Communications of the ACM
Silicon Valley Experiencing New Hiring Boom
Stanford computer science student Marty Hu has turned down interview requests from big tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, and plans to launch his own start-up company instead.
Credit: CNN
Graduates with science and engineering degrees are about to enter the hottest Silicon Valley job market since the dot.com crash a decade ago. Some recent graduates are even turning down interview requests from the best-known companies in the technology world in order to launch their own Internet start-ups. Not surprisingly, competition is growing among Silicon Valley companies to hire the best young engineering talent. All of this is leading to a Silicon Valley hiring boom, as big players expand and medium-sized companies advertise a steady stream of job openings.
Despite these signs of a vigorous hiring environment in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley still has a 10.6% unemployment rate — higher than the March 2011 national average of 8.8%. However, Silicon Valley produced 1,200 jobs last month, and its biggest companies are on track to add thousands more in 2011. Some high-profile companies are even planning to double their workforce over the next 12 months. All these rosy hiring forecasts, mixed with new infusions of venture capital, have even created talk of another dot.com "bubble" like the one that appeared in 2000.
SimplyHired.com, a search engine for job listings, says that nearly 40% of the 130,000 open positions in Silicon Valley are for software engineers. Innovations in social media, mobile and cloud computing are driving the growth. Even during a recession, Silicon Valley has been able to re-invent itself. According to statistics from SimplyHired.com, since July 2009 there has been a 245% increase in openings that have "Facebook" as a keyword and a 421% increase in "Twitter" job postings — evidence that the fast-growing social-networking sites are creating jobs outside their own companies.
From CNN
View Full Article
No entries found