The answer to both questions is yes. The talent pool and cost of developer talent is significantly impacted by a company's reputation, including it's activities in the free/open source arena. Also, your question include a false presumption in "buy the talent it needs", every software company seeks to optimize talent/cost, it doesn't simply have a binary "needed quota filled." Perhaps it doesn't affect it enough yet for them to rationally stop their nasty behaviour, and that is a better question.
I was recently looking at finance job ads for programmers and the one thing that set the ads apart from 100% of the ads from the companies we all read about here was that they didn't say "competitive salary." They said, "extremely high salary."
I noticed that too. I won't say I'm oblivious to the possibility of a much earlier retirement, but leaving my current job, one I really love, will take more than just that.
Sure, but you could do finance for a short time and then go back to riskier startups, which is the thing I was trying to illustrate with my comment: finance companies appear to be much, much more confident in their viability, or at least are willing to demonstrate their confidence in having a future.
Absolutely. I have categorically declined all recruitment e-mails from Comcast. There's no way I would work for them unless I was starving. I hope the rest of you feel the same...
Speaking of Oracle - I bet they have no problem to hire people. But reputation affects what kind of developers you get. I believe this might affect company's destiny.
That article says the NSA is a bit worried about recruitment problems, but hasn't seen any yet. It also says that increasing salaries at SV companies is a far greater challenge in recruiting than reputation.
That's because they know the backbone of their organization is training people NOT to talk about what they are actually doing, nor the implications of those actions.
Hm? It's easy to make a meaningful argument without raw data. You just extrapolate from what you know.
I know that I have had the opportunity to apply to work at the NSA. When I was looking for job opportunities after college I perused lists of government jobs, including positions at the NSA. I know that today, I would not apply to work there. I'm one person, but I know many engineers of a similar mindset and read about many more, so I assume it's a trend. I definitely don't know what rate of potential applicants conform to this mindset, but I know some do (me, the people I know like me, and voices I've heard on the internet).
Therefore, I can meaningfully argue that they would have a harder time hiring. Of course I might be wrong but that's what you get when you operate with incomplete data.
Just to play the devil's advocate, one might just as easily argue that the self-selecting of you and your like-minded peers actually made the NSA's recruiting tasks easier. If you have some moral / ethical / rational belief systems that are inherently incompatible with their organizational DNA, a perfectly efficient recruiting machine would have sorted you into the "NO" pile anyway. Likewise, people more well-suited (for the sake of making ourselves feel better, we'll call them morally challenged) - might now be more inclined to sort themselves "in." So, they might have merely saved themselves some additional interview analysis and (assuming a less than perfect screening process) perhaps even prevented another Snowden Affair.
To be clear, I am not asserting that any of this is true, but I suspect that my unfounded speculation using incomplete data is no less reasonable than yours.
Many of us have always had that mindset about the NSA.
However, it takes a special type of odd personality to work there (doing amazingly cool stuff but not being able to talk about lots of it). The personalities that fit there well don't fit elsewhere very well.
> The personalities that fit there well don't fit elsewhere very well.
Source?
I think NSA employs over 30k people. You're going to make a baseless claim that they all share one common personality trait, making them a poor fit for any other possible place of employ, in the whole world?
We know, for a fact, that the vast majority of NSA employees are willing to subject themselves to enhanced scrutiny (limited travel), behavioral controls (they will discuss your porn and online accounts), and submission to a fairly arbitrary set of rules (such as polygraph tests) that have no proven connection toward their job or efficacy.
Okay, so, we HAVE demonstrated that NSA employees do share at least one common personality trait that is reasonably unusual in the general population.
Perhaps I was being a bit overzealous and should provide a bit of exception. People who stay with the NSA for very long don't fit elsewhere very well.
Now, this probably doesn't apply to those who don't have security clearances. But then, you're basically claiming that the NSA is just like a standard employer--and that's not normally what people think of when they think of "working for the NSA".
Have Oracle's attacks on open source software [1] affected their ability to hire and retain talent?
Is there any example where bad behavior by a large organization [2, 3] meaningfully affected its ability to buy the talent it needs?
[1] http://www.wired.com/2010/08/oracle-attacks-opensource/
[2] https://www.nsa.gov/careers/FAQs/index.shtml#isNSA_5
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars