President Obama is gathering 100 leaders from across the U.S. for his jobs summit in Washington on Thursday to brainstorm how to create new jobs.
While the list of invitees is heavy on academics, labor unions, and business, it appears only two people from technology made an early invitation list: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat.
FedEx. Yes. Nucor. Yes. But no Microsoft. No Oracle. No Salesforce.com. What gives?
Yes, Schmidt is a key advisor to Obama. But his invitation, along with Whitehurst's, could have a lot to do with the fact that Google and Red Hat, unlike many of their peers, are actively hiring.
Red Hat and Google have thrived through the recession, perhaps suggesting that they have a clue as to what it will take to create new jobs in a tough economy, one that has seen 23 straight months of job losses.
Intriguingly, Google's hiring may be crimped more by a desire not to aggregate all of the best and brightest than an inability to do so, as evinced by Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz's comments at Supernova this week.
When I asked Whitehurst on Wednesday what he thought the two companies had in common, he was quick to respond: "open source."
It's an interesting observation. While the two companies use open source in different ways, their business models are actually more similar than different, and both depend on open source.
As I've written, both Google and Red Hat (along with Facebook and other new-school "software" companies) depend upon and help to create abundance--of code, of Web sites, of information--and then make money by filtering that abundance.
It's a model that works, and it's a model that heavily depends upon and contributes to open-source software.
It would be going too far to suggest that open source is the critical component of any successful technology business today, especially as just about every company now includes it in their offerings in some way. Plus, CIOs have discovered other ways to stretch IT budgets and keep their workers on the payroll, as Gartner advises.
But the mentality of open source--more with less, sharing code and expertise--does seem to be a hallmark of successful technology companies, and particularly at Google and Red Hat.
Microsoft likes to tout the cost savings that derive from paying Windows-skilled employees less money.
That's great, if you're an employer, but if you're an engineer who needs to feed her family, the money is in Linux and Mac OS X skills, as highlighted in a recent post on the site of the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre:
(Credit:
Indeed.com)
Of course, once you look past the operating-system data, it's clear that open-source skills do, on average, command less of a premium, perhaps because they're in more abundant supply. Because students are more likely to have JBoss or MySQL experience upon graduation than Oracle or WebSphere experience, for example, there is greater supply to appease demand and, hence, reduce salaries, on average.
This is almost certainly the reason that Windows skills command lower salaries, too: Microsoft has done a great job of seeding the education market with free or low-cost versions of its software, making Windows and other Microsoft technologies pervasive and cheap to learn.
Are these lower salaries necessarily bad? Probably not. So long as the demand for such skills remains strong, taking a lower paycheck in return for greater job security is probably worth it.
If you're a student hoping to get a job after graduation, your best bet is likely to aim for the largest and/or most resilient markets.
With open source increasing its share of enterprise computing, it's a safe bet to invest in open-source software skills. There's safety in numbers.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Silicon Valley was late to the recession "party," but the global financial crisis is causing companies to tighten their belts, leaving a stretch of Highway 101 relatively traffic-free and out-of-work entrepreneurs with some difficult choices.
A new report from the Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, as The New York Times details, indicates a 1.3 percent drop in Silicon Valley employment. That may not sound like much, but if you've driven in Silicon Valley lately in rush-hour traffic, you can see a real difference.
Not everyone, however, is being hit equally:
The report also showed that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest residents continued to grow. The percentage of households earning more than $100,000 a year rose to 42 percent in 2008, from 35 percent in 2002, while the number of households earning $35,000 or less rose to 20 percent, from 19 percent in the same period.
In other words, venture capitalists and successful technology executives are likely to weather the recession in comparative style, but the fire fighters, janitors, and rank-and-file technology workers are going to feel significant pain.
Importantly, such people really have nowhere to go: many live at a considerable distance from Santa Clara and other primary places of employment, commuting an hour or more to get to work each day. There are few alternative industries in Silicon Valley to absorb technology's outcasts.
This has always been a problem with Silicon Valley's technology-fixated economy, and it's about to get worse. Hope springs eternal in Silicon Valley, however, and clean technology and other cutting-edge technologies will almost certainly spur investment and, hence, jobs. In the long term, Silicon Valley will also benefit from a trend toward the creative class congregating in urban centers.
But that's later. For now, Silicon Valley won't be the land of opportunity for too many that support, but don't commensurately profit from, the technology economy. Move on, Tom Joad. Move on.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
TechCrunch has compiled a list of ex-Googlers' complaints (and sometimes praise) against the company. Considering the source, it's perhaps not surprising that not every (ex) Google employee loves her alma mater, but the criticism does suggest that working at Google is not necessarily like working for the Magic Kingdom.
On the hiring process:
Google actually celebrates its hiring process, as if its ruthless inefficiency and interminable duration were a sure proof of thoroughness, a badge of honor. Perhaps it is thorough. But I would be willing to wager that Microsoft's hiring process, which takes a fraction of the time, does not result in a lower-skilled workforce or result in a higher rate of attrition. And let me say this: if Larry Page is still reviewing resumes, shareholders should organize a rebellion. That is a scandalous waste of time for someone at that level, and the fact that it's "quirky" is no mitigation.
On the Google work/life balance (or lack thereof):
But along with the food came the Google lifestyle: if you were staying for dinner, it better be because you were working afterwards. It was frowned upon to leave right after dinner. I think a lot of people spent quite a bit of time either just before or just after dinner hanging out and not really being all that productive, which is nice for the mostly 20-something crowd, but I can sympathize with the people who have families that didn't fit in. I had my own reasons for not wanting to hang out at work, so I never really got that far into the Google social scene. And my experience was that the people who spent all their time at Google were the ones that ended up on the sexier projects or in charge of things.
As I read through the posts, it became clear that the bloom is off the Google rose, but that's what happens to companies as they grow up. Google has always been a great product, but it's becoming a great company. It has been making difficult decisions like layoffs and shuttering products, indications that it's living within its means and living according to Wall Street dictates.
In the process, Google is almost certainly going to annoy existing and prospective employees. That's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign that it's a normal company.
Microsoft is expected to announce layoffs soon. Google is laying off 100 of its recruiters as it slows hiring. (In case you're looking for a date, apparently Google's recruiting team is, ahem, well-favored in the aesthetics department.) Even Apple, as CNET's headline reads, is planning for life "without Jobs."
OK, so the "Jobs" in question is Steve Jobs, and he's scheduled to return to his day job in six months, but you get the picture.
The downturn is hitting open source, too. Despite earlier prognostications to the contrary, I'm hearing news of a swelling number of open-source companies that are shaving headcount, including some of the biggest names. (No, Red Hat is not one of them.)
I suppose that this was inevitable, as smart companies do smart things: when the economy tightens, these companies, along with leaders like Google and Microsoft, are going to ensure profitability.
I just regret to see good people released into the wild, and some of the people affected are very, very good (and mostly on the sales side, from what I've seen).
The point, however, is that no one is completely immune. That's not a surprise. But it is unwelcome news.
TechNewsWorld suggests that the technology industry may be relatively insulated from job losses in the recession. Yes, technology has its share of job cuts, and any cut is painful if you're on the receiving end, but there are bright spots in the economy.
Open source is one of them.
While the article points to a few different areas of technology that should comparatively thrive in a downturn, as I note in the article, open source is particularly well-suited to a troubled economy:
In a recession, headcount looks like a cost center, but open source can turn employees into profit centers -- or, at worst, into less costly cost centers.
Why? Because to the extent that you're savvy with repurposing others' code, it means you can write a lot less code while simultaneously getting a lot more done.
Google is perhaps the classic example of this. Google writes a heck of a lot of software, but it also borrows heavily from Linux, MySQL, various Apache projects, etc. Google arguably wouldn't be Google without open source, as it's dependent on the cost and flexibility advantages that open source delivers.
Enterprise IT can take a cue from Google and make its employees more efficient by encouraging them to use more open source, a topic that Google's Chris DiBona will be addressing at this year's Open Source Business Conference. For those that already do, you're ahead of the pack (and making a nice income as a result).
Do more with less. That's the open-source ethos, and one that should pay handsomely in a recession.
It's a rough market, and likely to get worse before it gets better. For those (developers or otherwise) who think they may need to be finding new employment soon, I'd highly recommend that you sign up for the Open Source Group on LinkedIn. New jobs are constantly being listed. Here are a few from today:
Open Source Jobs on LinkedIn
(Credit: LinkedIn)The group provides other useful information and services, but given the criticality of employment, it may be the first thing that catches your eye.
I'm asking the question about how to hire well in Latin America because of Red Hat's success in Latin America, as well as my own company's download rates and incoming leads from Latin America, but it could very well be generalized to, "How do you hire employees in areas where your company has no physical presence?"
I don't know. For months I've been meaning to hire a pre-sales engineer/consultant down in Brazil or Argentina, but I haven't the first clue as to how to find someone capable of working alone so far from the rest of the company's operations. If I wanted to do near-shore open-source development, I'd look at North-by-South, but I'm looking for full-time employees here.
In the US, Alfresco is widely distributed, but we all live in the same country. (Well, some of us live in Utah, some in Texas, and some in California, but theoretically they're the same country. :-)
We have people scattered throughout (Western) Europe, too. But this is different.
Anyone have a good experience hiring in a country far from most of your company's operations? Perhaps more particularly, anyone know if there are "gotchas" (tax laws, etc.) to hiring in Latin America, particularly Brazil and Argentina?
I spent some time today with the IT team of a large enterprise. There has been talk of an open-source job boom, but what I heard today suggested a relative dearth of critical open-source talent.
In this company's case, the IT team needs developers with deep MySQL experience. It's easy to get a cursory knowledge of MySQL or other open-source technology, but that's not what this enterprise needs. It needs someone that knows how to scale MySQL to hundreds of millions of transactions. It's not a question of whether the technology can handle it, but rather whether the administrator of the technology can handle it.
Ideally, enterprises would simply pilfer this experience from their competitors. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, since their competitors are also waiting on them to hire, train, and battle-test employees, so that they, in turn, can pilfer the talent.
This is a short-term problem, but I suspect it's a significant problem for now. One of the main reasons this company is sticking with Oracle for now (other than the fact that Oracle is working fine for them) is that it can't hire local talent to scale MySQL like it needs. As experience with open source goes "into production," I suspect we'll see a lot more open-source software go into production, too. We just need a bit more time.
Google is dominating Microsoft, right? Microsoft hasn't a clue, right?
According to a collection of blog posts from people that have worked at both Microsoft and Google, there's much more than meets the eye. In particular, it would appear that Microsoft, crusty thirty-year old that it is, has learned quite a bit about how to add process to enable (somewhat) smooth functioning at scale.
Google? Not so much.
As one ex-Microsoftie who joined Google, only to decide to return to Microsoft, puts it:
This orientation [at Google] towards cool, but not necessarily useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.
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