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Flipping The Help-Wanted Coin: Microsoft Or Google?
Posted on Oct 19, 2005 at 09:06 AM by John Foley
You've heard the reports, even if you don't believe them, that there are more IT openings in the United States than good candidates to fill them. Let's assume that's true (IT unemployment is a low 3.2%) and that two of the tech industry's biggest employers, Microsoft and Google, are among the places aggressively looking for talented people. Where would you rather work?
It's a hypothetical question, but one rooted in reality. As my colleague Thomas Claburn writes, Google's Web site advertises nearly 600 job openings. Microsoft's got seven times that many (4,321) in the United States alone. Microsoft also lists 306 job openings in India, plus many more in other countries.
There's lots of interesting tidbits to be gleaned from both companies' job postings. Microsoft, for example, is looking for software testers in Shanghai, China, to be part of a project called "Silk Road" that involves creating an engineering team that contributes to its Windows Server division. Sounds like the folks who get hired will be doing some of the quality assurance needed to keep bugs out of Windows Server. Microsoft lists about 30 software test openings in China. There also are a dozen research openings in the country, plus jobs in sales, marketing, product support, legal, and more.
More than half of Google's jobs (362) are in Mountain View, Calif., with most of those (108) in engineering. Google has 10 openings for people who work on user interfaces, an area of interest to me. The company needs IT staffers and managers to help run big Linux clusters in its data center. It's also hiring an enterprise sales and deployment engineer to sell its Google Earth technology to large commercial and government customers. Thomas Claburn has written about Google's plans to expand its reach into the enterprise with products beyond its search appliance. Google Earth seems to be one of them.
Surprisingly, Google also has 76 job openings in New York. That's more than any other U.S. city outside of Mountain View. One of those is for a "PowerPoint and graphics product specialist," who, among other skills, needs to know how to use Microsoft's Excel and Word. So there you have it -– Google does use Microsoft apps on the desktop. One employee's desktop, at least.
So, where would you rather work? I put that question to people who visit InformationWeek's MicrosoftToday.com Web site, and the audience was split, with 45% choosing Google and 43% Microsoft. My standard caveat: This is an informal poll, so don't take the results too seriously. But they can serve as a point of discussion. We'll leave the poll up for a few more days to give you a chance to cast your own ballot.
Google's got momentum, the Bay Area, a breakthrough business model, cool, new apps, and a vibrant corporate culture working in its favor. Microsoft's got clout, the Pacific Northwest, Bill Gates, a nice corporate campus, and more than a few interesting products of its own. To be sure, not everyone gets excited by the prospect of working for one or the other. Twelve percent of our poll respondents chose option C: neither company.
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