This One Word Is Used By Nearly Every Tech Company To Describe The Job Market

What do most if not all Silicon Valley companies have in common? According to a CNBC report, Silicon Valley companies that file for an initial public company all use one particular word to describe the job market: "intense."

The latest company to use this exact word is Okta Inc OKTA. The cloud company said competition for workers, especially for experienced engineers close to its San Francisco Bay headquarters is "intense."

But reading between the lines, CNBC suggested what the company is trying to say is "engineers around here are expensive and flaky."

Mulesoft Inc MULE, a company that provides a platform for connecting applications, said in its IPO filing that "competition for highly skilled personnel is intense, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area."

Notice A Pattern Yet?

The CNBC report noted that Cloudera, a seller of software for big data projects, is expected to be the next notable company to file for an IPO. Similarly, the company said, "Competition for highly skilled personnel is often intense, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area."

AppDynamics took the pattern one step further. The company cancelled its IPO after it was acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc. CSCO and said local competition for talent is "intense and often leads to increased compensation and other personnel costs."

Finally, CNBC noted that this trend is far from new; the exact word has been used in salesforce.com, inc. CRM's 2004 prospectus. The company said that competition "for these personnel is intense."

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