Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 637 posts

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

#331

Post by winternett »

joshuamorton wrote: post #306
winternett wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're focused on a different angle than on what I posted. There are so many factors that affect compensation for each individual employee, comparison of pay is useless. Geographical region also has big bearing on the discussion, and it really makes no sense to compare compensation online with a public audience in that manner. I won't discuss specific details and employers online for obvious reasons. I reside on the…

I think you have some misunderstanding, because it takes approximately one month to start vesting at Google (and Facebook) and at Google your equity is frontloaded. I'll happily tell you what the approximate compensation is by Google in Atlanta or NYC, because there's really no reason not to discuss those things.

Again... No the main point of my original post.

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

#332

Post by toast0 »

namdnay wrote: post #260
xyzzyz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about France, but in Poland, if you’re sending invoices to an entity that has no presence in Poland, is not incorporated there, has no offices etc, it can hardly be legally seen to be a legal “employment” relationship. But, assuming the situation above, even if it is illegal (which I strongly doubt), so what? What can the system do here to you? Will it jail you or fine you, or otherwise stop you, the worker,…

In France (and Germany too apparently), if you are found out - usually by a random tax audit - they will ask you to back-pay employee and employer contributions on the money that you received (so about 60% total) the issue isn't really the company, as you pointed out, they are not in France, they're not subject to French law. The issue is that as a French tax resident, if you are meeting the criteria for employment (…

It sounds like if the single member company invoices the foreign company and then pays you as an employee, with all the payroll deductions, that's fine?

That seems reasonable, the only thing is that you have to compare the foreign company invoice rate as a gross payment to salaries offered by domestic companies which are generally quoted as net payments? As I understand it, European salaries are usually quoted fully net --- you get exactly that amount, in contrast to US salaries which are mostly gross, there are a lot of deductions that start from the quoted amount, but some that are employer side and not usually quoted.

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

#333

Post by dang »

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 detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32318067.

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

#334

Post by tytso »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #189
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.

> And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry. My understanding was that asphyxiating the industry was always the plan. For those who worked in industry pre-2008, one of the major drivers that allowed new startups to be so disruptive was that startups could very often compete with the then major tech companies on compensation. If there was a difference in pay, it was usually minor and could easily be made up for…

I work at Google so my perspective is to be biased, but that's not what I see.

I work on infrastructure, and so a few years back, when I proposed a major project, I had to demonstrate how it would save *many* times the fully loaded cost of the engineers on the team, by reducing the Storage TCO for all of Google (for example). It was not enough for the project to "break even" --- the benefits had to do more than just exceed the "nominal" SWE cost. It had to be multiple times the cost of the SWE's, to account for the opportunity cost of those SWE's --- SWE's are a constrained resource, which is why a project needs to save $$$ (or increase profits) by many multiples the fully loaded SWE cost. (That project has since been completed, successfully, and I got a promotion to Sr Staff Engineer out of it.)

The reason why SWE's are a constrained resource is becaused finding good SWE's is non-trivial. As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day. I'm trying to find highly motivated, smart, and talented SWE's who can also be team players. And if they need to have domain expertise (say, be proficient kernel engineers), it's super-duper difficult.

So I don't see any indication of people getting hired just to starve statups of talented engineers. We need every single talented engineer we can get for the projects that we want to accomplish. And in the time when we may need to slow down our growth, it may mean that we will need to slow, or shut down some projects. That may suck, especially if it's a project that we had invested a lot of passion into. But it's certainly no reason to panic. Slowing down growth is not the same as layoffs, and there is no shortage of work for us to do.

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

#335

Post by whimsicalism »

smaryjerry wrote: post #329
whimsicalism wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real wages are not keeping up with inflation. Nope? For most people Year/Year and also over the last quarter, real wages have gone up. It is only for the most highly compensated workers (top 10% or so) that wages have not kept up with pricing. [0] [0]: https://realtimeinequality.org/

Real wages have gone significantly since 2020 when COVID hit per the below link. This inequality index website includes both labor and capital - meaning not just wages but income from stocks. Yes the stock market has gone down, the rich own more stocks, and so rich made less money. Wages, the payment for only labor has been declining in real terms due to inflation outpacing wage growth. See this link and the sharp de…

> the stock market has gone down, the rich own more stocks, and so rich made less money

My link shows that real factor income for all but the top 10% of earners is up which includes wages and capital income.

Your FRED link will have to contend with the fact that those most likely to be unemployed at the start of the pandemic are lower earners which is going to shift up the wages for 2020.

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

#336

Post by lamontcg »

We're not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now.

It does show that the billionaires are kind of enthusiastic though about the coming recession and economic pain being inflicted on the lower classes, and getting those uppity workers a bit more under control. They're not so worried about asset prices / stock prices / sales / etc and probably correctly assume that everything will rebound just fine for them.

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

#337

Post by EddySchauHai »

ransom1538 wrote: post #276
itstomkent wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.

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.

Go on angel.co and filter for jobs in the Bay Area and you'll find roles around 250k base salary. 250k including bonuses and stock is far more common. This isn't just Bay Area btw, take a look at the contract market in London and there are multiple > 200k GBP roles (roughly 250k USD).

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

#338

Post by typon »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #330
ilikehurdles wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of candidates (speaking for myself here) just don’t care too much to negotiate equity at privately held companies. Given the highly unlikely probability that a company I work for will have a successful exit at all, let alone while I am either employed or hold exercised stock options, it’s all Monopoly money to me. Benefits, salary, and bonuses is the only compensation I negotiate and judge a company on.…

Yeah, I mean, this is my take, too. I have worked for places that offered equity a few times. It did turn into something once (Google bought my employer). But the actual equity conversion was minor in quantity compared to the rest of my Google TC. There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company. I don't think this is healthy. The incentives are not there for engineers in startups to really put th…

> There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company.

Took me 10 years of grinding to finally realize this. Now at this stage the only question is how do I do it?

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

#339

Post by tfehring »

ransom1538 wrote: post #276
itstomkent wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.

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.

There are well over 100k US-based software engineers at the five FAANG companies alone, plus a long tail of other companies that compete with them for talent and offer similar (and in some cases higher) compensation. All of those companies can go over $250k in total comp for the equivalent of Google L4, i.e., one promotion above entry-level.

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

#340

Post by baby »

lamontcg wrote: post #336

We're not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now. It does show that the billionaires are kind of enthusiastic though about the coming recession and economic pain being inflicted on the lower classes, and getting those uppity workers a bit more under control. They're not so worried about asset prices / stock prices / sales…

I mean FB's stock got halved in the last few months
Post reply on HN