By now it is a common axiom in Silicon Valley small talk that good engineers are, at the moment, murder to come by. While the most prominent talent battles have thus far been between Facebook and Google, I was curious whether there was a specific smaller startup that everyone wanted to work at.
So I set up a GoPollGo poll asking, “If you could work for a startup, any startup, which one would it be?” and included the Valley’s most prominent startups, adding new ones as they were suggested by you guys.
The poll, which was tweeted out by the TechCrunch account and posted to our Facebook, got over 36K views and over 5K votes over two days.
The immediate winners? Your own startup — whatever that may be — and the still stealth Milk. But, allowing for the Kevin Rose effect (even though I’m sure Milk is a great place to work and will be even more so after it actually launches something) and taking into account what the numbers looked like before Rose tweeted out the poll link, it seems like most people, if they have to work for someone else, would want to do the time at Square and Twitter, with Facebook clocking in immediately afterwards.
So why the crazy appeal of the houses that Jack Dorsey built? Says one Valley bystander, “People want to work with Jack. I think the design and engineering teams are highly respected. Most startups are making junk. Jack was able to use design to make something as dull as payments sexy and interesting.”
You can view the rest of the poll here. Aside from the crazy Milk numbers, it pretty much jives with what everyone intuitively knows about where everyone else wants to work.
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
