|
 San Francisco? No, Seattle, home of Microsoft Corp and Amazon and
fast becoming a second home for Silicon Valley companies looking to
access the city's plentiful pool of relatively cheap tech talent.
Microsoft alumni are now running the Seattle offices of Facebook
Inc, Twitter Inc and Google Inc, and they look to their former
employer as a source for new talent. Microsoft has always suffered
some loss of talent to competitors, but it now has to battle
attractive companies in its own backyard to hire the tech stars it
needs to reposition itself as a leader in mobile and the cloud.
"A lot of our top engineers are from Microsoft and they are doing
really well," said Rohit Wad, who leads Facebook's Seattle office
after an 18-year career at Microsoft. "The deep computer science
knowledge they have is directly applicable to a lot of work we do."
Facebook has more than 400 employees in Seattle, up from 125 only
two years ago, vastly outstripping the social network's overall
growth. It recently took over a second floor in its rented offices
to handle the overflow, and is starting to fill a third.
"There's a depth of engineering talent and experienced engineers
here," said Wad, whose team does a lot of work relating to
Facebook's platform and mobile development. "That's a big contingent
here in Seattle because we can get people who are proficient in
that. There is meaty, fulfilling work here."
Google now has more than 1,400 employees in two centers in the
Seattle area, with the engineering work run by Microsoft veteran
Chee Chew. Twitter opened its Seattle office in January and has
almost 100 employees under Jeff Currier, another former Microsoft
manager.
"We have a huge talent pool in the city," said Hillel Cooperman, a
former Microsoft executive who founded his own software firm and
design consultancy in Seattle with former colleagues called Jackson
Fish Market. "It's less expensive to hire them up here, so why
wouldn't you?"
Software developer salaries start at about $95,000 in Seattle,
compared to about $109,000 in San Francisco, according to recruiting
company Robert Half Technology. Washington was the fifth
fastest-growing state for computer-related jobs in the first half of
this year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Texas,
Florida, North Carolina and Oregon were the four fastest.
"It’s really hard to find great talent in any market, but the Bay
Area is a freakin' knife fight," said Brett Thompson, who runs human
resources and recruiting at Seattle-based data visualization firm
Tableau Software Inc. "That's why you see a lot of companies from
the Bay Area coming up here. It actually feels like there's a more
plentiful amount of talent in Seattle."
MICROSOFT, AMAZON ANCHOR
Microsoft and Amazon are the engines that power tech employment in
the Seattle area, bringing in thousands of graduates and qualified
programmers every year from around the United States and the world.
Many subsequently leave those companies, but don't want to give up
the laid-back, relatively cheap Seattle way of life. They often go
to one of the Silicon Valley invaders, or the rash of startups that
are becoming forces in their own right, such as Zillow, Tableau and
Zulily.
"Microsoft people tend to leave after their reviews in the summer
and then September when they get their bonuses," said Jerry Taylor,
president of Executive Recruiters Inc in Seattle, who has been
placing tech candidates in the city since 1977.
[to top of second column] |
Turnover has been heating up this summer, after Microsoft began
laying off 1,351 around the Seattle region in July, many of them
involved in testing Windows software. Microsoft currently has 1,289
vacancies in the area on LinkedIn, almost half of them with the word
'cloud' in the title.
Albert Squiers, director of technology recruiting at Fuel Talent in
Seattle, said the ripple effect of the layoffs was starting to be
felt in the region, and he has already been contacted by a handful
of job-seekers from Microsoft. Taylor said he has seen an "influx."
The ebb of talent from Microsoft is potentially damaging to the
software giant if it continues to lose mobile-savvy people to
younger rivals.
"I definitely think that Microsoft is challenged to bring in top
talent," said Scott Ruthfield, a former Microsoft and Amazon manager
who founded the tech recruiting and consulting firm Rooster Park.
"There are growth companies that tell a more exciting story."
Microsoft executives declined to discuss the issue, but a spokesman
said Seattle's growth as a tech hub was good for everybody: "It is a
boon to both the local tech industry and the overall regional
economy, and benefits companies of all sizes."
QUALITY OF LIFE
Despite the more frequent rain, many rising tech stars end up liking
Seattle more than the Bay Area for the space and low rents.
"People like the quality of life in the Pacific Northwest, the
outdoors, the traffic and the cost of living," said Megan Slabinski,
who runs Robert Half Technology's recruiting business on the west
coast. "Oftentimes, candidates are not as willing to relocate to the
Bay Area, once they live in the Pacific Northwest."
Shravan Goli, president at online tech job site Dice.com, a former
Microsoft employee now working in the Bay Area, said it was hard to
get his old colleagues to join him. California's state income tax is
as high as 12.3 percent for top earners, compared to zero in
Washington.
"There's a huge cost of living differential, and state tax," he
said. "I felt the pinch when I moved down."
One employee even kayaks across Seattle's Lake Union to work at
Tableau, which is now worth more than $4 billion after going public
last year and has expanded its workforce by 65 percent in the last
12 months.
"It's so hard to hire people now," said Goli at Dice. "That's
driving the necessity for companies to get more creative and find
other pockets, like Seattle, to go set up shop."
(Reporting by Bill Rigby, editing by John Pickering)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright
2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
