The dark side of tech development in Singapore

Though start-ups in Singapore are growing in numbers, there is a shortage of tech engineers to meet the demand, reports Tech in Asia

Tech start-up entrepreneurs do not often share openly about this, but developing your tech product in-house in Singapore is nothing short of challenging. There is an obvious growth in the amount of new start-ups appearing in the ecosystem but the supporting group of tech engineers are falling behind. 
 

State of engineering talent for start-ups

The odds are stacked against start-ups in obtaining entry-level programmers and engineers to work for them. The supply of workers is small compared to the demand to fill the workforce. 
 

At the university level, due to many years of cultivating an ‘iron rice bowl’ mindset, many graduates clamour for jobs in large, stable MNCs, which focuses them on management roles rather than pursuing software programming. 

 

Mindsets are changing but those numbers are still small.
 

What can an entrepreneur do about it? 
 

Sheep-stealing

“If you post a job advertisement on Jobstreet or StartupJobs, the candidates you get are already not grade A,” quips Jack, a CTO founder. He explains quality coders are only found via referrals. He takes a step further. He studies which tech start-ups have a good flock of engineers and digs into the LinkedIn profiles. From there, he contacts them and poaches them.

Initially it sounds fine at a micro-level that a new team is formed and a new product is being developed, but it becomes an unhealthy exercise with the constant sheep stealing from each other. You will find technical projects being half-done or become totally abandoned, which leads to start-up failure. This is an unhealthy vicious cycle. For the engineers themselves, career progression becomes ad-hoc and mercenary. One engineer admitted to me that he jumps to another company every 3-4 months for a small increase of S$100, but there is no career direction is what he is doing.

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This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.