Who wants a great engineering team in Bucharest? Please help me spread the word
You might have heard that this week, after having tried for months to keep the entire team of my company Seesmic I had to let go about half of it (also here and here)... Here is a great group of engineers for mobile …
Context & Ripple Effects
Loic Le Meur's post is the human face of a shortage documented across the corpus: a former Digg engineer fielding seven offers in late 2010 and Google hunting for mobile-app experts in early 2011 both showed demand outrunning supply. The Wall Street Journal's April 2011 piece on how the mobile app talent pool runs shallow framed the same squeeze Le Meur now describes from the employer side — months of trying to keep his Seesmic engineers intact before letting about half go.
First-order effects
- A cohort of roughly half of Seesmic's engineering team, concentrated on mobile work in Bucharest, is on the market at once — with its former founder personally vouching for them to his network.
- Hiring teams facing the shallow mobile talent pool gain a rare chance to acquire several vetted mobile engineers as a group rather than one at a time.
Second-order effects
- Employers who absorb the team effectively acquire Seesmic's accumulated mobile engineering capability, converting a competitor's cost cut into their own hiring shortcut.
- The public plea sets a template other startup founders under similar pressure may copy — using founder reach instead of paid outplacement or recruiters to place laid-off staff.
Third-order effects
- If founder-mediated placement becomes routine, layoff announcements double as talent marketplaces, shifting some recruiting power from agencies toward personal networks — and putting cities like Bucharest on buyers' maps as a source of intact mobile engineering teams.
The trend: Startup engineering talent is scarce enough that even a forced layoff gets reframed as a public hiring event, tightening competition for mobile engineers across borders.