Wow, Silicon Valley has been so quiet the last 48 hours. John Battelle, Om Malik, Silicon Beat, and Jeremy Zawodny have taken much-needed breaks after an exemplary year, and even the tireless Michael Arrington has slowed his posting down to a trickle for the last few days. Leaves me some much-needed time to catch up on working...
And while I was working, I got to actually spend some time thinking! And I realized that in 2005, I've met with the founders of dozens of startups, and something universal among all of them surprised me:
They all lose sleep at night trying to figure out how to attract more technical talent.
Nearly every one of them has asked me if I know of any good AJAX [sic] developers. This is such a switch from just a year ago, when it was a significant challenge to convince most startup folks that using just the simple and flexible mix of Dynamic HTML, JavaScript, style sheets, and a DOM-capable browser, companies could build amazing applications! (Was it only than two years ago that O'Reilly's ETech 2004 Program had nothing about JavaScript or Dymanic HTML?)
The bottom line? Hype about the benefits of technical outsourcing, offshoring, eLance, and Rent-a-Coder has been overblown. Technical teams who work well together are measurably more productive -- finding, hiring, and retaining top technical talent is challenging because the pool of such people in Silicon Valley is still relatively small. For example, this year I watched Google and Yahoo! insatiably search the globe for Dynamic HTML masters to slurp into their ravenous organizations. They literally cannot find people fast enough.
And it's not just Dynamic HTML talent. Nearly every company needs PHP talent, many of them want Python talent, and though Java is increasingly less useful for web-based applications, some of Silicon Valley's emerging stars are covetous of Java developers as well. I know at least two well-known startups that have been looking for decent senior Java engineers for over a year. To be engineering-resource-constrained as a startup is to grow more slowly -- so now the venture capitalists have joined in the effort to recruit top technical talent to their companies.
I do not believe this trend will stop any time soon. A company is only as good as its people -- and more productive technical talent is a huge differentiator. The long winter of discontent with engineers (and especially web devs!) during the first half of this decade, in which technical talent was mocked as commoditizable, has given way to a much more engineering-friendly environment where people with specialized skills are far more appreciated.
It's a good time to be a Dynamic HTML, PHP, or Python engineer in Silicon Valley. And even the Java engineers are getting some love.
Demand is good, it helps one find a job, but not necessarily do well. Think underemployed, when a $1m house mortgage exceeds $5.5k per month...
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/13440759.htm
From a job point of view, Web development is still at bottom of food chain. Circa 1999, when developers at say Informix, etc were thinking whether they should leave they 110k+ jobs for a 70k web development plus options for a web 1.0 company.
When it comes to take home pay, software development has it's own food chain. In typical increasing salary are
Web developers->Java developers->C++\Client Server developers -> Systems programmers
and so on. Probably based on learning curve, experience, etc.
There are companies which will pay well for their best employees, but they are the exception. Check dice.com or hotjobs to compare salaries.
I would think, when the seniormost web developer gets in excess of 160k per annum, it might be worth a career.
Thoughts?
Amit
Posted by: Amit C | December 27, 2005 at 12:48 PM
I agree with most of what the author claims. Live software may be the future; mobile access is key though. Any enterprise that can take grip of this enormous, ripe market will be able to garner substantial profit. The emergence of cell phone jammers, however, pose more questions than many care to answer. For details, check out 安特易屏蔽器.
Posted by: | December 28, 2005 at 05:58 PM
Amit, good point. Seniormost webdevs get paid a lot more than they used to, but it's still not on par with the best system and server-side developers.
As an example, consider the job announcement Why Jot for DHTML People...
And yet as part of the job skills required, they say,
So, should they pay DHTML rates or server-side rates for people with such job skills? You be the judge.
Posted by: Adam | December 30, 2005 at 01:44 PM
A non-sequitur: I love what I think is a typo in your post: "Dymanic HTML" -- a very apt description of all the Web2.0 stuff going on at the beginning of the new year.
"Manic HTML? I'm bleeding Dymanic HTML!"
--Etymological Bob
Posted by: Etymological Bob | January 01, 2006 at 09:18 PM
Oh man, I laughed out loud when I read that, Bob. :)
Posted by: Adam | January 02, 2006 at 06:14 PM