VanRoekel is leaving his position as the managing director of the Federal Communications Commission. He joined the FCC shortly after president Obama's inauguration in 2009 and has helped the FCC become perhaps the most forward thinking departments in the federal government in how it uses the Web.

VanRoekel told Howard in April that, "the experiences that live outside of FCC.gov should interact back into it. In a perfect world, no one should have to visit the FCC website." In that scenario, FCC data would be ingrained into a Web service or app.

VanRoekel takes on a big job. Kundra was the first federal CIO ever and in his two-plus years on the job only scratched the surface of changing how the government uses technology. The federal government has an $80 billion IT budget (or, just about the entire cash holdings of Apple, the second largest corporation by market cap in the world). Kundra was a great strategist. He advocated for cloud computing and transparent government, bringing projects like Data.gov and the federal IT Dashboard to the public. The federal government now plans on eliminating 800 of its 2000 or so data centers (with about a quarter of that coming from the Department of Defense).

VanRoekel looks like he has the skills and mindset to put Kundra's strategies into action. With a couple years in the federal government under his belt, VanRoekel will not be surprised at the often run down state of federal IT. The goal, set forth by Kundra, will be to make the federal government as productive and agile as the private sector that iterates productive technology much faster despite less resources.

If Google is ever to effectively challenge Facebook and Twitter in social software, which is expected to be a key battleground in a world no longer dominated by atomized search experiences online, then hiring leading thinkers could be an important part of the company's strategy.

• Why There's Nothing to Fear in Social Search


• Social Relevancy Rank: What's Missing?


• 3 Flavors of Social Search: What to Expect


• Social Shopping: Putting the Emotion Back in E-Commerce

Trained as a cognitive scientist at Stanford and UC San Diego, Evans joins a growing list of prominent hires by Google in recent months that will at the very least complicate the common saying that "Google doesn't get social software." Hopefully they can all work well together to move the social software world forward for all of us.

Photo of Evans used with permission from Tikva Morowati.

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. Today we're publishing our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who's hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.

We've reported on a total of 420 hires since the first of January. The top 10 sector categories have been:

1. Software/IT (24%)
2. Social Media/Social Networking (15%)
3. Marketing/Advertising (11%)
4. Publishing/New Media (7%)
5. Hardware (6%)
6. Mobile (4%)
7. Gaming/Entertainment (3%)
8. Search (3%)
9. Government (2%)
10. Security (2%)

News of those positions getting filled came from press releases and personal tips, but also from mentions of new jobs on Twitter and blog posts. We scour the web daily for cool news about people getting cool new jobs.

There are far more hires going on in total than we can currently report on, but we're working on expanding our capacity and we believe that this is a valuable data point as a semi-representative snapshot at least. We hope that the particular hires reported on ReadWriteHire will also be of interest to companies in each of these sectors. Knowing who your competitors have hired is valuable information.

If you've made a new hire or gotten a new job recently, drop us a line to let us know! You can reach us by email at jobwire@readwriteweb.com.

Congratulations to everyone who secured these increasingly difficult positions to land. Join us over at ReadWriteHire for more stories of exciting new hires every day of the week.

HubSpot used the new submission form on Jobwire, our site tracking new hires, to tell us about the move this morning.

Photo: Schachter at ETech05, prior to the Yahoo! acquisition.

For more details check out our analysis on Jobwire, our site tracking new hires in tech and new media.

Founders Fund has invested in some of the most high profile startups in the market, including Facebook and Slide.com. We covered the move in depth over on Jobwire, our site reporting on new hires in tech.

Join us over at Jobwire to check out our pie charts and where tech and new media companies are putting their money these days.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

Though these startups were inspiring, we also think it quite noteworthy that even at a down time economically there are still jobs for super smart people. We covered the Pownce/SixApart deal in greater depth at our hire-tracking site Jobwire. See that coverage for more details about the technology that Pownce will bring to SixApart.

Who's getting those jobs? What kinds of positions are being filled and in what sectors? Check out our first set of charts below from last week's aggregate activity on Jobwire to find out the answer to those questions. One interesting tidbit? Software developers are getting hired by social networking companies. If you got a job or your company made a hire in tech or new media this week - send us a note about it at jobwire@readwriteweb.com. Read on for details on how last week looked.

We reported on 48 hires last week and the following is the break-out by job title. We're sure that there are more interesting hires of developers going on and we're doing our best to find them - but they are a little harder to find than some of the executive hires that get announced by companies. None the less, we find these first numbers interesting.

Hires by Sector

What kinds of companies did we report on last week? Here's the break-out by sector.

Note: "Other" includes sectors like retail, search, security and gaming this week. For specifics, see the Jobwire site.

We expect next week's numbers by sector could look very different, but we'll be tracking them closely and we'll let you know. We think that people's new jobs are a lot of fun to find out about and we think the information can prove quite valuable.

RWW Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV and reports on about 10 new hires in tech and new media every day. We hope that you'll join us there for all the daily news about the hottest new hires.

We're covering the deal in more depth on our new blog about tech company hires Jobwire. Please see our coverage there for more details about what's sure to be a very interesting move.