India: US high tech. companies luring employees with perks

The Times of India

Silicon Valley lures recruits with iPads, haircuts, desks with view
Claire Cain Miller & Jenna Wortham, NYT News Service

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.

The company, a service to turn cellphones into credit card readers, lured 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. 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 said it recently lost an intern when one of the biggest start-ups offered the candidate a 40% 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, COO at Square, where Firestone works. "Recruiting in Silicon Valley is more competitive 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, as the flow of personal or venture capital investing has picked up. In Silicon Valley and other technology hubs, start-ups are sprouting by the dozen, competing with well-established companies for the best engineers, programmers and designers.

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.

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