It’s always been hard to hire engineers, but it’s only gotten harder in recent months. Read any publication that cares about business, from the NYT to the Wall Street Journal, and you’ll see a ton of hand wringing about The Quittening, and the accompanying talent shortage. An equal amount of ink has been spilled about how red-hot the hiring market is. It’s a seller’s market for talent. This represents a huge potential opportunity for engineers of all stripes. Many engineers could pick up a five figure raise by switching companies right now. In spite of that, it doesn’t seem like many engineers are choosing to make the jump. Why is that?
I’ve spent about a decade as an electrical engineer. I’ve also spent the last four months building and running a job board for a very specific subset of engineers. (If you happen to be an RTL or FPGA engineer, and you’re looking for a new job, please check us out at www.rtljobs.com!) That’s given me some perspective on what engineers want from their careers and their work. The more I think about it, you need to offer engineers some combination of these three things to pique their interest:
- Cool stuff to work on.
- Smart people to work with.
- Some degree of repeatability in work environment.
Without those, getting an engineer to join your company is gonna be a hard sell.
If asked to oversimplify what engineers care about, I would pick three things:
- Technology
- Intellection
- Stability
You can draw a straight line from each of these values to things engineers want in their working environment:
- Technology (rightarrow) Cool Stuff to Work On
- Intellection (rightarrow) Smart People to Work With
- Certainty (rightarrow) Repeatability in Work Environment
Every engineer is at least a little bit techno-utopian. There’s a reason that engineers love Star Trek – they’d love to see a world where the mundane challenges of living are abolished by godlike technological power. Engineers tend to adore the raw capabilities that technology unlocks. We also like to increase that capability, when we are able to do so. The techno-utopian streak endemic to most engineers naturally draws them to work on stuff they think is cool.
The Open Source Software movement is a great poster child for this. People have spent decades building software that they need, just because they think it’s cool. They certainly aren’t getting paid for it, and that’s turning out to be more and more problematic as FOSS becomes a cornerstone of critical internet infrastructure. I’ll point you to Apenwarr’s lovely recent blog post for a better treatise on that. The point is: the main point of people working on FOSS isn’t generally that it makes them money. They do it because they think it’s cool!
I hate to say it, but if anyone understands people’s innate drive to work on cool stuff, it’s El*n M*sk. (I ain’t speakin’ his name; the dude gets enough press without me helping his SEO.) Nothing says it more clearly than the start of every job description for his rocket company:
[this company] …was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not.
He’s built companies that work on:
- satellites
- spacecraft
- rockets
- electric cars
- self driving vehicles
- tunnelling equipment
Say what you want about the man himself, but all of those things absolutely qualify as “cool shit”. He knows how to make stuff that engineers want to work on. The cool factor of this is enough to draw many engineers in on that factor alone. How do I know this? It’s as easy as looking at the Glassdoor reviews of what it’s like to work at TSLA or CosmosY. Culturally, they are terrible places to work. You’ll spend 60-80 hours a week meeting a grueling timetable, with a sub-market salary as a reward. I once had a recruiter tell me: “El*n M*sk is one of the easiest people on earth to poach senior leadership out from under.” After eighteen months in the gulag of rocketry/EVs, many managers are ready to cry “Uncle”.
In spite of these truths, people flock to working for TSLA and CosmosY.
Why? Because both of these companies make cool stuff! And making cool stuff is deeply relevant to most engineers.
Data I’ve collected on the workplace bears this out as well. RTLjobs.com is just about to wrap up our first annual employment survey. (If you hire, recruit, study, or are an FPGA engineer, I’d love to hear
