10% unemployment yet every startup in NYC struggling to hire

Could it have anything to do with most of them likely only wanting to hire people geographically in (or near) NYC? And hand-in-hand with that, the startups don't really want to pay something adequate for someone with the necessary experience to live modestly within commuting distance?<p>I know more people who have offshored engineering/dev work to India and the like than send work to developers in Nebraska, Kansas, Alabama, etc. Then they complain about the less than stellar work, with timezone diffs, English proficiency, cultural differences and so on.<p>There's a pretty large pool of people who are willing to work remote and - gasp - even travel to your main office sometimes, but who simply aren't going to uproot and live in NYC to make $100k. For someone raising a family, they could make $75k in Omaha or Tupelo and have a <i>much</i> better quality of life.<p><a href="http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&#38;l=nyc" rel="nofollow">http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23&#38;l=nyc</a> <a href="http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&#38;l=nyc" rel="nofollow">http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&#38;l=nyc</a><p>9400 Java jobs in NYC, but only 900 are estimated at $150k or higher.<p>Cost of living between Omaha (at 75k) and NYC: <a href="http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&#38;city1=53137000&#38;city2=53651000" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=75000&#38;city1=531370...</a><p>Cost of living between Nashville (at 80k) and NYC: <a href="http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&#38;city1=54752006&#38;city2=53651000" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=80000&#38;city1=547520...</a><p>You need roughly $150k in NYC to have an approximate lifestyle. Yet only 10% of the jobs pay that.<p>The concept of 'hiring' itself may be due for a makeover, and a 'JIT' approach to company development may be in the cards for companies struggling to hire the right people (which they'll likely lay off the moment things go south again).

It's because "every startup" is lazy and afraid to take risks. In the programming world, for example, everyone wants to hire someone who has 150 years of experience with each of C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, and node.js. Problem is, that is not possible. So the position goes unfilled.<p>If programming shops were willing to hire people fresh out of college with English degrees and teach them programming, they would probably do really, really well. But nobody is willing to do that, so college grads go without jobs and startups go without employees.<p>(Also, startups expect you to really drink that Kool-Aid. They want you to work 12 hour days, skip weekends, not take vacation, and "be loyal" to the company. Why would anyone do that when they can work 9-5 for 4x as much money at an investment bank?<p>Ironically, even the investment banks can't hire anyone, but that is for other reasons.)

Perhaps the reason startups are struggling to hire in NYC is not because there are too few hackers but because there are too many startups. Most hackers simply do not have aspirations to work 80 hours a week to make some MBA jackass rich off of his website which promises to revolutionize the world for apartment brokers, attempt to make print media relevant online, or sell last year's handbags at a discount.

I agree with the author that programming (not just "tech") literacy should be part of every curriculum, I don't think this will solve the unemployment problem.<p>Technology is very good at creating value, but not very good at creating jobs. All 72 tech companies in the S&#38;P 500 combined employ about 2.3m people [1], whereas just Wal-mart employes about 2.1m people. Those numbers are worldwide employment, but for reference, the US had 15m unemployed in November.<p>Even the breakout, unimaginable success that is Google only employs about 28,000 people. And I'm sure that for every hire Google has made, they've displaced many more people that used to depend on print advertising. (To be clear, I'm not saying that technology is net bad for the economy. Technology creates a lot of value for the individuals that work and invest in it, and for the economy as a whole. However, technology is not a massive creator of jobs.)<p>So unless startups become a multiple of the size of the entire S&#38;P 500 technology sector, they're not going to make a noticeable dent on unemployment.<p>[1] I compiled a spreadsheet (<a href="https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEtYWUJjcTRNNkxMRS1YZGRrd0E&#38;hl=en&#38;authkey=CJflxN0N" rel="nofollow">https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqpDDf0Sr4EXdDJMZEt...</a>) based on information available on Wikipedia[2] and through Google searches<p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies</a> and individual company pages

Sure, the U.S. could be promoting education in the science &#38; engineering, but blaming undergraduate institutions for not filling cubes (or exercise balls, yoga mats, etc) at a startup is completely off base. The job market is rough for recent graduates who were all but promised that the world is hungry for the skills their universities have tried to imbue upon them for an extremely large sum of money. Perhaps a small startup run by the campus Business School "idea guys &#38; girls" less than a decade out of undergraduate school themselves is not the most secure option for someone whose student loan interest clock just started ticking. Should anyone be surprised that a senior or recent graduate might rather wait the several months to hear back from a large consulting company (who are also in hiring mode due to layoff too many people in 09 &#38; are feeling client pushback on their broken offshore/onsite models)? The talent pool isn't as shallow as you would think. Startups buzz about "how to interview and retain a rockstar gurus" and end up looking for a walk-on-water engineer to work long nights for beans &#38; equity with no guarantees for success. Smart kids are malleable, and even if they leave college learning Ruby, Common Lisp, or whatever the flavor of the week is, they will need to grow on the job. Take a chance, offer competitive or better-than-market compensation, and grow your talent from eager minds that buy into your vision enough to feel financially comfortable and invested in the success of the organization.

Yes there's a mismatch between the jobs available and the skills of the unemployed. But the rest of the article is pretty much wrong.<p>Plenty of people aren't cut out for programming or just don't like it. Trying to force them into jobs where there not a good fit isn't good for anyone.<p>Business schools should teach a wide range of case studies from a range of sectors. Yes that includes farming and food logistics.<p>The beer company InBev ships $36 billion dollars a year of beer. That's more than market cap of Facebook. The Beer industry is probably worth more than the combined value of every startup featured on Techcrunch in the last year.<p>Let's not exaggerate the importance of our industry in the wider scheme of things.

The skills he mentions in the article should be taught on the job, not in college. The other problem I noticed, especially when it comes to fresh undergrads, is some companies want people who already have some exact skillset yet don't want to do any training of their own.

Programming is a rare and economically valuable skill. It's hard to train people to be programmers.

NYC startups are struggling to hire because there is a real shortage of skilled labor in the country including technology labor. The 10% unemployment reflects a surplus of labor that would normally be taken up by manufacturing jobs which we don't have since we became a service economy. The 08 crash was an excuse to fire legacy employees. We will never get the jobs back that we've lost.

So far, on Hacker News, the conversation has focused on hiring programmers, but the original article is broader than that:<p>"Despite all this unemployment, every startup I know needs to hire not only engineers, but also sales and operations team members. And this is not just bubble seed startup dollars at work."<p>In 2008 I tried to find a good marketer to work with a client of mine. This is a difficult task. There are many people who claim they understand online marketing. Finding anyone who is any good is very difficult. The noise to signal ratio is amazing.<p>Likewise when it comes to fundraising, pitching to investors, etc. It is tough to find the few people who are good.<p>Possibly part of the problem is that, even in this economy, the folks who are truly good are making really good money and don't want to invest time with a startup.<p>No doubt there are many folks out there who will one day prove their talent but they have not yet had the chance. The question then becomes, how to find them?

Part of the issue is that the 10% unemployment rate is not equally distributed across all demographics.<p>If we generalize the desired startup labor pool as college-educated adults over the age of 25, the national unemployment rate drops to 5.1% (<a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm</a>). I can't find a great source, but I'd also wager that when you factor location (NY metro) and industry (technology), the unemployment rate drops even further--almost to the point of natural unemployment.<p>If you fit this profile you shouldn't have a difficult time finding work, and hence we have a "war for talent" in the face of high, national unemployment.

Responding to previous comments, I would advise against using an Indian firm for a startup. I think overseas firms can do well when assigned routine work, like putting in a CMS where all the requirements are straightforward, or handling inventory and accounting. For exceptional circumstances (which is what a startup faces) you want people who can meet everyday in the same room.<p>Geographical distance is a major problem for small startups.<p>I worked on a project last year where the project manager was thrilled at the idea that he could hire Indian programmers for $10 an hour. I was in New York City, we had another programmer in North Carolina and another in Europe. The "CEO" was an investor who attended meetings 2 or 3 times a month. The project manager was basically the CEO, but he had no real power, since everything needed to be decided by the CEO. Myself and the project manager would have 3 hour conversations and decide on something, but then need to explain it to the CEO, whom we only saw a few times a month.<p>The project went nowhere.<p>From this, I conclude, it is best to have small team working in the same room, when doing a startup.<p>The team in India was unusually bad. Every time they committed code to Subversion, something broke and I would have to fix it.

1) because all us smart NYC programmers got the hell out of there during the "Silicon Alley" days.<p>2) Practically anyone who lives within 100 miles of Wall Street and can program, and isn't a completely dysfunctional human (and many who are), is doing something in the financial sector. It's a huge brain drain, and it's practically impossible to compete with on the basis of salary. To boot, you can't easily motivate these folks with options because A) NY doesn't have a reputation for churning out tech winners and B) these same people study finance for a living, so when you offer them some options or founder's stock, suddenly you're into a discussion of volatility premiums and Black/Scholes analysis of the present-day value of said stock/options.<p>It's just not a suitable place for a vibrant startup community.

How many startups really need rockstar ninjas? I mean <i>really</i> need them? As in the business will succeed if you have them and fail if you don't. I bet that number is actually very small.<p>But everyone thinks they're the special case.

Are you sure startups in NYC are struggling to hire?<p>A years ago, I was in the states under a F1 visa. I was looking forward to do an internship in NYC. I couldn't even get an interview. I spoke with at least twenty recruiters.<p>I was at that time an active OS contributor, I had commit access in projects like Rubinius or in Sputnik Tests (Google conformance test suite to test V8). I had also two years of commercial java programming experience, and personal projects in rails, sinatra and django. This was just after I finished a internship at Google.<p>What compensation was I asking for? Enough money two rent a room and buy food.

If kids in the NYC metro area don't have an opportunity to learn programming in grade school it's because the schools suck. Perhaps if parents cared about their children's education, they could just relocate to a more forward-thinking part of the country. I was tutoring AP Computer Science to the kids of Vietnamese immigrants in the midwest 12 years ago. I took "C" and "Hypercard" class in junior high school 20 years ago and I lived in a farming town in the middle of nowhere.<p>The real reason NYC has a shortage of engineers is because engineers don't want to live there. Aside from one or two cool startups and the Google office, most tech jobs in the area are in finance or "agency" style work.<p>"...selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&#38;L's where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker..." sounds like exactly the "Boiler Room" sort of startup most people with other employment options want to avoid.

"There's a massive misalignment between the labor pool and the job pool, and I blame our undergraduate institutions"<p>I don't, I just think the Rent Is Too Damn High.<p><a href="http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/</a>

Good, let them struggle.<p>Maybe someday they will learn that the only developers aren't young and just out of college.<p>There are plenty of good developers that are self taught, and there are also plenty of good developers who aren't in their 20's, but if you every look at the "about us" of these startups, and they have pictures, what do you see?

I still say, the tech market reigniting and the quantitative easing are strangely well timed. I have to wonder if the tech market is being inflated, because it is the one market that has not suffered decades of neglect. It could be a good thing, as the world does need investment in technology if we are going to hit the next whatever revolution now that the information age looks to be at the least maturing, investments in science seem to be the natural course to bring on the advancements for the next age. Unfortunately some of those ages dawned with investment in science for less than peaceful purposes. So if the industry is being inflated, then I supposes it is better than massive investment in military spending to bring about the next age.

Every startups is struggling because very few of those 10% live in NYC and have the relevant education or background.

I've hired a few technical employees in the Chicago area, and I found that it's almost impossible to find someone with basic reasoning skills. Most people I interviewed had very poor eyes for details, had a hard time spotting or understanding their own mistakes, making sense of novel situations, thinking abstractly or generalizing from specifics etc... This was true even among CS graduates from schools with decent reputations. I don't know why the pool is so bad or if it has always been this way.

I've noticed that many startups want people that are: a senior developer in new technology X, is good at Photoshop, and can design customer facing webpages. They also want to pay you well below market wages (because you should be happy to work for a fun company that has a fooseball table) and give you company equity in place of sub-market wages (which is a joke, because most startups are out of business within 5 years).

Because those 10% of unemployed folks are definitely highly-skilled programmers. Right.

<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617</a><p>High School dropouts are 15.7% unemployed. College grads are at 5.1%, basically full employment given job changes. <a href="http://bit.ly/3FWnbX" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/3FWnbX</a>

The resume/interview hiring process is severely broken in US. It is not the schools, it's the companies hiring, they are looking for some perfect holy grail but really need to just start hiring people and pick through the chaff. These startups deserve what they get making it impossible to even find their 'perfect employee'.

That 10% is the broader unemployment rate and includes all occupations. I believe the latest stats from the BLS peg unemployment among software developers at about 4%. Most good developers are gainfully employed, it's up to you to entice them away from what they're currently doing.

From my view the real problem is how valuable will English majors be at my startup. How long will it take them to get up to speed where someone doesn't have to hold their hand anymore.<p>I am really weary of hiring someone with zero programming experience. But not as apprehensive about hiring a programmer with little experience but some experience.<p>I'd be more likely to hire someone who was a self starter when it comes to learning programing over and English major who just couldn't find a job.

I know a number of quite proficient programmers with degrees or backgrounds in the classics. Some, to be sure, are of the generation where 8th-grade programming class wasn't really an option. I'd much rather see the primary and secondary schools teach human languages and mathematics than see them try to teach coding.

Then again, maybe the cranberry farmers and beer shippers are the people who are really running the world.

TL;DR version of anything like that: Those people aren't the ones that startups want to hire right now.

They prefer to hire a <i>highly skilled wage slave</i>.

To those hiring in NYC - I just relocated to the east coast from CA and am looking for opportunities in NYC. Feel free to reach out.

Let's see....bad weather, high rent, high cost of living, lots of wall street jackasses, too many damn tourists, and plenty of terrorist threats. And we haven't even started talking about silicon valley's tech culture and close proximity to Asia.