• TechCrunch, Monday, August 8, 2011 12:08 PM

What do you get when you add a flood of venture capital, lower barriers to entry, and the lure of great fame and fortune? A generation of tech professionals -- including Web engineers, developers, and designers -- that's getting increasingly harder to corral.

According to an informal poll conducted by TechCrunch, the majority of techies (21%) would choose to work at their own start-up, rather than Facebook (7%), Twitter (8%), Foursquare (5%), Quora (2%), or Yelp (1%). Forget about media companies and ad agencies, which, while not on TechCrunch's list of employer options, we can assume are hardly on top technologists' radar.

"By now it is a common axiom in Silicon Valley [and Silicon Alley] small talk that good engineers are, at the moment, murder to come by." The result is a dearth in online expertise at a time when just about every company -- and those in media and advertising in particular -- could use all the help they can get adapting to our increasingly digital world.

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