Mr. Goldberg. (twitter.com/betashop)

The fast-growing design-centric superdiscount site Fab.com, which executed a double pivot, is up to 90 employees and growing revenue at 33 percent per month, CEO Jason Goldberg told Betabeat. With head hunters poking around all the bigger startups in the city, that's a lot of employees to hide. But Mr. Goldberg isn't losing sleep over having his employees poached. "We're a hot company," he told Betabeat. "We're growing really fast. We've had a number of companies who are trying to recruit some of  our team members. When someone on my team gets 10 calls from a recruiter a week, we think they should feel flattered."

If a recruiter wants to get in touch with one of his employees, they're welcome to, he said. Last week Mr. Goldberg wrote a blog post titled, "Recruit away our team. I dare you. Heck, I encourage you" in which he offered to hand over employee phone numbers to recruiters. Basically, bring it on.

Why, why, why would you ever say that at a time when talent is so hard to find? Betabeat asked.

"Our employees have the right to work whever they want. They gotta want to be there," he said. "It's a nice way to send a message that people are free to come and go as they please, but the onus is on the employer to build an amazing work environment."

He's confident that the employees who belong at Fab.com will stay, he said. "I have a belief that the best kind of way to ensure that we attract and retain talent is to build the best work environment in the world," he said. "The challenge is on myself and my team to do that."

When employees tell him they've been contacted by a recruiter, Mr. Goldberg congratulates them. "I say 'great, that's awesome, it should make you feel good,'" he said. Reverse psychology, much?

But outing recruiters may have another benefit. "Guess what?" he said. "I'm going to call those companies and try and recruit their people."

Gangster with a keyboard. (yfrog.com/user/brandondiamond)

Remember when organizers accidentally leaked the entire list of 452 hackers who signed up for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon? The list has gotten into the hands of some of those overly aggressive, ham-fisted recruiters and non-technical co-founders who dog any engineer with a LinkedIn account. A recent example:

My company is hiring a CTO/lead developer.  We've been accepted into a top accelerator program (like one that actually gets written up in TC) so our company has validation and money.  Whoever we bring on would also enjoy a significant equity stake (think co-founder level).  You can read more here:
www.NextBigTechStartup.com
Cheers,
Camilo [co-founder at GeoSkipper]

In an expression of continuing frustration with pesky talent seekers, local start-up entrepreneur and lead of the developer syndicate NYHacker Brandon Diamond typed back a response that any engineer could use as a model:

DEAR SIR AND MADAME:

I WOULD LIKE TO BID TO MAKING YOUR PROGRAM FOR YOU. WE ARE REPUTABLE #1 DEVELOPER FACTORY IN ALL OF KRJEKISTAN. I CAN FOR YOU, CODE NEXT BIG WEBSITE STARTUP (C+, VBSCRIPT AND VISUAL DELPHI!!!)

I WILL TAKE $1000USD IN EQUITY, STEAKS PLUS 3 COFLOUNDERS.

PLEASE ACCEPTING OUR BID IF YOU ARE WANT 1 BILLION (1,0000) CUSTOMARES. TO BE A TECHCRUNCH ARTICLE IS BIGGEST DREAM FOR KRJEKI CHILDREN. MORE BIGGER IS, BEING CODE JOCKEY FOR ACCELERATOR AND HAVING FOOD ALMOST EVARY DAY!!!!!

GRACELAND,
ALABASTER W. STOPFUCKINGSPAMMING, DDS

Ironically, Google locked Mr. Diamond out of his Gmail account after he sent this email to the list for "spamming." He's not sure how to restore it. He's also currently out on Long Island where they've been 36 hours without electricity due to rainstorm Irene. "I guess that without power, Gmail isnt too important," he said zenfully, IM-ing with Betabeat from outside a Starbucks.

"Having to give up on your company sucks for a month or two and it hurts forever, but it is not failure – if these teams are absorbed back into the world of cubicles and are allowed to return to the jobs they walked away from in the first place, that will be failure, and failure at the community level. When you meet the founder of  a failed business, reach out your hand, pick them up and do everything you can to keep them involved in our community... because our community depends on it."

Mr. Barnes’s plea reminded us of a reoccurring theme we’d heard while reporting on New York’s geek gap. In "Raiders of the Last Nerd," this week’s feature on tech recruiting, Kinda Sorta Media’s Rex Sorgatz offered Betabeat an ominous-sounding take on the struggle to hire local talent, “If you want a CTO, you have to go to, like, Tel Aviv.” But we didn’t have the space in the paper to really delve into why.

In his experience, Mr. Sorgatz said it wasn’t so much that New York was short on rockstar coders. Rather, it’s a side effect of the entrepreneurial bug gone viral. “People now run four-person companies where they may have otherwise led a five-person tech team in a twenty-person company.” (Is this a good time to say we told ya so? No? Okay, just checking.)

As evidence of this epidemic of Markus Zuckerbergius, Mr. Sorgatz offered up a recent incident between a “prominent start-up in town” and TechStars, a high-profile start-up accelerator. The prominent start-up got upset after TechStars convinced a recruit they wanted to hire for a top product position to launch his own company instead.

Charlie O’Donnell, who works with Mr. Barnes at First Round, noted the same phenomenon. “There’s more of a displacement than there is a shortage. If you just looked at all of the available appetite for developers, then you could say, yeah, there’s more money in ideas chasing after good people,” he told Betabeat, adding “But not all those ideas are good ideas.” Mr. O’Donnell, who now spends a third of his time helping start-ups in First Round’s portfolio staff-up, didn’t seem to think it was a lost cause. “To me the fact there’s anybody left working as a developer for Fox News over in Midtown, tells me there’s still work left to be done.”

The flip side of start-up fever, of course, is that not all of those wanna-be Zucks are going to make it. “There are a lot of people working for companies that are going sideways, companies where the writing’s on the wall,” said Mr. O’Donnell. Skeptics about the value of getting paid in equity, take note. “That’s the nature of the seed and angel stage market, not all of them are going to make it to a Series A. That’s where most of them drop off, because it’s the most risky point.” This also happens to be the point where Mr. Barnes is hoping founders who did make it past the valley of death will swoop in with job offers to keep the lost souls from wandering back to the corporate world.

Mr. Sorgatz offered a similar vision of the future. “It’s impossible that the rate of success stays as high as it has been, and many of these start-ups are going to have to decide if they are going to be viable companies, and I suspect a lot of them will not be. I would not call it the bubble bursting, but there will be a shift in the talent.”

It’s a cyclical process, explained Mr. O’Donnell. That’s why you’ve seen so many acquisition hires from start-ups launched a year-and-a-half ago. (Like Brooklyn’s Sam Lessin, whose start-up Drop.io was purchased by Facebook in October... mainly to acquire Mr. Lessin). “It’s saying, ‘Listen, we’ll put a little money in your pocket and make you feel good about that little product you started. Don’t feel bad you ended on a zero.’”

So next time you hear about a start-up with a questionable concept or execution, think of it less as a doomed-to-failure, and more as a rising talent pool for your own (no doubt rock solid) idea keeping you up at night.