Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Competing for Talent

September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Competing for Talent

TAGS: Open Source

If you're a private open source company, how do you compete against the likes of Google or VMWare for talent? At MySQL, we've found that one of the most attractive elements of the company is the fact that we are globally distributed. We have over 300 employees in nearly 30 countries. (That's in total, not 300 in each!) And over 70% of employees work from home. Among developers, the rate is over 90%.

So that means that they don't have to commute, they don't have to hang out in boring HR meetings, they can just focus on what they like, which is coding. We may not have all the perks offered by big companies, but at the end of the day, developers know they are working on something important and they can do it from their home rather than relocating to Silicon Valley.

But man cannot live by email, Skype, and IRC alone. So every now and then we get groups together for meetings. It might be a small meeting of one team gathered in Austin or Amsterdam for a few days design and planning work, or a full gathering of the tribe. For example, this past week we had all of our developers in Heidelberg and in January we'll pull the entire company together in Orlando.

I suspect that this geographic advantage is true not only for MySQL, but for many open source companies. It lets you hire the best and the brightest wherever they happen to be.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on September 25, 2007 04:44 AM

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