This morning most of us woke up to the disappointing news that social news site Digg, once a promising destination for Silicon Valley talent, was losing 37% of its staff as well experiencing key executive departures.

While the usual armchair Twitter quarterbacks responded to the what the layoffs mean for the ailing site, another more positive trend was also evidenced; People making it clear that the kind of top tier engineering talent that worked for Digg was welcome at a spectrum of high profile startups and full fledged techcompanies.

As I’m hearing that the talent pool of experienced engineers in the Bay Area is currently in short supply, this layoff might be a boon for local startups looking to add skilled staff. Some of the companies that have already expressed interest in hiring include Twitter (above), Groupon, GDGT, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures,  IGN, Styleseat, various First Round Capital portfolio companies, our parent company Aol and AT&T Interactive.

It looks like SimpleGeo founder and former Digg Lead Architect Joe Stump is curating the tweets and offering support and introductions help to the 25 people laid off. If you hear of anyone else who is tweeting about hiring, please link to them in the comments.

Crunchbase

• DIGG
• JOE STUMP

Company: Digg

Website: digg.com

Launch Date: October 11, 2004

Funding: $45M

Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see. Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg in the fall of 2004. He found programmer Owen Byrne through eLance and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea. In addition, Rose paid $99...

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Person: Joe Stump

Companies: Sprint.ly, Tweetimag.es, SimpleGeo, Blunder Move, Freestyle Capital, Attachments.me, Digg, eNotes

Joe Stump was the Lead Architect of Digg. While there he was responsible for making sure the applications built at Digg will scale into infinity and beyond. For the last 10 years he’s specialized in building highly scalable LAMP solutions. When not working on Digg he spends time maintaining a number of PEAR projects and explores San Francisco. Joe left Digg in May 2009 to found SimpleGeo.

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