Text 6360, 88 rader
Skriven 2005-07-30 16:32:02 av Mike '/m' (1:379/45)
Ärende: Revenge of the Nerds -- Again
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From: Mike '/m' <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2005/tc20050728_5127_tc024.ht
m?campaign_id=topStories_ssi_5

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Google and Yahoo! are hiring away hundreds of top engineers from high tech's
most prestigious firms


Some call it the "giant sucking sound" emanating from Silicon Valley. For
others, it's a migraine in the making. But whatever they're calling the hiring
binge at Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ), just about everyone is a bit
astonished at the fearsome force swallowing up some of tech's best and
brightest.



"High-profile researchers are now flocking to the search engines," says Marti
Hearst, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley's
school of information management and systems.

STOLEN SUPERSTARS.  The migration of software-engineering talent to Google and
Yahoo is a testament to how high these search companies have risen in the tech
firmament. Coveted talent from academia, startups, and venerable tech companies
that a decade ago would have flocked to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) or Sun
Microsystems (SUNW ) are now more than willing to switch teams and join Google
or Yahoo.

In the second quarter alone, Google snapped up about 230 engineers. Recent
additions include software superstars Louis Monier, director of eBay (EBAY )
advanced technology research, and Kai-Fu Lee, a top-flight researcher at
Microsoft -- which prompted the software giant to sue Google and Lee to keep
him from going to work there right away.

Yahoo, meanwhile, has recently hired dozens of top engineers, including Larry
Tesler, former vice-president for shopping experience at Amazon.com (AMZN ) And
the company is expected to announce on July 28 that its new head of research is
Prabhakar Raghavan, former chief technology officer at search-software outfit
Verity (VRTY ) and an authority on algorithms.

INTERNET FOCUS.  What's behind this talent raid? Another dot-com gold rush it's
not. Eager investors already value these businesses at a combined $130 billion,
up from about $63 billion last August when Google went public. That means the
share prices reflect much of the companies' promise, suggesting stock options
could be in for a slower climb from here.

Of course, these top-level search engineers are still among the most
well-compensated techno-nerds out there. But there's more than money at work
here. These guys -- and they are truly mostly men -- are also attracted to the
massive, unsolved technical challenges facing search companies, which affect
hundreds of millions of people daily.

In years past, PCs, operating systems, and databases were viewed as core
technologies where engineers could work on problems and change people's lives.
Today, more techies view search on the Internet as among the most important
services.

"The Internet is touching everyone's life," says Usama Fayyad, chief data
officer and senior vice-president at Yahoo, who joined the company last
December. "A new science is being defined in an area that will take over much
of what we do commercially and socially."

LAYING FOUNDATION.  Indeed, Google -- and, to a lesser degree, Yahoo -- has
become what Microsoft used to be: a young, vibrant company working on the
bleeding edge of the day's vexing technical issues. Before the Internet became
the phenomenon it is now, Microsoft was a magnet for top talent interested in
solving the toughest tech problem: making personal computing easy.

Today, though, the gravitational force at the center of techdom is no longer
the PC -- it's the Net. And while MSN holds its own with Google and Yahoo in
terms of worldwide use, its engineers can't develop products that would
undermine Microsoft's monopoly businesses, Windows and Office. Some researchers
say privately that restricts creativity....
===


Interesting quote from [later on in] the article:

    Yahoo also carries substantial geek cred. Each day the
    company generates 10 terabytes of data"


  /m

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