Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Some quick pointers to jobs recently posted on our Jobs page:

• Panache is looking for an ActionScript developer in Los Angeles
• Linkline, in Ontario, is looking for a Senior Account Executive for the company’s telecom serviecs
• If you know Microsoft ERP tools, WhiteStar USA has an opening for a Microsoft Dynamics NAV Implementer.
• Finally, if you are a software information extraction guru, Fetch Technologies is looking for a Software Development Manager.

These and a lot of other jobs are posted from members of socalTECH’s premium services. Note to HR folks: you can post any number of positions to our job board if you are a member, which is only $24.95 a month; there’s no limits on positions, both companies and their recruiters are welcome to use the service; and, this is one of our most trafficked pages on our web site. Our users tell us that the positions that get the best responses are: executive (CxO level) postings, marketing and sales, and management level engineering positions.

The Mercury News posted an article this morning on how companies in Silicon Valley are dumping cubicles for “open” offices. Having worked closely with many software, hardware, marketing, and sales teams–and having endured “open office” layouts a few times myself–I just shake my head this.

Having been both in the trenches and managing teams, I found consistently in my own experience that — particularly with the intense focus necessary in hardware and software engineering–having a quiet place to work, without distractions, is a key part of having a productive team. Open office spaces — although they might be great for times when you’re working on very collaborative projects or “creative” endeavors — are always loud, always distracting, and terrible for focusing on things. I recall spending lots of times shuffling people around offices, to try to make sure that the noisier folks — for example, sales people making sales calls — were not someplace they would be distracting the productive software engineers. Even within an engineering group, having an open plan makes it difficult to work — for example, if the guy next to you keeps pestering you with questions, your boss keeps glancing over your shoulder because he’s sitting behind you, etc. Plus, there’s that person who is now a great buddy with a desk next to yours, who you have been trying to avoid all year at the watercooler because they just have to tell you that story about their weekend one more time.

I was talking to Duke Bristow, who teaches entrepreneurship and engineering courses at both USC and UCLA (yes, apparently you can work for both schools at the same time), about companies who had told me they are having difficulty finding developers. He tells me he has lots of graduating engineerings students–both undergrad and graduate–who are looking for positions. Contact me if you’d like to connect with Duke. I find that too many companies here overlook the huge wealth of engineering graduates from schools here.

In fact companies like Intel, IBM, Google, HP, Yahoo, etc. recruit heavily out of the schools here for their employees, pulling a great deal of engineering talent out of Southern California up into Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Having graduated from USC with a Electrical Engineering degree myself, I think the vast majority of people I went to school with in engineering are now working for companies up north.

I ran across a blog posting recently from Jason Caplain, a VC in North Carolina, talking about an entrepeneur’s complaint of developers leaving the region for Silicon Valley. Jason, while talking about NC,  had a few good points which he uses to rebut the entrepreneur–a few of which could equally apply to Southern California.

The great entrepreneurs, with the great ideas and the ones that are willing to part with the right amount of equity shouldn’t have a hard time attracting development talent. There is a ton of tech talent here with the local universities (NC State, UNC and Duke) and larger companies like Cisco, Red Hat, IBM and SAS right in our backyard.

Here, of course, there is Caltech, USC, UCLA, UCSD, UC Irvine, Harvey Mudd, not to mention a slew of other schools with strong engineering and technology programs. Plus, a huge developer base of technical and business talent at the more established local companies here (Broadcom, Qualcomm, Overture, etc.).

There is a huge cost of living advantage to being here in NC compared to Silicon Valley.

While we are much more expensive than NC in terms of cost of living, housing and cost of living in Southern California is more affordable than Silicon Valley.

More importantly, the cost for development talent here in NC is a lot cheaper than Silicon Valley. What this means is that it can be cheaper to build a company here.

I believe this is somewhat true in Southern California as well; from my experience, developer costs and salaries are definitely lower here in Southern California versus the extreme competition for talent in Silicon Valley. For the employees, it actually works out pretty well–salaries might be lower, but so is cost of living, and the quality of life (sun, surf, sand, etc.) more than makes up for the differential.

In any case, it’s interesting to see the perspectives from another high tech region.

Om Malik is reporting today that Helio is on the brink of some job cuts, after Earthlink said it would cut 900 people (and much more) earlier this week. So far, the track record of MVNOs here in Los Angeles isn’t looking so good.