Web 2.0 Hire in the Press !

San Jose Mercury News  —- TODAY

Web 2.0 Hire in the press

 Web 2.0 Hire

Web engineers high in demand

Recruiting battles boosting salaries in Silicon Valley

By Ryan Blitstein
Mercury News

Article Launched: 06/01/2007 06:54:21 PM PDT

Zachary Taylor is a wanted man.

Part-programmer, part-designer, the 28-year old Oakland software engineer has an inbox filled with e-mails from recruiters trying to pull him away from his job at InsiderPages, a user reviews start-up in San Francisco.

Taylor’s at the forefront of a hyper-competitive battle for Web talent that’s raging in corporate office parks across Silicon Valley. This new war in the second Internet age has boosted salaries and more than doubled Web engineer job postings in the past year.

“It really is a battlefield,” said Tess Rogers, a longtime valley headhunter who recently co-founded Web 2.0 Hire, which focuses on social networking and other cutting-edge Web sites.

“Across every business, the demand is huge. It’s simple economics – not enough supply and increased demand.”

The hiring spree is leading to a replay of the first dot-com boom’s talent crunch – which peaked about seven years ago – and comes just three years after it was tough for many programmers to find any work at all.

This time around, companies aren’t giving away cars as signing bonuses. But salaries are soaring well into the six figures (plus stock options) for elite engineers, according to more than two dozen employees, recruiters and executives at start-ups and large businesses.

Most in demand are engineers like Taylor who are well-versed in Ruby on Rails, a computer code framework that allows programmers to more easily create attractive Web sites that deliver heaps of data; and experts in methods such as AJAX, the oft-used buzzword that describes a set of Web programming techniques that have become ubiquitous at Web 2.0 companies.

Web 2.0 is the term used to describe sites like MySpace and YouTube that let people communicate with friends and share videos and information online.

Taylor is among an emerging class of developers who make these sites fun, easy to use and capable of serving up flashy graphics to millions of people at once.

Consumer start-ups account for the bulk of demand for Web developer hires, but it’s not just these small private companies – or even Internet giants like Google – that are rushing after Taylor and his peers.

They’re joined by online business software start-ups like JackBe and more established on-demand companies like Salesforce.com; software and hardware giants such as Oracle and IBM; along with non-technology businesses such as hedge funds, banks and retailers.

Amid this new landscape, companies are looking for a new breed of engineer who can write code from both sides of the brain. It’s enough of a challenge to find developers who have Ruby on Rails or AJAX programming chops.

But the most sought-after also have a design sensibility and an intuitive understanding of how people communicate online.

Between early 2006 and this spring, corporate networking site LinkedIn tracked a 128 percent increase in Web 2.0-oriented job ads. Among traditional software companies, including IBM, postings asking for Web 2.0 developers grew 30 percent, according to LinkedIn’s data.

Two years ago, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of online job ads included the word “AJAX.” As of February, that figure is 25 times as large: those positions account for about one of every 400 jobs posted on the Internet, according to job search engine Indeed.

Although their resumes may include the same acronyms, though, the personality of an engineer who wants to work at Oracle is very different from that of a recruit at a small private company. There are exceptions, but traditional software companies generally have older employees who are more interested in a low-risk, stable work environment. For these businesses, it’s challenging to find candidates who are young enough in age or mind to have Web 2.0 expertise.

Taylor is typical of the many young engineers leaving the safe harbor of a big business job to seek their fortunes at a private company.

A self-taught programmer who didn’t attend college, he learned Ruby on Rails during his off hours while employed at business software company WebMethods. Intrigued by the prospect of working with Ruby for a salary and a chance at a hefty payout, he joined InsiderPages in April 2006. The company was recently acquired by Citysearch/IAC.

“An equity stake and the potential of a big exit is something IBM can’t offer you,” Taylor said.

Many tech giants are turning to universities to find a fresh supply of talented engineers who aren’t yet prejudiced for or against some types of companies.

“Each student has own motivation, values and preferences,” said Christopher Pohalski, a career counselor for engineering students at both UC-Berkeley and Stanford University.

“Some are looking for stability, such as at a company offering a leadership training program. Others want to be on the bleeding edge. They’re OK with a little bit of chaos and a lot of uncertainty.”

Stanford said many larger companies have doubled the number of computer science graduates they’re hiring, and UC-Berkeley added an extra day to its career fair this year to accommodate more recruiters.

Because they’re in the Bay Area, graduates of Stanford and UC-Berkeley are often more likely to join a start-up. So the bigger companies direct recruiting resources toward schools like the University of Illinois that have the same caliber of students, but without the start-up fever that has re-infected Silicon Valley.

The entry of large software companies into the Web talent war has also put a squeeze on small start-ups and established Internet companies, instigating them to fight harder for highly skilled developers.

The most successful talent-hunters are the ones with the best word-of-mouth connections, and they’ll give up scarce resources to find the best people.

Adam Rifkin and Joyce Park, co-founders of consumer communication site Renkoo, were so successful at referring their talented engineer friends to LinkedIn and Facebook, those two companies gave Renkoo free office space and room on their servers to host its site.

Taylor often fields calls from recruiters asking him to pass on names of talented members of the Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails Meetup, a networking group for engineers he founded last year.

With the drop in H-1B visas to bring in international talent and many engineers tempted to found their own Web 2.0 start-ups at low cost, offshoring might be the one thing keeping the Web 2.0 talent battle from exploding.

“The Web has enabled truly distributed development, so you can engage the talents of people who are located far away,” said Bob Lisbonne, a general partner at venture capital firm Matrix Partners who often invests in software and Internet companies.

“If everyone needed the same kind of person and they physically had to be located within 10 miles of headquarters, then you’d really have a labor crisis.”

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Contact Ryan Blitstein at rblitstein@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5715.