Fri, Jul 11, 2008 12:13 EDT

Open Source and the War for Talent

Topic: IT Organization Management

Current Rating: Comments: 5

Despite the angst earlier this decade that every technical job in the country would be sent to Bangalore, today's US tech employment picture is actually quite different. According to an article in CIOinsight, tech employment has reached an all-time high of 4 million people, with a tech unemployment rate of 2.3%.

The implications are quite obvious:

Technical skills are in high demand
The unemployment rate indicates that anyone with appropriate tech skills can find employment, so people are likely to be choosy about accepting job offers
Crucially, if you are a company recruiting tech employees, you're going to be in competition with plenty of other companies for the best

In my view, this situation is likely to be exacerbated in the future, as IT is breaking out of the back office and becoming infused into everyday business offerings. Put another way, as products and services become more IT-rich, companies will need more IT skills to successfully compete.

What does this have to do with open source?

Just this: The most desirable potential employees view the opportunity to work with open source as a positive distinguishing factor in job offers. I was speaking this week with the CTO of a large company -- a F500 firm with one of the most recognizable brand names around -- and he told me that top talent wants to work with open source, viewing it as key to their career development. Attempts to recruit to work on proprietary or, worse, home-grown apps is a turn-off, for the very understandable reason that company-specific skills are a handicap when attempting to land a job at a new company.

Top talent wants to work with open source because it's widely used -- meaning their skills are easily transportable, making them more desirable recruits in the future -- but also because that's the future of software, and top talent wants to work on exciting developments, not boring dead-end technology. As one of the founders of Zimbra put it, no really good engineer wants to take a 10 year-old application and turn it into a fifteen year-old application.

I can't put it blunter than this: if you want to recruit top technical talent, you've got to explicitly pursue open source as a key part of your infrastructure. If you don't, your employee pool will be the also-rans.

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Mon, Jul 14, 2008 10:19 EDT

Talent and Open Source

Posted by: rharvey
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Nice article and excellent reference to the war on talent. As a recruiting organization, we are always working on building an employee value proposition and this information is very valuable in attracting and retaining top talent

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Wed, Jul 16, 2008 12:15 EDT

Open Source not even on the radar

Posted by: theoldman59
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I work in an IT Group of over 2000 supporting a rather large company. Open Source isn't even on the radar and won't be for many years. We have no trouble recruiting talent world wide.

Author is expressing an opinion not supported by the market or facts. Open Source is basically a flea speck on the IT world, not something we consider important, let alone critical.

If you want a job, learn SAP, Oracle or another major technical solution. Open Source is typically low end, small businesses with a few exceptions. Even in the exceptions, proprietary software rides on the open source rendering it a truly closed architecture.

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Wed, Jul 16, 2008 13:49 EDT

Open source

Posted by: Anonymous
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I'm a founder of an open source security startup and I could not agree with you more. If your a talented IT worker, where do you want to work? A stuffy rigid large propritary software company or open source. VCs should have an idea about the value of open source, let me share some statistics with you.

Between 2000 and 2006 there was a little over 1.8 Billion invested in open source companies by VCs. While the total is small in comparison to proprietary investment, its growing while proprietary investment shrank. In Q2 of 2008 the total in open source companies rose to $115 Million, a 14% increase over the same period a year ago, according to The 451 Group. Funding for the first half of this year is up 62% over the first half of 2007.

As far as the comments from "theoldman59" are concerned, keep them coming. We are happy to have them, when we hit the market we want to completely blindside our proprietary competitors and misguided comments such as these play to our benefit.

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Thu, Jul 17, 2008 14:45 EDT

Typical Open Source A

Posted by: theoldman59
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What a chuckle!

So total invested in Open Source $115 million in a quarter is pretty good?

The company I work for has an IT buget bigger than that per month! Total budget is well over $1 billion per year. By the way, we have one business unit that netted over $3 billion last year, which is more than the entire $1.8 billion invested between 2000 and 2006. We spent over $10 billion on one aquisistion in 2007. The $1.8 billion invested in Open Source over six years is Chump change! Remember, this is only ONE company!

When large companies have annual IT budgets of $600 million to well over a billion, Open Source is small pickins and frankly doesn't matter.

The only time open source is on the radar is when it directly competes with a commercial product, performs a handful of functions that we need well, and the company believes the cost of labor to support the product is less than the cost to support a commercial product. Most of the time, the commercial product wins the comparison. Been there and done that.

Open source has a place, but be aware of anyone that claims it's a panacea that cures all!

The techs we have don't care about it except as a hobby at home for something different.

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Fri, Jul 18, 2008 15:47 EDT

Agree

Posted by: Anonymous
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Nice article

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