Tom Sherlock demonstrated his wearable computer. Steven Neff, hemmed in by a scrum of recruiters from Google, Rackspace and Pulse News, showed off his art-filled news website, Politicallyillustrated.com. Jen Costillo impressed a NASA recruiter with a system she built to allow a person’s gestures to control a computer cursor the way a mouse would.
And Timothy Watts, a programmer who flew in from Houston, got his first taste of the thirst for software talent in Silicon Valley, compared to the “dry” situation for software workers in Texas.
Illustrating the intense competition for engineering talent in Silicon Valley, the recruiters easily outnumbered the job candidates Saturday at Hacker Fair, a “reverse job fair” that was also one part science fair. Unlike a typical job fair where job searchers drop off a resume at a company’s booth, here recruiters made the rounds to stations occupied by a candidate, each of whom was required to have created a project they could demonstrate to show off their software, hardware or other technical skills.
“Being a hacker is kind of like being a rock star. When you’re that type of person, you want people to come to you rather than the other way around,” said Patrick Keys, who was looking to get an audience with Google or Apple for his app that can run on Internet-connected televisions.
A line of recruiters jostled outside Hacker Dojo, a community tech space in Mountain View that hosted the fair, when the doors opened Saturday morning. Most of the valley’s household names of tech were there — Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Mozilla, Salesforce.com and Symantec — as well as long list of startups, including Yammer, Flipboard, SmugMug, WePay and Fanhattan.
In an illustration of the tilted balance of supply and demand for talented engineers, many of the recruiters — they generally worked the candidates in teams of two, consisting of a human resources recruiter and an engineer to quiz candidates on technical questions — said they were pleased with the quality and quantity of candidates, though fewer than 100 candidates registered for the fair. And, of those, more than two dozen didn’t show up.
Being able to see candidates show off something that they built “is incredibly valuable. It’s a much better use of everybody’s time” than a standard job fair, said Pam Hart, head of recruiting for Palo Alto-based Flipboard, the iPad app that bundles updates, photos and links from friends on social media and presents them in a magazinelike format.
Bret Reckard, head of staffing for Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, said job candidates with the openness to get out and show off a project they had created could be a good fit for a company that builds open-source software products that it throws open to the outside world during development. He said the conversations at Hacker Fair gave him a much better sense of a person than just reading a resume.
“You can see what they built. It’s much more than just a piece of paper,” Reckard said.
And Sherlock, the guy with the wearable computer? His idea was to create a flexible keyboard that could be worn attached from a lanyard hung around a person’s neck, allowing a person to walk down the street posting to Twitter, seeing what they had typed through a display in their glasses.
Sherlock, a Los Altos man who described himself as an “inventor for hire,” said he didn’t know if he’d get a job offer, but would be happy just to find a startup he could work with.
The Hacker Fair, Sherlock said, “just sounded so intriguing, I just had to come out.”
Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.
