I joined linkedin this week, 16 hours later I was contacted by a Google recruiter "impressed" with my software engineering experience.<p>I listed my current job title 'Software Developer'. No description, no technical bullet points, nothing, just a title. Thats what they were "impressed" with.
How about the "5 million dollar bonus" (I'm guessing restricted stocks) to retain one top engineer? We must be switching over from brawn to brains in the human value chain, which is apt, as the ENTIRE value of NFL teams doesn't even equal the value of any ONE of the companies mentioned (Total value of Facebook is $50B while total value for combined NFL teams is ~37B for example). Either that, or we're in a bubble. I, being the incurable optimist, vote for the former.
I've noticed a spike in emails from recruiters for jobs/gigs in California recently, both from the companies cited (I've had emails from all 3) and from others. I've lost track of how many times in the last week alone I've had to tell recruiters "I'm not willing to move to California at the moment". Thinking of making a macro for it.<p>Also, I've come close a few times to telling recruiters to tell their clients to please discover the joys of ssh/sftp/dropbox/basecamp/email/irc/phone, ie. telecommuting. I'm increasingly finding it funny that employers care where my body is considering how an extreme gap there is between the demand for qualified engineers and the supply of available+interested+affordable ones.
No kidding! They keep stealing my people! ;)<p>Seriously though, it's been making things tough. We've really had to step up our game lately to make compelling arguments. Luckily, we have some advantages over those guys, like being able to push code live to millions of people with pretty much no bureaucracy.
Which is why for some reason's it's good to be an entrepreneur outside of California. Recently traveling to the US this was quite a revelation: being in Europe (Amsterdam) can also be a competitive advantage.
Anyone here in California not asked for a raise in, say, six months? Headlines like this mean the demand curve has shifted. If you don't communicate that fact to your bosses, they will likely not recalculate the market clearing price for your labor for you. (If it had gone down, on the other hand...)
"San Francisco's Twitter… has more than 400 employees and plans to grow to 3,000 employees by July 2013."<p>Wow. Planned staff increases:<p><pre><code> Google: 25%
YouTube: 30%
Facebook: 50%
Twitter: 650% (over 2 years)
</code></pre>
That is amazing. I am very curious what organization and methods Twitter has planned to manage scaling up like that.