The biggest challenge facing Microsoft today is making sure that it has enough qualified, capable, talented people who can continue to scale with the company.
But the Redmond, Wash., software maker is facing competition for those resources from an unexpected source: the hedge fund industry.
“You have about a third of the number of people entering the IT field than you did during the dot-com era,” Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner told eWEEK. “Also, one of the stiffest competitors we face today are the hedge funds, for staff to support all the major systems and analysis and decision support-type activity they do and which is pretty intensive.
“There is excitement and glamour associated with working for a hedge fund, so we are finding that some of the best competition that we get in the marketplace is coming straight from the hedge funds, which, over the past few years, have added a lot more people than Google and Yahoo,” he said.