Tech boom! The war for top developer talent

[FarCenter]

GitHub sits at the white-hot center of a tech boom unseen since the early days of dot-coms. It is both emblematic of an industry where success is often accompanied by excess, as well as a showcase where software engineers can highlight their coding chops to prospective employers. Each month nearly 5 million developers pay up to $200 apiece to share code and swap techniques on GitHub's online project hosting platform. If you want a job with an open source company, your list of GitHub commits is far more important than a résumé on LinkedIn.

In a world that increasingly runs on code, developers are king -- and companies will pay a king's ransom to lure top talent. What follows is an inside look at some of the startups and development firms fueling the hottest market for coding talent the tech industry has ever seen.

Oval Office aside, GitHub is not unusual in the kinds of perks it offers employees, roughly 70 percent of whom are developers or designers. Across Silicon Valley and beyond, companies compete to see who can offer the most generous salaries, the best benefits, the most over-the-top extras.

That's because for every 10 coding jobs in the marketplace, there are maybe eight people who can fill them, estimates Avik Patel, senior staffing manager for WinterWyman in New York.

"Demand has grown like crazy, but the talent pool hasn't kept pace," he says.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/tech-boom-the-war-top-developer-talent-231709

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. GitHub is both a meritocracy as well as a distributed workforce.

Coders can work from home and no one cares what you look like. They only care that you produce.

If I was doing it over again, I'd learn to write software and stick to open source.