Tech firms cast a wide, and virtual, net for talent
WASHINGTON - At cybersecurity software startup Invincea, some of the developers building the company's key products never enter its Fairfax, Va., office.
They're not outsourced talent. Instead, they're full-time employees who work from home offices, wherever they already are. A 50-inch screen in Invincea's "developer's bullpen" in Fairfax projects camera feeds of each programmer, grouped in a Google Hangout, a kind of group video-chat. They chime in from Chicago; Ann Arbor, Mich.; San Francisco; Boston; and Blacksburg, Va.
"It's almost like they're virtually in the same room," said Chris Greamo, Invincea's vice president of research. "Email is used, but even more commonly ... folks can chat back and forth."
In the past year, Invincea has responded to the fierce competition for tech talent in the region by hiring four full-time developers who remain outside the Washington area. The 35-person company sells software to federal organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Invincea is hardly alone in casting a wide net. More tech companies are expanding their talent search beyond their region, according to Sandrine Ennis, president and founder of the tech talent staffing firm Talentstream. They are creating what's known as a distributed workforce, using software to connect geographically disparate employees in real-time.
At Invincea, employees use several Web services such as Google's instant messaging service to communicate, GitLab to manage code repositories, and Confluence, an application that helps teams collaborate on tasks.
"These are tools we'd probably have available to our workforce independently, but we just make more use of them during the day with the distributed workforce than we probably would otherwise," Greamo said.
As it struggled to find local tech talent over the past year, Invincea opted not to outsource core software development to another company, although it does outsource tasks such as setting up data center hosting for certain projects, he said.
"I think a way to foster passion is for folks to have ownership in the company they're helping to build. All of our [employees] have some sort of equity ownership in the company, whether they work in D.C. or remotely."
Still, there can be an undesirable effect on camaraderie. "There's a dynamic that you get when you have folks sitting together - whether it's the fact that they go to lunch together ... or they go to happy hour or those types of things," Greamo said.
The tech talent crunch extends beyond Washington. San Francisco-based tech company Buffer, which develops an app to let people share pages on social media websites, embraced the idea of a distributed workforce because of the competition for talent in that area. The setup is now part of the company's permanent corporate structure.
Buffer's entire team - about 25 employees - is scattered throughout the United States, Britain, Asia and Africa, prompting one employee to build an app to keep track of the employees' time zones. Though the company is officially headquartered in San Francisco, where just a few employees work, chief technical officer Sunil Sadasivan is in Washington, where his wife is completing a one-year internship. He has rented a desk at the Canvas co-working space in the city.
"Not all the best engineers are out in San Francisco; they're all over the world, really," he said.
The entire team meets three times a year during 10-day trips paid for by Buffer. The company hires developers initially on 45-day trial contracts and takes them on full-time if they seem to be a cultural fit. About 70 percent of candidates make it past this trial period.
"There are some really key nuances to how people communicate [online] and how that comes across," Sadasivan said. "Positivity is our first value - so if an email or interaction on [instant messaging system] HipChat comes across as negative, those things are very easy to pinpoint and flag."
Sadasivan said the model has proved to be a draw for potential employees who don't want to relocate, giving them the flexibility to work from home on their own schedules. But he added that as the team grows, Buffer may need to rethink its communication protocol.
"For the most part, we've been one monolithic team," he said. "Now we're breaking it into smaller and smaller teams ... so you [might] communicate with your small team of three to four people, and being in sync there might be more key" than being in sync with the larger group.