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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?

#311

Post by AlwaysRock »

paganel wrote: post #39

> 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), thi…

> but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company

I've made xxk of side income every year over the last few years working for companies that help people land at faang companies. It's a huge business.

If you're an average swe making 100K-150K and you could spend 6 months and xk-xxk to be making 200K+ for the rest of your career, its a pretty easy decision.

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

#312

Post by cmrdporcupine »

guiomie wrote: post #218
tenpies wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spot on. There is a huge sense of entitlement from SWEs in FAANGs right now, and from the various folks I know at FAANGs, Google is worst since mediocrity and unproductiveness are not confronted because folks are scared of being 'ungoogley'. Every company has its dead weight that others have to carry, I think Google has much more and has been getting away with it because of all its profits coming in.

Google's definition of productivity is different than yours.

In general: Code reviews are strict and long. Style and structure matters more than anywhere else I ever worked. Everything requires extensive testing. You better have a design doc / PRD, some tickets, good commenting, and unit tests.

People will happily point out and roast you for any potential bugs, race conditions, deadlocks, bad style, and sloppy work.

Mediocrity in this regard is not generally tolerated. The standard of development is much higher.

But yes, it's slow. If that's your measure of productivity, they'll fail.

Except it doesn't matter because the goal of a SWE at Google is mostly to keep the ship sailing.

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

#313

Post by knicholes »

nwsm wrote: post #303
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…

After completing ~9 interviews (2 video interviews, 5 on-site interviews, and then was asked to complete 2 additional video interviews after mediocre on-site results), I passed Google's "hiring committee" and then was put in their team match process. Over the next 4 months I had ~4 calls with hiring managers, none of them fruitful (and not for lack of my own enthusiasm or willingness to leave my comfort zone). After…

I told Google and Facebook to please stop contacting me, as after three attempts, either you know I suck or you'd accept me. It takes way too much effort to brush up on my algorithms/data structures each time I interview.

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

#314

Post by gen220 »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #264
blagie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You need a counter-cyclical business to really make that work however. And given how interconnected things are these days, what out there is counter-cyclical?

Having a counter-cyclical business is helpful but not strictly necessary and actually not sufficient.

What is actually most important are a long-term outlook, backing from shareholders to pursue anti-fragility at the cost of short-term growth, and well-managed and well-protected cash reserves.

Few well-known, public or VC-funded companies operate this way, because collective greed is a far more powerful force than the desire to build an anti-fragile, long-lasting company.

And in a world where it's fairly easy to close a company's book and move on to start the next thing, and where the economy hasn't experienced real stagnation in over a generation, this arrangement of incentives makes sense.

Berkshire Hathaway has historically worked this way, as an example. One of Buffet's basic playbooks was to combine the books of cyclical and counter-cyclical businesses, and harvest temporarily high prices of the former to plow into the latter, and vice versa.

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

#315

Post by smaryjerry »

ajross wrote: post #248
smaryjerry wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real wages are not increasing. The ‘Real’ part of real wages means after adjustment for inflation. See link, we’ve been going straight down in real wages. We are already back below pre-COVID wages. That means we are back to wage levels around 3 years ago. In any job if you got no raise in 3 years then you should not look at that as a good thing - and that’s what has happened to everyone, on average after accounting f…

That's arguing about leading/lagging indicators, though. Wages go up with inflation, more or less by definition. Wage increases due to inflation can't be measured until after the fact, though. Short version: "inflation" is not remotely the same thing as "recession", which seems to be the point you're trying to make. If your only evidence for an economic slowdown is prices and not production or consumption, you're lik…

You are intentionally conflating nominal and real wages, most people are not making more money. In real wages they are declining as per the link in my previous comment. If you make $100K per year and your expenses are $100K you make zero. If you make $150K but your expenses are now $150K then you have not made any increase in wages in real dollars. Wages are not flat or going up with inflation as per my link, they are actually declining significantly since COVID.

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

#316

Post by klempner »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #264
blagie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You need a counter-cyclical business to really make that work however. And given how interconnected things are these days, what out there is counter-cyclical?

You don't need a counter cyclical business, what you need is somewhat counter cyclical funding.

You develop during recession when it is easy to hire people, and when the economy is on the up side of the business cycle you have a product that's ready to sell.

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

#317

Post by FartyMcFarter »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #294
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!

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).

> Wages are not comparable to asset prices

They get directly compared when getting a mortgage though - typically there's affordability criteria including the ratio of income to mortgage amount.

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

#318

Post by ajkjk »

nwsm wrote: post #303
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…

After completing ~9 interviews (2 video interviews, 5 on-site interviews, and then was asked to complete 2 additional video interviews after mediocre on-site results), I passed Google's "hiring committee" and then was put in their team match process. Over the next 4 months I had ~4 calls with hiring managers, none of them fruitful (and not for lack of my own enthusiasm or willingness to leave my comfort zone). After…

Yeah, it's insane. When I turned down a Google offer because they did such a bad job of the post-interview process, my recruiter was _surprised_. All I could say was: why? what did you think would happen if you didn't find a team I actually could get excited about?

(It was worse than that: I told the recruiter I was interested in roles in any location except the South Bay and Seattle's Eastside, and they came back and said those were the two places they found matches, so I took a different job. And they were surprised. As far as I can tell Google can't figure out how to not assume that they're everybody's dream job choice like I guess they might have been in the 2000s.)

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

#319

Post by [deleted] »

uoaei wrote: post #293
willcipriano wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#320

Post by gen220 »

kafrofrite wrote: post #13

For what it's worth, Meta offered me slightly after the hiring freeze was announced for a security engineer position (L4 IIRC). I'm interviewing with Google for Security Engineering as well and still they haven't told me anything about a hiring freeze yet.

As far as I understand, the freeze is applying to standard SWE roles at levels below staff.

If you're interviewing for something more specialized (security, sre, production engineering), the freeze may not apply to you.

The hiring pipeline for those specialized roles is comparatively quite narrow and competitive, it doesn't make sense to squeeze them.

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