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

351–360 of 637 posts

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

#351

Post by pm90 »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #324
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as I said elsewhere the equity portion in startups is decidedly non-competitive for anybody but founders. "tldr options" @ https://equity.ltse.com/calculators/tldr-stock-options is an eye-opener to see just how meh the packages offered are.

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.…

You do you, but even if you don’t expect to make it big its not a good idea to leave money on the table.

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

#352

Post by robertlagrant »

itstomkent wrote: post #240
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I mean, I came to Google through an acquisition (of an adtech company) and it was pretty clear to me that the goal of the whole process was a) make your company go away and stop your customers from using you instead of us and b) get as much of your talent out of the job market as possible. They totally didn't care about our product or the productivity of the employees they brought in. They let us sit and twiddle…

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.

> 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.

While I think the premise is wrong - not anyone can learn to code - there are also levels of "learn to code" so it's simpler to spin up a create-react-app and modify it a bit for a code school credit compared to advanced Scala - it's also true that learning to code is nowhere near the hardest part of software engineering productivity.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

tytso wrote: post #334
PheonixPharts wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by tmpz22 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #258
ep103 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our industry, the interview process is completely divorced from the skillset required for the actual job. Fittingly, this is because Google developed an interviewing process that was scalable, required minimal training, human-interactive or soft skills, and was objectively measurable (leetcode), while non-obviously biasing the interview process towards cheaper, younger interviewees. It is also an interview process…

> biasing the interview process towards cheaper, younger interviewees Maybe young people entering tech are just smarter? There's a lot more people entering in the funnel, so if we keep the size of those coming out the same I would expect them to be more talented.

If Google is being pragmatic and young people are smarter and deliver more value why are they also paid less?

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

#355

Post by jillesvangurp »

Very simple, an economic downturn leads to any public company looking at their cost structure and polishing up the numbers. Big companies accumulate a lot of organizational debt where teams, departments, and individuals under perform for whatever reason and often not even because of their own fault. Corporate stupidity, and mismanagement, are also things that plague big corporations. Just look at Google lately.

Regularly pruning the org tree is both something that needs some level of excuse as it would otherwise upset the rest of the org tree; and needs to happen once in a while. The people least likely to leave by themselves are usually the once targeted explicitly. So, any kind of economic down turn is usually a good moment for that. Doing it wrong means your best people leave first, which is usually counter productive. So, you have these trillion dollar companies shedding a few crocodile tears over having to say goodbye to a few not-so-valued employees and using all the usual euphemisms, cliches, and woke language for that.

So, classic targets for layoffs are HR (ironically), supporting functions like IT, middle management, people promoted to their level of incompetence (Peter principle), etc.

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

#356

Post by jshen »

itstomkent wrote: post #240
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I mean, I came to Google through an acquisition (of an adtech company) and it was pretty clear to me that the goal of the whole process was a) make your company go away and stop your customers from using you instead of us and b) get as much of your talent out of the job market as possible. They totally didn't care about our product or the productivity of the employees they brought in. They let us sit and twiddle…

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.

The thing people miss, demand for software is infinite, so demand for software developers will increase to match any increase in supply.

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

#357

Post by jshen »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #250
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're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.

There are not more than enough decent developers.

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

#358

Post by jshen »

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.

That is the market rate. I’m at a large non FAANG company, non tech company, and that’s what we pay when you factor in bonus and RSUs.

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

#359

Post by ryanmercer »

andsoitis wrote: post #112
ryanmercer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Inevitable. Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable Right? And some people are holding multiple full-time jobs doing that sort of "work" glares at /r/overemployed

> And some people are holding multiple full-time jobs doing that sort of "work" glares at /r/overemployed I would be highly surprised if there are any meaningful number of people who each hold multiple $300k jobs simultaneously. I just don't see how that would pass the hiring process.

Maybe not 300k but /r/overemployed has a private paid discord that I checked out for one month out of curiosity, there are some extremely legit appearing people in there showing their setups and I fully believe the $$$ figures they are throwing around on the discord, not so much the sub itself but definitely on the paid discord there are some people with multiple lower 6-figure salaries laughing all the way to the bank while more upstanding people are carrying the bulk of their work load.

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

#360

Post by pharmakom »

itstomkent wrote: post #240
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I mean, I came to Google through an acquisition (of an adtech company) and it was pretty clear to me that the goal of the whole process was a) make your company go away and stop your customers from using you instead of us and b) get as much of your talent out of the job market as possible. They totally didn't care about our product or the productivity of the employees they brought in. They let us sit and twiddle…

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.

I think software engineering is actually quite difficult. If it feels easy it’s probably because you’ve been at it for a while. This severely constrains supply but demand is huge because even at high cost, software automation can deliver big returns for a company.
Post reply on HN