Singapore, where has all your talent gone?

By http://e27.cohttp://e27.sg/2012/11/06/singapore-where-have-all-your-talent-gone/ | Nov 6, 2012 | Corporations

Searching for hacker talent in Singapore

There’s an idea in Singapore’s tech startup scene that Singapore lacks top engineering talent. And to a certain extent this is true.

What most people probably don’t realize, though, is that while Singapore’s talent pool is comparatively shallow, competition from attractive companies here is scarce enough that talented individuals are relatively easy enough to scoop up. This creates some interesting dynamics – in particular, it makes Singapore a very nice place to recruit from when you’re a large, established, attractive tech company.

I am a fourth year Computer Science undergraduate in NUS, and I’m currently serving as the outgoing president of the NUS Hackers. A good part of my time is spent connecting recruiters with exceptional students in NUS, and running events to grow the hacker community on campus.

Over the past year or so I’ve seen the best of my friends gobbled up by top-tier Valley tech companies.[1] These friends have been offered signing bonuses in the US$50,000 – US$100,000 range, after passing technical interviews or concluding internships in the Valley. They tell me to intern in a Valley company when I still can. They tell me I will learn a lot more at a top-tier startup in California than with one in Singapore. Their arguments are compelling to a young engineer, and I can’t deny that I – like many of my friends who haven’t applied – are increasingly convinced that we should do so.[2]

Granted, these friends are the best of my batch. They are very accomplished technically, and they’re the smartest people I know. In many cases these friends initiated contact by reaching out to the Google or Facebook recruiters.

But I now think that this trend is reversing. Large tech companies are starting to actively recruit from Singapore. For example, Facebook is now a common fixture at the School of Computing’s career fairs, and they recently concluded an invitation-only event for interested students. Closer to home, the NUS Hackers are hosting Quora for a tech talk/recruiting event this Friday, at NUS. (You may sign up here). We’re hosting Palantir next week. Both are top-tier Valley startups. We expect the student turnout to be huge.

I must admit that it confuses me when people say Singapore faces a lack of good engineers. You must understand what the experience has been like, for me: on the one hand, local startup people have been going on about Singapore’s talent problem. These people are often from companies or entities I have never heard of. On the other hand, my friends are being recruited away by the best tech companies in the world. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that these people who have been lamenting the state of talent in Singapore are wrong. They’ve certainly got a point. But it strikes me that everyone has got a talent problem. If local companies are not even successfully reaching out to the best their local universities have to offer, then perhaps they should try that first before complaining.

This is, of course, a lot easier to say than to do. I’ll admit that part of the problem is that recruiting is difficult, especially when you’re doing a startup. But another problem is that we lack startups that are very attractive to engineers.

If you’re a local startup, what’s the simplest way to correct for this? One thing you could do is to have your engineers come down for NUS Hackers events to mix around with students. Get a feel for your target demographic, or give a talk at Friday Hacks on an interesting, thorny technical topic. These events are largely a self-selecting filter for interested, capable hackers.

And if you’re a technically accomplished student, or a good engineer, you should probably come down for these events anyway. If local startups aren’t hunting you down, you bet companies like Quora and Palantir will. And that’s not a bad place to be in.

[1] I’ve had friends who have received offers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Quora.

[2] I interned at Viki, a local startup with brilliant mentorship. Most of my other friends who did not intern in the Valley either did client work, contributed to Google’s Summer of Code (US$5000 for three months of work) or hacked on personal projects.

About the author

Cedric Chin (aka Eli James) is the current president of the NUS Hackers. He may be found on Github and Twitter.

Image credits: Profiles International

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  • http://www.facebook.com/alvin.kwang Alvin Kwang

    After all the points you have raised, you seemed to have missed the most crucial one when you hear people ask “Singapore, where have all your talent gone.”

    You mentioned Facebook and Microsoft. These are great companies were built by brilliant students who had a vision, and abandoned everything else distracting them. Mark Zuckerburg was offered a job at Microsoft but he turned them down. As a result, Facebook was born.

    My challenge to you and your friends, is to turn down the lucrative signing bonuses, turn down a top tier Valley company, and take the leap of faith to build a startup that Singapore can be proud of.

  • http://twitter.com/infinix Francis Teo

    I’m a NUS SoC CS grad, class of 2006.

    Beyond pay, part of the problem is that many companies locally don’t require a high level of technical skill, and because of this, aren’t willing to pay more because they don’t value that.

    Comparatively, in a lot of the larger multinationals (tech or otherwise), demand a higher level of technical skill. Specific examples include grid computing, global network routing, large scale server optimization and database optimizations. The list goes on. The fun stuff. :)

    Haven’t been working tech for a couple of years, but I don’t think much has changed. For many local companies, spaghetti coding is a way of life. As long as it works, there is little regard for the long term maintainability of code. Efficiency of code (you know all the optimizations for space and time CS poeple like), clean coding and the like are all thrown out the window. And so the job goes to the lowest bidder.

    Why would I want to work for a company like that when I can have fun doing all the high level tech stuff, and where every optimization matters?

    There are many exceptions within the startup world here, but I don’t think they are in the majority.

  • Anonymous
  • http://elijames.org Eli James

    ALTERNATIVELY: join a top-tier Valley company, learn as much as possible, make as many connections as possible, learn both business and engineering skills from the very best in the business, and THEN go build a startup.

    That’s the way they did it at Pinterest, Instagram, Quora, Palantir, Yelp, Youtube, LinkedIn (and the list goes on, and on, and on …)

    The Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg model of entrepreneurship is romantic, statistically improbable, and overrated. ;-)

  • codelion

    Some small errors and typos -

    >Singapore, where have all your talent gone?
    Singapore where has all your talent gone?

    > There’s an idea in Singapore’s tech startup scene…
    There is an idea in …

    >They tell me to intern in a Valley company when I still can
    while I still can …

  • http://www.facebook.com/marc.tan1 Marc Tan

    I think the crux of the matter is not that there is a lack of talents, rather a lack of talents for the price these companies are willing to pay. And the ulterior motive is that if they complain loud and often enough, the government will loosen up the restrictions on employment passes and they can scoop up engineers from India, China and the Philippines at a fraction of the price of a local graduate.

  • noto

    Personally, me and my friends have started a startup in Singapore from 2006 and shut it down after 5 years of trying to make it work. We graduated from Computer Science of NUS in 2006 and startup is unheard of during that time. Below is my opinion of “startups vs talent” in Singapore.

    1. There are very good CS guys around in Singapore, but most of them stayed back at school to do PHD. The reason is very simple: Singapore IT jobs have little coding skills needed and most of the time it is just project management (with most of the coding jobs outsourced) or support work (calling up vendors, standby when server down etc). There is no way for us to grow our talent once out of school. College is the last place where we can do technically challenging stuff, so those competent CS guys prefer to stay in school.

    2. Our govt is infact the biggest employer of our IT graduates, doing the stuff of Point 1 above.

    3. Despite all the woohoo that the startup scene in Singapore is trying to make itself into, it is really quite pathetic here. Cost is high, funding is little, market is not in this region too. Naivety is still the main driving force of startups in Singapore. Meaning those that want to startup in Singapore are probably really first-timers that do not know what they are getting into (especially fresh grads out of sch), and probably understood startup as anything that has the mixture of “tech+biz”

    4. Companies do not value startup founders that failed, meaning if founders want to find re-employment in other companies, it is doubly hard for them cause employers do not understand what do startups do and how their experience in startups can contribute in anything. Startup founders that failed in Singapore is treated like a bankrupt equivalent.

    So with job market that is generally not technically challenge, and startups that are technically challenge but not making it at all, it is simple to see why “talent” is not found in Singapore

  • Jason Ong

    I agree with Cedric on this.

    Credit goes to Zuckerberg for starting Facebook but scaling it to the social network behemoth that it is today takes a lot of experienced engineers, product managers, executive officers (Google was a source for these) and top tier $$.

    The hope is in 4-5 years time, these young talents can maintain connection back to Singapore and startup something interesting on their own or join a risky venture back home.

  • James

    ok I’ll go for your NUS Hackers Friday Events.

    …wait that wasn’t the point of this article?

  • http://elijames.org Eli James

    Precisely! ;-)

    (Or, more importantly: if you are a Singaporean tech company, come present and tell people about the stuff you do!)

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  • http://www.facebook.com/jitsion JitSiong Thaddeus Koh

    Hi noto,

    We started e27 at around the same period as well (2006-2007) but from what I see over the last year (2011-present), funding definitely is more available now. (referring to your point 3.) I am actually referring to private money, not government grants(which do not paint a complete picture of this private sector).

    We are seeing smarter kids starting up, especially when we have one of the most number of “how-to-startup” events here in Singapore(Every month, Blk 71 sees 8 events, out of which 6 is organized by the open community). Their naivety IS their strength, coupled that with good knowledge and know-hows, thats where you see interesting businesses being created.

  • http://twitter.com/kevinlrd Kevin

    I absolutely believe Singapore has the talent, it’s more a question of whether there are enough reasons for the talent to want to stay in Singapore.

    When I was looking to get back to my techie roots, I thought I was going to have to move back to Silicon Valley, as that was where all the interesting technical jobs seemed to be. But instead the opportunity came up to start the Singapore office for Palantir and bring that Silicon Valley mindset and culture to Singapore.

    Yes, companies from the valley come to recruit here. But what Palantir offers is a chance to have an impact and work on some of the most interesting technical problems right here in Asia. Come by NUS Hackers Friday hack on 16 Nov to find out more.

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  • noto

    1. Good to see more private money floating around. At least that finally is happening? Are those private money from reputable investors with strong connections to markets, next series of investors? Or are they just starting up also? Cause during my time, the “investors” we had were govt backed and started later than us, and was figuring things out themselves also …

    2. Regarding smartness, it really depends what we are talking about here. If you are talking about algorithmic level of smartness (Google-kind), I simply do not think that any of our local universities is able to compete at the global level (NUS vs MIT/Yale/Stanford??? or even Peking/Fudan???) If you are talking engineering/application level of smartness (Facebook-kind), then probably we already have them ard since way back in 2003-4 when we are in SOC (though I will say we have a lesser population of them due to our country size)

    If you are talking about networking/biz kind of smart, where they can have the guts/aggressiveness to move to other countries and immerse to capture the market, I have no idea cause I am not mingling with the local startup crowd anymore. In my opinion, if startups mingle too long locally, it is not healthy at all. Assuming that they know what a “startup” is all about in the first place, the main problem is the large enough market that they are going to capture to make it possible to become a “startup”. Our surrounding region do not have that kind of homogenous market/infrastructure yet

    3. Local events helps in fostering the “startup-spirit” (and probably help in getting the ecosystem of “investors => startups => exit => new startup from employees that exit” loop going) But the problem is there is zero startup in SG that is able kickstart this loop thing so far …

    4. “naviety == strength”??? It reminds me of when I was a kid where I wasn’t afraid to jump 5 steps down the stairs and I keep increasing the number of steps to 6,7,8 etc … Is that even considered a “strength”? Isn’t encouraging kids to jump a wide enough hole that has the probability 99% falling through pathetic? Strength comes from knowing the fear and overcoming it, not due to “not knowing” it …

  • Guest

    Dont’ believe anything they say about those signing bonuses – I’ll bet you US$50 that most of them (if not all) have only heard of a friend of a friend who got such a bonus. No startup would ever pay an intern any signing bonus to begin with, neither they would import interns from Singapore to SV, even without any bonus. Start-ups rarely take iterns on board – not to mention importing them or giving them bonuses. Thats a good joke.

  • http://elijames.org Eli James

    Citation needed, my friend. ;-)

    I can tell you very honestly that my friends are getting such offers. Not all of them are from startups – arguably Facebook isn’t a startup any longer, but Quora is, and they do a moving bonus for hires from SG. (But that’s only to be expected, no?).

    It makes sense when you consider a) these companies have money b) talent is fierce and c) the bar for entry into these startups is high, so not everyone gets in.

  • Randy

    Engineer can’t be rich in this island! Better in finance & banking!

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