patrick.net

thomaswong.1986 says

Thats the fun and pain of working in tech.. it moves really really fast.. and YOU are

going to sacrifice much to get up to speed... no one ever said its easy M-F 8-5 job!

Trust me, I know it's not an M-F 8-5 job. I don't think I've ever worked those hours, and I certainly don't now.

JFP says

I don't disagree with this, but you still need a core of engineers with experience, or else who is going to train the new engineers?

yep... and as such I do the first round of training.... its my job!
later i do job rotation and the staff cross train them self. '

thomaswong.1986 says

enough people and facilities to have production back in the states... i say redo detroit and get people to have jobs... VC money would server better as it

circulates in the USA and not in Asia....

Everybody has fiduciary duty to their investors.

Sometimes that's best served by quickly recruiting a team which is excellent and will interact well with executives working out of the founders' headquarters. The economics there (chance of success, total money spent getting to a win) dictate locality.

Sometimes it's served best by finding the lowest labor cost.

Detroit doesn't fit either category. It's not local and you can't hire software engineers there for 500,000 Rupees a year which is $8066 at current exchange rates and much better than the $15,080 US minimum wage (given 40 hour weeks with no vacation) to say nothing of the $60K average among entry level software engineers (via salary.com) and $90K average across software engineers of all experience levels.

JFP says

drew_eckhardt says

The agreement was ony between a few big companies, it led to a class action lawsuit, and is done. There are plenty of companies left in Silicon Valley although the center is shifting north towards the city where kids want to live these days.

It's a seller's market for competent experienced technical people who do decent jobs promoting their personal brands.

Agreed. Good engineers have no problem finding another job in SV. Anybody who argues otherwise is incorrect.

sacred cows... you can axe everyone else but not the R&D people...

so let the blood bath begin...

Customer Support,
Sales Admin,
Marketing,
Professional Services,
Accounting,
IT, HR
and who else is left...

Ugh! is that enough sacrifice already,
just dont let any engineer lose their job!

drew_eckhardt says

Detroit doesn't fit either category. It's not local and you can't hire software engineers there for 500,000 Rupees a year which is $8066 at current exchange rates and much better than the $15,080 US minimum wage (40 hour weeks with no vacation) to say nothing of the $60K average among entry level software engineers (via salary.com) and $90K average across engineers of all experience levels.

from the CEO perspective only the Sales process matters,,, nothing else...

R&D work on long term projects so they are not important on daily or monthly basis where they are at ...Sales people are already in the field generating orders. Mfg can be anywhere as well.... since they only fill the warehouses and provide drop ships to customers.

at the end of the day/month/quarter its always about Revenues and Expenses and the CEOs daily question... "where are we at now" during the exec staff meetings.

visibility only comes from a handful of Sales admin and Accounting folks at HQ.

I wish we could have opened up North Bay and further South of San Jose

to increase facilities and jobs ... but state of CA doesnt want real Tech jobs

and Mfg...We (CA) have not been so open to keeping jobs in the state...

we demonized too many entrepreneurs and business people in recent decades.

I think for the time being, there's a certain preexisting momentum, from having Oracle, eBay, & Google in S.V. And thus, if the leaders sort of *stick around*, then others will follow suit, in terms of financing start-ups and looking for bigger M&As, down the road.

Still, from the perspective of the actual work, it seems to be a bit of a high cost region, for development when historically, ever increasing R&D costs have always been the first thing which CFOs look to trim.

Realize, DuPont grew around Wilmington DE (ala very affordable), not NYC nor Boston, and of all the old R&D industries, it had the highest number of patents in chemical processing. This had worked until they decided to offshore R&D in the 90s/00s and now, that DE company is a part of the rust belt. Likewise, as Proctor & Gamble acquired northeast companies, like Vicks in New Haven or Gillette in Boston, it looked to trim headcount and move the work to the Ohio Valley.

thomaswong.1986 says

sacred cows... you can axe everyone else but not the R&D people...

so let the blood bath begin...

Customer Support,

Sales Admin,

Marketing,

Professional Services,

Accounting,

IT, HR

Startups are team sports.

Profits are what result when you multiply business proposition * implementation * marketing * sales * support and subtract what you spent getting there.

A value too close to zero for any factor makes for negative and otherwise uninteresting outputs.

You can't profit from a product the target market won't buy because it doesn't solve a problem or that problem is adequately addressed by established market alternatives.

You can't profit if the customers don't buy the product or return it due to low quality from bad implementation.

You can't sell efficiently without high quality leads generated by marketing.

You don't make money when sales doesn't close those leads.

Customers don't come back and look elsewhere when their support experience is inadequate or they get the impression that's the case when they're shopping.

Physical proximity of all elements improves communication and makes things better.

Some elements (HR, accounting, etc.) don't feed directly into the equation for success but aren't significant cost centers and moving them elsewhere reduces your odds because that decreases the cycles other people have to spend on the product.

If you get to the big company stage where you survive by not sucking too much more than the competition (as opposed to beating their market alternative by 2-10X where the high end is your target and 2-3X work sometimes) you can afford to maintain the status quo by outsourcing although you should do better by finding new distruptable markets you tackle like a startup. For instance Google's self-driving cars, Uber, and robotics projects could completely revolutionize transportation and suck up a substantial fraction of urban travel costs where the average American spends $8200/year on their car.

Making the status quo inexpensive also has its limits with profits dropping as you get to the last stage of the technology adoption life cycle. Microsoft is not winning given market alternatives of smart phones (as of Q3 2013 Android Linux had 80% of that market, iPhone 12, and Windows Phone 3.6) and tablets (66.7% Android and 29.7% iPad by units, 46.2 and 45.6% by revenue).

Smart executives know this and act accordingly.