Greetings readers and happy Monday!
I hope you all had a splendid weekend. This is the inaugural post in a new weekly curated news rundown looking at recent headlines in recruiting technology from the past week. So, without further ado, let's get to the headlines.
Indeed looked at Silicon Valley tech job emigration (hint: Seattle, Portland, Denver and especially Austin are benefiting the most). The new H1B guidelines are reducing the computer programmer gigs that skilled immigrants can take (hello talent shortage!). A data storage company named Cohesity (no relation to Felicity) just raised a $90M round led by Google Ventures and Sequoia (looks like they'll be hiring pretty soon). Speaking of which, Axios looked at the gender breakdown of venture capital (and it's not great) and Atlassian's global head of diversity thinks tech companies trying to fix diversity are looking at the wrong metrics. But Google might be onto something with their Code Next labs.
On the Skynet beat, Goldman Sachs new CTO chatted job automation. Yahoo Tech's David Pogue did too but isn't too worried about it. Chatbots, the tech wave of the future, are having growing pains (You don't say!). Google's custom machine learning chips are setting insane benchmarks (so maybe we just need to use them for chatbots) and people are managing to fall in love with Alexa. Paging Joaquin Phoenix.
You'll find larger capsules for each story below. Have a great week!
Recruiting Tech and Talent Acquisition
Is Silicon Valley at Risk of Brain Drain? (Indeed): "Both Silicon Valley and Austin have national profiles, strong technology industries and are locked in a fierce competition for talent. However, we found that Silicon Valley job seekers, especially older ones, are increasingly interested in leaving, while Austin job seekers are increasingly looking locally for their next opportunity."
Trump Cracks Down on H1B Visa Program That Feeds Silicon Valley (Bloomberg): "The new guidelines released Friday require additional information for computer programmers applying for H-1B visas to prove the jobs are complicated and require more advanced knowledge and experience. It’s effective immediately, so it will change how companies apply for the visas in an annual lottery process that begins Monday."
Storage Startup Attracts New Funding at Valuation of More Than $500M (Bloomberg):"Cohesity Inc., a startup that specializes in data storage, landed funding that valued the company at more than $500 million, according to a person familiar with the matter, giving it fresh resources to bolster growth."
Men Still Run Venture Capital (Axios): "Only 7% of decision-makers at U.S. venture capital firms are women, according to an Axios analysis. Moreover, women effectively control just 4.7% of all venture dollars raised in the past five years by U.S.-based firms."
Product Hunt Now Lets You Ask Its Community to Recommend Apps and Tools (The Next Web): "Now, in addition to its its categorized feeds for surfacing stuff you might like, it now lets you ask the community to help you find products for your specific needs."
Inside Chatbots Growing Pains: We're at an Inflection Point (Marketing Land): "Roughly 78 percent of adults in the US have not even heard of chatbots, according to an online survey that Publicis Groupe’s Digitas LBi hired Harris Poll to conduct in November 2016. As much as that lack of awareness would appear to be a curse, it may actually be more of a blessing."
Goldman Sachs CFO Talks Job Automation (Axios): "The key for workers, ― which he says applies both on and off Wall Street ― is to not fight against automation for the explicit sake of "same job" protection, because clingy manual input will always lose in the end."
Google says its Custom Machine Learning Chips are 15-30x Faster Than Competitors (Techcrunch): "The numbers that matter most here, though, are that based on Google’s own benchmarks (and it’s worth keeping in mind that this is Google evaluating its own chip), the TPUs are on average 15x to 30x faster in executing Google’s regular machine learning workloads than a standard GPU/CPU combination (in this case, Intel Haswell processors and Nvidia K80 GPUs)."
The Disruption of Workers by Robots is About to Take a Giant Leap Forward (Yahoo Tech): "One thing is clear: Robots are definitely going to take over millions of our jobs. About 5 million retail jobs, 3 million truck-driving jobs, and 500,000 taxi and ride-sharing jobs in the US could, in time, take their places alongside the millions of factory jobs that robots have already displaced."
Tech Firms Striving on Diversity Fixate on the Wrong Metric (Wired): "Companies should focus on a unit of analysis that measures where diversity has the greatest impact: at the team level. Teams are key to improving diversity, because it’s the interactions between people every day that we’re actually talking about when we say “diversity.”
How Google's Code Next Lab is Tackling Tech's Diversity Problem (Fast Company): "Working with community organizations and the design firm Kurani, they developed a space that would draw students in, whether or not they had been interested in technology in the past. The walls are plastered with floor-to-ceiling images of people like Melba Roy, a black woman who led a team of NASA’s human computers in the 1960s, and Guillermo Camarena, the Mexican inventor of a type of color television screen."