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.
If they are paying 30% less then they will be competing against late stage startups. They have a cash cow to help tilt the lever to their advantage. However that 30% is unlikely to make older workers works more because they have other family obligations. Priorities change in your 30s.
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.
> My hunch is that these companies are cargo-culting their strategies
Yes most of these tech companies are the same. Their strategy is based off what other successful companies are doing. Also they want shareholders / investors to be on board. @paulg himself started this run with an email telling investors and companies to turtle up and stop hiring.
The whole thing has become a self perpetuating loop.
Companies also use this type of thing as an excuse. You'll be seeing companies blaming their poor performance on this downturn for the next few years long after it's all over.
If I was an exec at either company and hiring was all of a sudden a bit less competitive and/or I had better access to top tier employees at other companies who were now more amenable to being recruited... I would certainly hit the "freeze" button for a few hiring cycles to recalibrate around this new reality. I would not need to look at my business plan or P&L to do that.
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…
"We" being...? (Without country the anecdote is not meaningful in this context)
Sounds like Google given the reference to Mountain View.
Google has always recruited and interviewed independently of whether they actually have roles open that make sense for you. Earlier this year, I passed the interview and spent six weeks in "team match" before I gave up and took a role with another company. Had a friend who did the same for months for a PM role.
Just bc you're getting contacted by Google recruiters this week or interviewing doesn't mean you'll ever find a team or get a real offer.
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 best businesses I've seen work counter-cyclically. When there are hiring freezes and layoffs, it's easy to find good cheap engineers and you hire. When job markets are hot, you put a pause on hiring. The same goes for many other things. A recession is an ideal time for deep R&D. There's little competition, and it's possible to do long-term thinking. When the recession ends, and the bubble begins, you hit jackpot.…
I couldn't agree with you more.
A FAANG-tier company with which I'm closely familiar pretty much did the worst thing every time during the past 2 years - they tried to tighten the belt when COVID first hit (missing a ton of great talent when the initial uncertainly killed off some of the smaller companies), then they tried growing and chasing talent really hard, right when the bubble was at its peak, and now that the economic outlook is negative, they've halted / significantly slowed down hiring.
My personal opinion is that Warren Buffett's old quote to be "fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful" rings really true.
And Oracle, and pretty much all the FANG MAAMAs except Amazon.
I wonder what is going on with Amazon. They seem to be going strong with hiring.
My money is on Amazon being more fine with "aggressively pruning their workforce" on a regular basis. The point of a hiring freeze is so that you can move employees around internally to prune unprofitable parts of the business without pruning workers.
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?
Nope, native Polish. Never really lived outside of Poland.
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,…
If you're a recruiter and your entire job is to find and interview candidates and there's a hiring freeze but you (the recruiter) haven't been laid off... what are you going to spend your time doing? Finding and interviewing candidates.
Nope, native Polish. Never really lived outside of Poland.
If you don't mind me asking, what's your legal setup and way of landing US contracts? Most I've seen require a US-based legal entity (which is the tricky bit I can't figure out, as to the best of my knowledge there's no way to set one up without having existing ties/citizenship in the US).