Like the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, the “Emerald Triangle” of Seattle, Redmond and Kirkland has become a many faceted jewel of a marketplace for elite technical and management talent, and strong software design and programming professionals throughout the ranks. As the NW tech world turns, management turnover churns with it. Watching the direction of “HR talent [...]
If you use Facebook, the world’s top social networking site, you may have “liked” an Internet scheme without even knowing it – and unwittingly helped spread the scam to your Facebook friends. Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna and Facebook have announced the latest step in an ongoing fight against spammers and scammers: a lawsuit against [...]
Will the last Seattle Internet company to add a structured social media program to its online offering or outreach, please turn off the lights? Wait, reverse that. Social engagement can be a very luminescent idea to build traffic, heigthen awareness, elevate search ranking and propel your marketing message and sales momentum! Zillow has just announced the launch [...]
Heck, no, we don’t love snow! Seattle is “Rain City,” remember! We have more than a dozen words for rain including rainfall, cloudburst, sprinkle, drizzle, showers, downpour, precip, drencher, and cats n’ dogs, but, unlike the Eskimo’s, only one word for snow — dismal! Catch our drift of emergency online resources in the story below [...]
Does ”Everybody in Seattle really want to work for Amazon?” Business Insider’s Matt Rosoff says the attraction is irresistible for these reasons: 1. Goodbye Beacon Hill, Hello South Lake Union! Amazon is no longer quarantined in a renovated VA Hospital on Beacon Hill. It has traded Count Dracula’s castle on the cliff for much trendier digs [...]
Windows 8, The iPhone 5, 4G phones, Smartphones and smarter cars, the birth of “Business TV,” further meteorology in the Cloud, and new avionics in the clouds from Boeing’s 787 and 747-8 aircraft. All are in our future forecast for the Pacific Northwest and the Seattle metaverse in 2012. Friday Harbor’s Mark Anderson of the Strategic News [...]
What does the coming year hold in store for mobility, commuting and accessibility around the Puget Sound? The tolling that is set to begin this week on the 520 floating bridge between Seattle and Bellevue-Redmond, beginning at 5 a.m. on December 29th, won’t “bridge” into other transportation systems. The oll revenue is expected to shore [...]
Seattle Site of New World Internet Speed Record The recent SuperComputing 2011 (SC11) conference in Seattle was the scene of a new world record for an Internet transfer of gigabyte proportions. A FIOS shattering 98 gigabits per second (Gbps) was achieved between the University of Victoria Computing Centre located in Victoria, British Columbia, and the Washington State Convention [...]
Amazon Kindle Comes Under Fire Will the flames of early excitement that have tantalized consumers and ignited sales of Amazon’s 7″ color Fire handheld, the lowest cost entrant into the tablet wars at less than half the price of the Apple iPad and $50 lower than the Barnes & Noble Nook, be cooled by customer reviews? A few outspoken end-users [...]
Fisher Communications may have cut the cord on the 300,000 square foot Fisher Plaza office and data center in exchange for $160 million from Houston-based Hines Global, but the company has just cut the red ribbon on virtually unlimited shelf space by opening up a new marketing center online. SeattleNow is the name of new daily deals [...]
Enter your email address below to receive updates each time we publish new content.
Feb 6 2012
Techspresso Shots: PS Top Tech Talent Changing Posts, Places and Partners, Avg. Salary $90,000+
Like the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, the “Emerald Triangle” of Seattle, Redmond and Kirkland has become a many faceted jewel of a marketplace for elite technical and management talent, and strong software design and programming professionals throughout the ranks.
As the NW tech world turns, management turnover churns with it. Watching the direction of “HR talent flow” from one company to another, is a fair predictor of who is up and who is down in any given industry category at a particular time.
Take “third-party apps” for example, and the shifting momentum in that market space between Microsoft and Amazon. Last year, Charlie Kindel (no Kindle “name-pun” intended), who was a Microsoft general manager leading third-party app initiatives, left the company to launch a start-up as yet unrealized. At the time Kindel called Windows Phone “the best product Microsoft has ever built.”
Now, his replacement, Brandon Watson is leaving Microsoft to join Amazon.com’s Kindle team also in third-part app development. Watson’s Twitter account confirmed the move. “The rumors are true. The team is in great hands,” he wrote on Friday. “I’ll miss working on #wpdev.”
Mary Jo Foley notes at ZDNet that the Amazon group Watson is joining makes Kindle apps for a variety of platforms, including Windows Phone. Watson leaves Windows Phone with a legacy of accomplishment According to AllAboutWindowsPhone.com, more than 60,000 items have now been published in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Still it seems a bit surprising that the degree of overlap in the mobile app field is not restricted by a non-compete or non-disclosure agrement that would make it difficult to make such a switch “on the fly.”
Our talented cadre of Seattle workers are earning an average of $90,000 per year, up 5 percent from last year, plus an annual bonus of close to $10,000 according to a survey conducted by TechFlash. This compares favorably with the average annual wage of $81,327 for tech professionals nationwide.
Like the Microsoft and Amazon parallelism, the Bay Area has two opposing tech poles in Google and Apple. In an HR switch last week, Google purportedly pulled off a coup by hiring Apple’s senior director of product integrity for a secret project, according to VentureBeat. The hiring is interesting because the Department of Justice is investigating Google and Apple for allegedly working out a “no poach” agreement where the companies — along with Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intel and Intuit — allegedly conspired to suppress employee compensation by not poaching each other’s employees.
According to this Linkedin page, Simon Prakash worked at Apple for more than eight years where he was most recently the senior director of product integrity responsible for product quality across all of Apple’s products, from iPhones to Macs.
Now he’ll be working for Google on a secret project, presumably run by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is in charge of a variety of secret research and development projects at Google. The company recently acquired Motorola Mobility, and it has a wide variety of hardware projects under way that Prakash might be working on. [24x7]