What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes? • Hacker News Board

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

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Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:37 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #160

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

He's a smart guy but honestly, I think he also lost touch just like Page etc.

When he came to Waterloo to visit it was because he happened to be in Toronto pitching the Sidewalk Labs "spy^H^H^Hsmart" city thing. Remember that? Look it up. Fiasco IMHO. To me, being deeply involved in that debacle is indicative of a kind of business and intellectual arrogance that seems out of touch with reality.

He used to bring Henry Kissinger in for "fireside chats" at Google. He seemed/seems very fascinating by this kind of ... technocratic realpolitik. Google playing around in that area is a really not good look and did not in general get good reaction from the staff and looks really dubious in the current era.

There's enough ungrounded conspiracy theories about Google, they don't need, y'know, actual conspiracies.

But as a manager he definitely seemed to have a better sense of how the day to day operation of a large engineering firm can work.

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

#292

Post by H8crilA » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

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?

Yes, usually rationalizing it as "but it's cheaper to live in Warsaw", which is true. That being said it is a reflection of market reality, where some (many) people are definitely unwilling to move for 4x the salary. This doesn't of course mean that SV is "4x worse", but rather is a pricing of their other activities/personal relationships.

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

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Post by uoaei » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #272

forgingahead wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When asset prices increase quickly, everything is fine, as the wealthy are benefitting. When wages increase though, that's inflation and we must tamp down hard on it!

This is the federal reserves stated position. https://mronline.org/2022/05/26/u-s-federal-reserve-says-its...

Given the obviousness of the consequences, it's hard to imagine the Greatest Minds In Monetary Policy haven't foreseen the fact that labor is hurt and corporations are effectively subsidized when enacting such policies. So it must be intentional.

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

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Post by zeroonetwothree » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

forgingahead wrote: post #239

niall00c wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When your neighbor is out of work its a recession. When you are out of work its a depression" - said someone

When asset prices increase quickly, everything is fine, as the wealthy are benefitting. When wages increase though, that's inflation and we must tamp down hard on it!

Wages are not comparable to asset prices since one is an over time payment and the other is a quantity at one time.

In any cases total wages (well, income) are equal to GDP so I don’t think anyone is against an overall rise (in real terms).

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

#295

Post by cloverich » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

time_to_smile wrote: post #277

yuan43 wrote: post #139

> As several of these statements blatantly contradict one another, I went back to the data and ran the same sanity check that I did with Facebook above. In other words, what if Google is using the hiring freeze as a smoke screen and only continuing with the strongest candidates, while keeping the rest on the bench? An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it…

> the business cycle Just an aside, that this rebranding of Marx's theory of crisis never fails to get a chuckle out of me. In mainstream economics is presented as some magical property of the way economies work, where Marx specifically predicts cyclically economic crisis created by contradictions inherent in the structure of capitalism, the periodically build to a tipping point leading to crisis and ultimately the r…

FWIW i first learned of it from a libertarian angle, which equated business cycle with economy wide (mal) investment which was, in practice, usually driven by the fed or some comparable government program. Whether consistent or not it holds at least some truth and was an interesting angle to start learning about economics.

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

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Post by azangru » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

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.

Is an average Google engineer expected to generate $50m of revenue?

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

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Post by guiriduro » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

washbrain wrote: post #266

jahnu wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.

100k - accounting for pay, benefits, office space, training, hiring, computing equipment, support services (hr, etc)? In the States, those things can exceed the salary cost of the engineer.

> Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports.

Should be outsourcing at the programme or project level, not hiring employees to add to US teams, then.

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

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Post by zeroonetwothree » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

_gabe_ wrote: post #157

xhrpost wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effecti…

Unemployment can be measured in different ways so it’s hard to compare across countries.

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

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Post by Apocryphon » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:43 PM UTC

devin wrote: post #289

ransom1538 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally can go on indeed.com and check for "$250-500K/yr for a single developer". It. Does. Not. Exist. Yes there are a few at FAANG that do make this, but this isn't the current market.

It absolutely does exist. Source: Nearly everyone I came up with as a programmer is in the 250+ range, and not just at FAANG. Check out https://levels.fyi

I think the original post that gave that range was thinking of salary and not TC. Obviously, only a few companies can afford to give away crazy valuable equity.

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

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Post by munificent » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

tenpies wrote: post #202

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...

I don't think it's propaganda. Put yourself in place of a 30 year old who has only known a world where you're a highly in-demand whatever "in tech". You've never seen a day since you graduated where you're not flooded by recruiter emails. You've never worked a job that isn't 30 minutes of work and then the rest of the day is posting "day in the life of a FAANG employee" Tiktoks or being a paid activist. What's coming…

Anyone from the US who graduated in '10 had 9/11 as the formative event of their childhood, followed by the Great Recession just as they reached workforce age. For almost their entire lives, the US was at war, and for every day of their lives, they watched the climate get worse. They know in their bones that they're growing up in a world worse than the one their parents grew up in, and that it's largely the fault of institutions that were morally reponsible for protecting them and failed to do so.

They've been preparing for doom since they were weaned.