hiring

Startup Talent Bubble

Sun, Apr 22, 2012 - 12:47pm -- Isaac Sukin

I believe that the world of tech entrepreneurship is definitely in a bubble. But more than a startup bubble, we're in a coder talent bubble. Take a minute to read 2012 is for buying startups. Companies are getting bought not because they made anything of value or with a revenue model, they're getting bought more and more because the acquirers need more engineers. Have you looked at the list of sponsors for any hackathons lately? Huge companies (Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook come to mind) have sponsored several small hackathons reasonably close to the Philly area in just the past few months. They're not doing it mainly because it's a good thing to do, they're doing it because it's a recruitment tool and they desperately need to find engineers. (But keep doing it! Hackathons are awesome!) And then there's this phenomenon:

You have an idea. You need a website. Now what?

Sat, Apr 21, 2012 - 3:46pm -- Isaac Sukin

I have the unusual distinction of being a programmer in a business school that is currently experiencing something of a startup fever. Penn also happens to have a relatively small but enthusiastic CS community in which I consider myself active. One result of these circumstances is that I am frequently approached by students1 who have ideas for a business or have started a business that requires a website, but who have no idea where to start. I've been on the other side of that table too, hiring contractors for startups I've worked on. Here's the basic outline of how I answer this common question.

How you should accomplish getting a website built depends a lot on how fundamental the technology is to your business, how complex it is to build, how much money you have to spend, and what tradeoffs you're willing to make between quality and time.

Subscribe to RSS - hiring