[ibains]

Our US based startup has engineering in India (20 engineers) and the biggest challenge is finding engineering leadership.

It is hard to hire in the bay area, especially leaders who have experience shipping high quality products (systems), so we built the team in India.

Many young companies like us struggle since a lot of the talent (definitely in the bay area) is locked up in the Faangs where poor fiscal/monetary policy in the US has inflated stock part of the compensation so much, that it makes no sense to leave.

So it is hard find principal engineers to do great work because they choose to go to large companies and get poor work for money.

The bar is high for us though, we’d look for engineers with specialized skills (compiler, database internals) and leadership on complex products. The middle is the dead zone (engineers with N years of experience wiring apps)

Not sure about the European market, but maybe you can try to go to a smaller company?

[marcinzm]

Post COVID there's basically no reason to hire only in the Bay Area unless you work on hardware. Also, in my experience the issue with hiring managers is that they better know what to look out for in terms of bad upper management. The vast majority of startups have bad upper management in terms of actual management and company leadership skills. I've got less than 0 desire to work for a 25 year CEO who thinks they're the next Steve Jobs.

[mixmastamyk]

Can we leave it at poor management? I don’t think the “reverse ageist” jab was constructive.

[marcinzm]

It's not ageism, it's amount of experience. Age simply provides a cap on how much experience you could possibly have. Or do you believe that managers and leaders gain nothing from practicing their craft longer and in a wider variety of situations?

[klibertp]

> Age simply provides a cap on how much experience you could possibly have.

Not really. It depends on the opportunities and luck to meet the right people at the right time. Plus, people internalize experiences with different speeds. So, while in general you're right, you need to account for outliers that lived a particularly lucky life.

Though to be fair, people who got mountains of experience that way despite being young do not, in general, see themselves as next Jobs.

[mixmastamyk]

Ya sound bitter.

[marcinzm]

Are you sure you’re not just projecting your own feelings onto me?

[mixmastamyk]

Nope.

[dilyevsky]

What makes you think the work is worse in fang vs some average startup? I find the opposite to be true in general case - lots of small companies out there don’t care about actual tech.

> Many young companies like us struggle since a lot of the talent (definitely in the bay area) is locked up in the Faangs where poor fiscal/monetary policy in the US has inflated stock part of the compensation so much, that it makes no sense to leave.

This is just patently not true. Netflix is just one examples and there are many more. You just want top shelf talent at bottom shelf prices. If young companies struggle to hire the reason is they underpay cash or equity and just refuse to accept that simple fact.

[hungryforcodes]

I find this alot. I'm 40 -- say -- and I've been applying for engineering positions and get alot of "you'd be great for engineering manager and or senior x,y and z -- would you do that instead?". The general trend I see at the moment seems to be that companies have staff, but lack experienced leadership that can deliver products. I have a couple of patents and have delivered some products and this seems to make the difference.