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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?

#61

Post by ahtihn »

nowherebeen wrote: post #36
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.

Why do they pay more than anyone else if they want cheap?

They could easily pay 30% less and still fill their positions if they just lowered the bar to get hired.

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

#62

Post by LAC-Tech »

badpun wrote: post #60
Tade0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the local market rate. Your bog-standard senior role clocks in at $65k, but that's something you can get around here without going through many hoops. From a company with such an infamously convoluted hiring process I would expect no less than $90k - apparently that's not the case here. Fancy Silicon Valley salaries are naturally out of the question. Highest number to date in my social circle was $150k/yr - a br…

I'm contracting remotely out of Poland and $150k-$170k is definitely doable, especially if you're willing to work for an US company (and adjust to their timezone a bit).

I'm curious - are you an American yourself?

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

#63

Post by discordance »

mkl95 wrote: post #48

How can large companies with high turnover like Google and Facebook afford to stop hiring engineers? Do they downsize teams, shut down projects, or something else?

You don’t need thousands of devs and PMs to make good things. Think about WhatsApp, which was built by a handful of engineers.

I work at a large tech company and a lot of the hiring sprees seem more like VP measuring contests.

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

#65

Post by matwood »

TrackerFF wrote: post #5

Didn’t Sundar just recently demand increased productivity? Sounds like he’s setting the stage for layoffs.

Googlers responded to a questionnaire back in March and complained about bureaucracy. I'm not sure how you avoid moving slow in a company with 170k people though.

Big tech went on a crazy hiring spree the last few years, and it's time to take breath and figure out how to best handle all the new people (the productivity demand). Typically this also means new hires need an increased level of justification, and they'll let natural attrition take down the headcount.

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

#67

Post by ikiris »

noja wrote: post #24
TrackerFF wrote: post #5

Didn’t Sundar just recently demand increased productivity? Sounds like he’s setting the stage for layoffs.

Perhaps the productivity should come from fixing whatever level is deciding to make another chat product, again. Fix the bonuses and you'll get better productivity.

Hangouts Chat has shamefully entered the conversation.

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

#68

Post by matwood »

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.

> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job

Sure, but Google and other big tech have a completely different problem. Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This lets them take moonshots, but also makes it easy to slip into making bad investment decisions. For example, green-lighting a team to build another chat app.

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

#70

Post by datavirtue »

drawkbox wrote: post #49
choeger wrote: post #8

My hunch is that these companies are cargo-culting their strategies. The hiring freeze is as essentially a gut reaction. If one starts with layoffs, others will follow. The real problem is that companies of the Google scale will always need new engineers for particular projects and have a surplus for others. A global freeze or even layoffs simply don't fit.

The other side to this is that businesses tend to follow the leaders of the industry. So if engineer salaries were getting too high, they start a "freeze" which then cascades down to medium then small companies. However, the goal wasn't actually a freeze, it was to lower salaries, increase the pool of candidates and they can then find talent better. In a sense it is manipulation of the labor market and businesses tha…

"the goal wasn't actually a freeze, it was to lower salaries, increase the pool of candidates"

This.

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