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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?

#151

Post by [deleted] »

anonymoushn wrote: post #117
vitus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are Googlers in general okay with the idea that their contributions are worth 1/4 as much if they live in Warsaw?

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by treis »

ShamelessC wrote: post #47
user_named wrote: post #41

Does anybody know what's going on with Walmart Global Tech? A couple of weeks ago I was told I got great feedback and was moving on to the final step which was a call with a VP. Then silence for two or three weeks and no response when I email. Will they come back?

Walmart’s tech hiring is a complete and total shit show regardless of the economy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they never get back to you. In fact (and you didn’t hear this from me), I’ve never witnessed a higher density of incompetence than when [SWIM] worked as a coder at their home office. Don’t work there if you want to maintain your sanity.

> [SWIM]

What does this mean?

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

#153

Post by xyzzyz »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #138
_gabe_ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood how strong labor numbers negate a recession. Like sure your money is worth less because of all the inflation, and your COL keeps increasing but your wages remain the same, but hey we have lots of people working. Maybe somebody smarter than me can explain how these two correlate lol.

Strong labor numbers means wages would be increasing. Perhaps not for all income deciles, but at least the bottom ones (which is a good thing in my opinion since it helps close the income/wealth gap). What would be an issue is the labor participation rate decreasing, which it is, but it may be unavoidable due to things like aging demographics. That means fewer workers supporting non workers, and hence less supply of…

What about real wages, are they also increasing, or only nominal ones do?

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

#154

Post by smugma »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #104

The people I know who are still inside (Google) seem optimistic that maybe the company is taking a pause to deal with some of its bureaucracy and internal politics issues and with people's complaints about perf. I suppose that's good. From my perspective: They've got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.

This has been true for at least 20 years.

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

#155

Post by jboggan »

bena wrote: post #99
kleinsch wrote: post #75

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 fi…

It kind of makes sense to keep people in the pipeline as it were. If you shut down the whole apparatus, you have to spin it back up when hiring is unfrozen. But if you keep the machine running, you're ready to hire the instant you can. For them that is. Sucks for you and me.

There was a TGIF Q&A session in 2016 or 2017 and someone asked Sergei what his worst business decision at Google was, and he replied that it was slowing down and stopping hiring during 2008-2009.

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

#156

Post by evan_ »

jfoster wrote: post #135
phailhaus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We entered a technical recession by the "two quarters of contracting GDP" rule of thumb, but labor numbers are still strong and that second quarter contracted less than the first [1], which is not what we've usually seen when entering a recession. [2] [1] https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-second-... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

If companies are doing hiring freezes and layoffs, will the labor numbers remain strong?

Yeah probably, the tech layoffs amount to a couple thousand people in a labor force of hundreds of millions.

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

#157

Post by _gabe_ »

xhrpost wrote: post #142
_gabe_ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood how strong labor numbers negate a recession. Like sure your money is worth less because of all the inflation, and your COL keeps increasing but your wages remain the same, but hey we have lots of people working. Maybe somebody smarter than me can explain how these two correlate lol.

Hopefully I'm not being snarky here, but if you looked at another country with a smaller economy, and then saw that they employee fewer people, would you be equally confused?

Only if you then proceeded to tell me that because less people are employed the country has a lower standard of living and is more economically unstable. As a direct example of this, Sweden's unemployment rate is 7.6% right now[0], and it's historically been quite a bit higher than the US's. But people say that it ranks #1 in terms of quality of life[1]. Additionally, their unemployment rate is not negatively effecting their growth[2].

So in answer to your question, yes it continues to confuse me when people try to equate employment numbers with the overall economic status of a country. You don't take any number in isolation, you look at the data holistically, and sometimes you have numbers that seem to be at odds with one another. When that happens, it requires a deeper investigation to see what's truly happening instead of taking the number you like better and using that to promote your narrative.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/527418/sweden-monthly-un...

[1]: https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/sweden-best-country-f...

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-28/swedish-e...

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

#158

Post by JumpCrisscross »

phailhaus wrote: post #123
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #119

The Google internal propaganda game must be crazy strong if the actual employees are believing random management explanations designed to keep people from panicking. The US just formally entered a recession, in within a week of the economic turmoil multiple companies freeze hiring...

We entered a technical recession by the "two quarters of contracting GDP" rule of thumb, but labor numbers are still strong and that second quarter contracted less than the first [1], which is not what we've usually seen when entering a recession. [2] [1] https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-second-... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

Google sells ads. Its relevant broad metric is consumer confidence [1]. That’s down.

[1] https://www.conference-board.org/topics/consumer-confidence

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

#159

Post by the_doctah »

davidw wrote: post #146

I suppose this is "old man yells at clouds" material, but I feel like engineers should be practicing for their future jobs , not for interviews.

Neither my current job nor my future job require me to invert a binary tree but here I am practicing it anyway.

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

#160

Post by dekhn »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #101
gumby wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This is what appalled me about Pichai’s productivity comment. Google may not have high productivity, but that’s not its problem. The company has just drifted since Schmidt stopped running it, reminiscent of Microsoft in the second half (and before?) of the Ballmer period. The ladder-climbing PM…

Before I left Google, and in the BeforeTimes(tm) Schmidt came to our Google office in Waterloo and did a little all-hands thing and spoke. Not in a capacity as Google mgmt or decision maker but as himself. It was interesting. One of the things he said that stuck out to me was basically "I am baffled how these really large teams you have can work I can't imagine software development working well beyond a handful of en…

at the beginning of the 2007 real estate debacle, right after the markets had shut down, Eric got up in front of TGIF and told people it was going to be OK, that Google was in a better situation than most, and since things would eventually recover, it made sense for the company to continue being aggressive at a time when others were not. This helped position Google for tremendous growth in the years after. I think that's also the TGIF where he announced a company-wide 10% raise.

I met Eric later and we chatted about my project and how Google should be more aggressive at getting into Cloud. He and I thought on pretty much the same wavelength and I realized- he was a far better leader of Google than either Page or Pichai.

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