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What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

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Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#31

Post by ninkendo »

onion2k wrote: post #26
ripper1138 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inevitable. Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. Most of the Googlers I know have been spending 20% of their time on Google and 80% on side projects for the past year now.

Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.

Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#33

Post by __exit__ »

Tade0 wrote: post #28

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland. I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim. He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was...…

When you say the compensation was very close to the current market rate, I assume you mean the market rate in Poland, correct? No fancy Silicon Valley salaries for devs in Poland, that is.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#34

Post by ehnto »

onion2k wrote: post #26
ripper1138 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inevitable. Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. Most of the Googlers I know have been spending 20% of their time on Google and 80% on side projects for the past year now.

Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.

The more likely scenario for most is that there are other people or mechanisms making the money, or that they're living off the success of previous efforts. It's not necessarily their fault at a company that large, sometimes people are just grossly under-utilized or misallocated. People can just vanish in a manner of speaking, by getting forgotten about or by having your responsibilities taken from you but not replaced.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#35

Post by nixass »

Tade0 wrote: post #28

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland. I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim. He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was...…

I was approached by both companies in Germany recently too, freeze doesn't mean full stop, just tightening it.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#36

Post by nowherebeen »

aulin wrote: post #19

maybe they realized hiring leetcode junkies is not a great strategy and they want to freeze that while they find a better interview system

It’s a way to filter out more experienced candidates because they want cheap and young. Even a Meta recruiter admits to me that Leetcode has nothing to do with the job, it’s just a company requirement that no one questions.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#37

Post by yardstick »

__exit__ wrote: post #33
Tade0 wrote: post #28

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland. I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim. He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was...…

When you say the compensation was very close to the current market rate, I assume you mean the market rate in Poland, correct? No fancy Silicon Valley salaries for devs in Poland, that is.

Polish salaries are maybe not SV high but they are climbing. $100k USD/year plus for a contract engineer. Not cheap.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#38

Post by londons_explore »

meldyr wrote: post #11
cbanek wrote: post #4

I'm not sure I buy that they're actually on a hiring freeze, but I may be wrong. The day before it was announced I got a text from a google recruiter literally saying feel free to contact me on 8/8 (after the freeze is supposedly finished). I feel like this was definitely a show for the shareholders, and a way to drop your dead weight. Everyone seems worried about employee productivity and profitably all of a sudden,…

Be careful with young and ambitious recruiters these days. When large companies can do hiring freezes they do not immediately fire a large proportion of their recruiters immediately. Recruiters will spent the same time interviewing for less vacancies to fill. Be careful not to waste your time on this.

+1 to this.

In big companies, I've seen hundreds of applicants interviewed to start work on a project, when the project had already been cancelled months ago, and none of those interviewed were hired.

They'd already made it into the interview pipeline, and management hadn't let recruitment know that this position was no longer needed, so all the interviews went ahead as scheduled.

Hundreds of person-days wasted! The reputation of the firm damaged, good people missed (would you re-apply soon after being rejected?)... And I don't think this is a rare story.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#39

Post by paganel »

> Moreover, these freezes materially affect our business.

Related and slightly OT, but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company. Which, in retrospect, of course that it makes a lot of sense and I get it, from an economic pov, but I still find it kind of strange.

I had recently become quite bearish on these companies (especially Google and FB), this type of info only reinforces that opinion, you cannot truly innovate while you're employing people who see working there has an end in itself. Hope that monopoly-like thingie will continue to work for them (again, I'm thinking mainly about FB and Google), otherwise I see dark days ahead for these two companies.

Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

#40

Post by vitus »

Tade0 wrote: post #28

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland. I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim. He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was...…

We are indeed still conducting interviews (I had one just on Friday). Whether that transfers to actual offers extended during this time, I have no idea.

What I can say we are absolutely not doing at this time is rescinding offers, even for new grads.

There certainly have been some shifts over the past year or two to prioritize growth in cheaper markets (for lack of a better term) -- one manager I talked to mentioned that the headcount tradeoff was basically "one engineer in Mountain View, or 3-4 in Warsaw" (which is an accurate reflection of the salary disparity).

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