The talent shortage in Silicon Valley only seems to be getting worse following a series of high-profile departures from Google (mostly in the direction of Facebook), and talks of some big-money deals going on in an effort to retain staff – most strikingly Google giving all staff a $1,000 bonus and a 10% raise. There was also a story going round (completely unconfirmed, of course) that Google gave a senior engineer $3.5million in stock to stop them leaving for Facebook.
Now for once the shoe is on the other foot, as Facebook has lost one of it’s high-profile poaches. Paul Buchheit, the founder of FriendFeed and father of Gmail, has left Facebook to move to startup incubator Y Combinator. Although it would seem Facebook are on the brink of launching their own email client, Buchheit claims he didn’t work on the project (although interestingly he didn’t deny it’s existence) – saying he wouldn’t want to work on email again.
It’s not all bad for Facebook though – they have managed to poach an engineer from one of their main rivals, Foursquare. Nathan Folkman, who has been with Foursquare since it’s early days, is assumed to have been taken on to help with Places – Facebook’s location product that competes directly with Foursquare, which is entirely location-based.
Google has gone from premiere employer in the Valley to leaky ship in the space of just a few short years – of course they are trying to use huge wads of cash to plug the leaks, but nobody can tell if it has worked yet. Looking to the future, Facebook must be worrying how long until they start springing leaks too, and who the young upstarts will be that topple them from the top of the tech pile.
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