James Governor's Monkchips

On hiring for experience. An anecdote on engineering from Perforce.

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I have been looking at the issue of hiring for experience recently – How Amazon is demolishing the cult of youth – and I had an interesting conversation about it today with Tim Russell, chief product officer at Perforce.

Perforce sells software to support software development for enterprises with big development teams. While it began life as a centralised version control system, given the comprehensive victory of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) it has recently moved into distributed version control with Helix4Git. There is plenty of room for innovation around GIT, especially when used at scale – GitHub is known for revolutionising the user experience, with the introduction of Social Coding as a thing. Russell pointed at Microsoft’s recent introduction of Git Virtual File System as an example of further headroom for innovation. It’s pretty amazing that the Windows code base is now on GIT, especially given the way the code was traditionally managed.

In conversation Russell refers to “enterprise scale” as a differentiator for his business in contrast with SF-oriented startups like GitHub. The company has software development hubs in 3 main geographies – Cincinatti, Silicon Valley, and uh, Wokingham in the UK. The founder of Perforce recently sold the company to a private equity firm, and it has an entirely new management team, including Russell, with a plan to build on an already strong engineering culture with acquisitions in adjacent markets – testing for example.

Russell is currently hiring primarily 2 types of engineers – younger folks with more “front end” experience, working alongside more seasoned veterans with experience building infrastructure like databases.

What got me however was when Russell said he found it harder to hire more experienced people, people in their 50s with significant experience building enterprise class productions. Given the jokes about younger engineers, and “must relocate to SF” this was kind of surprising.

But how do you pry someone away from the likes of Oracle. When an elder tech company implodes as they sometimes do, ironically the talents of the people that leave can command a premium.

“Folks in their 50s are getting multiple job offers”.

This is obviously as it should be. Experience should be at a premium. As Werner Vogels Amazon Web Services CTO recently observed:

“There is no compression algorithm for experience”

In the Valley now, according to Russell, the war for talent he’s seeing isn’t about hiring a new graduate from Stanford, but rather somebody with 20 or 30 years of product engineering experience. This should perhaps be obvious to us, but it’s not a story I hear much about. Today we often think of “the talent” as the fast thinking young tyros on salaries of $250k. It’s a prejudice we see at work in a lot of startups.

So competition for older workers is cool. Perhaps you’re seeing something different. I would love to hear about your own hiring and or job hunting experiences. Needless to say – Perforce is hiring…

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