Solutions to Singapore’s engineering talent crunch, according to the TIA Community

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In the article “The dark side of tech development in Singapore”, I highlighted the issues plaguing the Singapore ecosystem in getting engineering talent and how entrepreneurs are handling this situation. This macro problem is multi-faceted and not easily resolved overnight. However, initiatives are ongoing, which this article will try to highlight as many as possible.

(The previous article also sparked off a healthy flow of valuable comments from the TIA community. This article incorporates these views, along with previous articles, to give a more comprehensive overview.)

Founders: the ball is in your court

We saw how entrepreneurs highlighted their woes of hiring engineers, but here is the flip side that the TIA community has mentioned, “Have you looked in the mirror and asked why?”

Laurence Franslay, an engineer, decided to join an MNC after four years in startups because he could not find a startup that excited him. He says that “engineers are generally ready to join startups, which is why the best from our Singapore universities all went to the US to join startups there. We need better startups in Singapore. They can provide a good learning environment if they are doing groundbreaking work, and not another Groupon/TaskRabbit/”insert-whatever-the-new-fad” is.

Winston Teo concurs, “Are the folks, who are saying that engineers are hard to find, working on ideas that are interesting or worthwhile to solve? Are they doing enough hustling and networking to get good engineers? If they can’t hustle for engineers, can they hustle for customers?”

He further adds that “non-tech founders should […] value and ascertain good engineering, then they would have a better chance of finding and nurturing good talent.”

Gibson Tang feels “Singapore lacks good product guys and managers who are able to convince good engineers to join them. To an engineer, learning new cool stuff is like catnip to them and most startups do not have such an environment, though that could be due to lack of mentorship from experienced engineers which are already a rare breed in Singapore.”

Kevin Flanagan suggests “that perhaps the really great trick in building the sorts of tech businesses that make a real dent in the world [is] to take a bunch of ordinary talent and show them how to do extraordinary things. But it ain’t easy.”

Victor Liew likes “building a culture where everyone is passionate about what they do. It’s encouraging to be with people who are excited when a new technology is launched, or when someone happily discovers a new service and tells everyone about it.” Aaron Lim agrees that “a hammer is a necessity to building a house, as is concrete – no one wants to be a hammer. Engineers like creating cool things and solving interesting problems. They want to be architects, not tools.”

Points to take away: To attract great engineers, entrepreneurs have to think big, think of a cool product, appreciate good engineering, build a creative culture, and view engineers as solvers not tools.

Pay and career path, or lack thereof

Jaryl Sim speaks about “talent development, which means hiring the right people, and giving them a path to grow. The small amounts of funding that startups here take are holding the ecosystem back because they create teams based on who they can hire, to join teams that are struggling to get the product out. Most startups sadly don’t have the bandwidth to really develop talent because of the scale in which we operate. On the bright side, there are great startups to work with in Singapore which can help developers grow.”

Benjamin Chew wants to “change the view that programmers are [commodities, not investments]. If the technology is important to the company (and it should be nowadays), the longer an engineer stays in the company, the more valuable he or she becomes. It pays having a good engineer to see a project from start to finish, and even into the maintenance phase of a project. A good engineer is worth much, much more than a mediocre engineer in the long run.”

Read more: Hiring and retaining engineers: Lessons from US

Skills upgrading and development: meetups, conferences, courses

Finding new talents with external resources and government help

Ending thoughts