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo) for hiring top people. Maybe if I needed to staff 50 or 100 people I'd bump into them trying to recruit the same candidate, but on a small scale (less than 20) I don't think it will be a major factor for three important reasons:

1. Great people want to make great contributions. I read at Xooglers about Ron, a guy from JPL that worked at Google for about a year. Ron was heavily recruited since he was smart and experienced. Ron's first project was to build AdWords:

So I was a little disappointed when I found out on day 1 that I had been assigned to the ads group. But that disappointment turned to dismay when I learned what my assignment was to be: I was the lead engineer on a new advertising system code named "adstoo", what eventually became AdWords.

Boy, talk about disappointment. Shouldn't a guy like Ron be helping to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'?

Sure, Adwords is important and vital to the success of the company, but do you really need certified rocket scientist like Ron to build it? Give me a break. To me, this project sounds a lot like enterprise application integration. Important, yes, but you never want to put your top guys on it. It's just too darn boring. They're likely to leave, just like Ron did.

Top guys want to change the world. Start ups have a plan to change the world. Start ups can attract top guys.

2. You don't need very many top guys. We all know that the best guys are worth their weight in gold. Alan Eustace, VP Engineering at Google clearly recognizes this. From the WSJ :

One top-notch engineer is worth "300 times or more than the average," explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering. He says he would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist. Many Google services, such as Gmail and Google News, were started by a single person, he says.

So if I'm a start-up, all I really need is a few top guys . In addition, it's more likely than not that the company was formed around such an individual in the first place. Otherwise, whoever is starting the company would hesitate to take on the risk in the first place. The really top guys can attract other top guys and before you know it, you've got a development team.

I realize that this doesn't scale, but when you're just starting out it works just fine.

3. Start-ups still can offer a great upside. Now, this might be disputable since the number of liquidity events for start ups has declined since the bubble, but things are slowly improving. In most cases I think a start up has more to offer than GAMEY.

Together I think these three reasons are sufficient to attract candidates to start-ups.