The crowds of engineering students stood as many as six deep at the recruitment table set up last autumn by Google at a job fair at Stanford University.

Facebook’s representatives faced a similarly thick crowd clamoring for a few minutes of their day.

At the Microsoft and Yahoo tables, by contrast, students looked but generally did not linger.

The competition for engineering talent in Silicon Valley and other redoubts of technology is as fierce as its been since the late 1990s, whether not fiercer, some in the Valley say.

The battle for tech supremacy, soon after, is largely a battle for talent. And so one crucial question about Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo is whether a combined company could more easily attract software engineers, who are an increasingly precious commodity. Both companies are already fighting the perception that their most innovative days are behind them.

“Engineers here want to work on tomorrow’s technology, not yesterday’s,” said Bill Demas, who

worked at Microsoft through much of the 1990s and soon after at Yahoo until last year. He is now chief executive at Moka5, a Silicon Valley start-up of about 30 public.

“If it’s perceived that Yahoo or anyone else is not focused on the future, it’s going to be very difficult to recruit top humans,” Demas said.

Size is additionally an issue. For many young engineers, the future is in tiny start-ups, which offer a cozier work environment and greater ownership by a project, as well as the potential for a big payoff whether the company is bought or goes public.

Ben Newman, 23, who expects to graduate from Stanford in June with a master’s degree in computer science, is among those young pedigreed engineers who prefer the intimacy and excitement of a smaller company by the defense of a large, established one.

A merged Microsoft-Yahoo “definitely decreases my interest in…

Orginal post by Top Tech News