Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#2Can't agree more. Hiring in Silicon Valley for early-stage startups now is impossible. Total Compensation numbers for software engineering is skyrocketing and you'll never be able to compete with FAANG companies. Sad reality but expected.
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#3"For each engineer that we hired in the Bay Area, we could have hired 10–15 outside of it. Everyone has heard of 10x engineers, but what they don't tell you is that the Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on them." This really surprised me, thought it was a big gap, but not this big
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#4"For each engineer that we hired in the Bay Area, we could have hired 10–15 outside of it. Everyone has heard of 10x engineers, but what they don't tell you is that the Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on them." This really surprised me, thought it was a big gap, but not this big
To be clear, this is SFBay Area vs India, not SFBA vs Midwest. We have excellent engineers in India (and other locations in the world); it's not nearly as easy or quick to build high-performing teams in India, but it's absolutely doable.
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#5"For each engineer that we hired in the Bay Area, we could have hired 10–15 outside of it. Everyone has heard of 10x engineers, but what they don't tell you is that the Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on them." This really surprised me, thought it was a big gap, but not this big
To be clear, this is SFBay Area vs India, not SFBA vs Midwest. We have excellent engineers in India (and other locations in the world); it's not nearly as easy or quick to build high-performing teams in India, but it's absolutely doable.
There are excellent engineers in the Midwest too.
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#6Can't agree more. Hiring in Silicon Valley for early-stage startups now is impossible. Total Compensation numbers for software engineering is skyrocketing and you'll never be able to compete with FAANG companies. Sad reality but expected.
It's sad if you're a founder or a VC, but not sad if you're an engineer. "Total Compensation numbers for software engineering is skyrocketing" is a very good thing for the folks who grind every day.
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#7I wouldn't build greenfield in India (I've had to deal with the quality coming out of there on numerous occasions) but I also wouldn't build greenfield in SanFran.
It's less the cost to me and more the turnover. I as a worker have every incentive to take a position in SanFran to get to SanFran and get established (outside of the money). I also then have every incentive to leave as soon as possible for one of the Big 5 since it's gold on my resume (even if I don't stay there more than a year or two).
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#8"For each engineer that we hired in the Bay Area, we could have hired 10–15 outside of it. Everyone has heard of 10x engineers, but what they don't tell you is that the Bay Area doesn't have a monopoly on them." This really surprised me, thought it was a big gap, but not this big
Those are rather lower than what I would expect to pay for top India-based talent (however, I don’t buy on the open market), but not too many sigmas out of expectation. More like five or six devs once you factor in both US salary and benefit load factors, or perhaps two to four devs doing particularly high-value work such as AI/ML.
Having said that, you have to include your on-site management (people and project), various other cost drivers (taxi or car costs, for example), domestic PMO and architecture oversight, and accept your delivery-days overage due to timezone and distance factors. In addition, those latter factors, plus a few regional-culture aspects, tend to result in needing more people (devs, supervisors, etc.) per function point than a pure colocated dev team. (Whereas a Mexico or LATAM team, while more expensive per developer, tends to be more agile for US-based projects due to timezone if nothing else.)
Cheaper? Per developer, absolutely. Solid development chops? Sure. An unalloyed win? Not without its caveats, but definitely worth exploring.
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#9>But who will build this Bridge? With Blah Academy, we have formalized our blah for blah blah blah
Of course, when you hire an engineer in the Bay Area, it's practical to avoid the fucking middleman.
Re: Why we built our core engineering team outside of the SF Bay Area
#10[deleted]