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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?

#361

Post by golergka »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #274
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.

Hire Canadians. Currency conversion advantage. Same time zones. Same language. Mostly same culture. Very well educated. Cheaper health care benefits. And $150k USD is a generous compensation level, and $250USD is about what a Canadian Googler @ L4 gets paid. $100-$125k USD gets you reasonable non-senior talent.

Why not hire completely international then?

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

#362

Post by jillesvangurp »

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.

They need to start at the top. The current phase of complacency, organizational lethargy, repeated pr disasters, people wondering wtf people are doing at Google, and general tone deafness started with the current CEO. Time for him to go. His vision is speaking in corporate cliches almost exclusively and just looking after things. If there is a grander plan other than "get people clicking ads", I have yet to learn of it. The current CEO is just riding the success of his predecessors, who for all their failings actually built a great few products and company.

The organization is a reflection of its leadership and their vision. Or lack there off. MS and Google are almost polar opposites. Google is MS under Balmer. Just failing, tone deaf, never quite doing anything right. Enter Satya Nadella and suddenly MS is re-engaging with developers, doing all the things that were simply unmentionable before, and generally delivering great share holder value. Google needs somebody like that. The current CEO is not it. He's a caretaker. Not a leader.

I'm not a shareholder; so no stake in this game other than observing what is obvious to me.

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

#363

Post by zeroonetwothree »

nowherebeen wrote: post #231
ascar wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your logic doesn't add up. Sure, these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance and indeed they shifted more and more from general intelligence assessment to algorithm coding assessment. Solving the algorithm is only part of the equation though. Writing readable code, explaining your thought process and decisions and communicating well with the interviewer are also vital points of the assessment. Is it a perf…

> these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance > Past experience is unfortunately also a weak indicator If past experience of doing the actual job is bad indicator and these test are not a good proxy, then according to your logic, experience is worthless and we should all optimize for these tests. And this is exactly what is happening in the industry. Younger professionals spent hours memorizing Leetcode be…

The questions I see don’t use any tricky DS/algo that needs memorising. They are all solved by some loops and a simple data structure like an array or dictionary. If you can’t use those comfortably then you probably aren’t actually going to do well at the job. I don’t practice at all for interviews and have had no problem passing, I get an offer maybe 70% of the time.

If anything companies are desperate for experienced hires and give them really softball interviews. If you are a new grad you get grilled hard but if you are going for staff+ then you get asked some generic soft questions and a fizz buzz

(Have 15 years experience)

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

#364

Post by time_to_smile »

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.

Non-FAANG, not even a company you've probably heard of, and all of my coworkers and I have TC is in that range.

I started my career in small companies and startups and it took me a long time to understand how TC works. Both in tech and finance base salaries are typically around 200 or less, but total compensations factoring in both bonuses and RSUs brings the amount of money you bring in each year much higher.

It's gotten much better in recent years with levels.fyi and the like helping more people to see this, but I found that a few years back if you didn't go to an elite school you likely didn't have someone explain to you how comp works.

If you want to make > 250k you absolutely can, and it doesn't mean selling your soul. Don't convince yourself that these TC levels are myths.

Though I do suspect we'll see dotcom level changes in comp soon.

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

#366

Post by pharmakom »

baby wrote: post #343
aksjdhmkjasdof wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. I don't agree with this analysis. I'd be shocked if Google did any layoffs (though it's always possible) instead of just freezing hiring and letting natural attrition happen for a while. As for the signal to empl…

FB is still printing money so I'm not sure how it's not a stable business

zuck will burn cash to the end for the meta verse it seems.

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

#367

Post by Applejinx »

coding123 wrote: post #341
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…

That's the plan for all industries and competition. It's a little weird to see it for employment pricing, but that makes sense too. Years ago my town had a bunch of lumber yards where you can get market rate lumber. Home Depot moved in and provided way lower than market rate lumber until all of the independent lumber yards went out of business in the area. Then they raised the price above market rate and that's that.…

Absolutely. I've come to believe that this is the nature of money i.e. an abstraction for power.

Power is meaningless unless you're hurting somebody: otherwise, what even is the point? Money is abstracted power. For this reason, ANYWHERE you are seeing accumulations of vast amounts of money, somebody or something is being hurt.

In this case it appears to be that the whole 'make 500k as a dev' thing, which has always seemed weird to me, turns out to be 'FAANG is trying to control all access to devs worth having, after which they can starve the market and do whatever they want'. It comes down to power, always.

You'll note that the open source devs upon which their internet relies, upon which so much rests, are NOT making 500k as devs. If you're doing something worth doing and it's not harming but helping, you are not getting paid. If you're getting paid in a big way, you're doing something that enables harming somebody, whether it's people or a more abstracted thing like a market. The wealthy FAANG folks are part of a situation where an employment market is being harmed, and that's why the money is there for them.

It's a weapon. Otherwise it would not be there.

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

#368

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

ascar wrote: post #182
nowherebeen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a way to filter out more experienced candidates because they want cheap and young. Even a Meta recruiter admits to me that Leetcode has nothing to do with the job, it’s just a company requirement that no one questions.

Your logic doesn't add up. Sure, these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance and indeed they shifted more and more from general intelligence assessment to algorithm coding assessment. Solving the algorithm is only part of the equation though. Writing readable code, explaining your thought process and decisions and communicating well with the interviewer are also vital points of the assessment. Is it a perf…

Well obviously it's not working well, I've meet better engineers in the defense and automotive industries than I have at google -- which to be honest is better for everyone when you think about it

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

#369

Post by jjav »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #199
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…

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…

> one major thing that has changed since 20 years ago is that it is simply not possible to become wealthy (like "I can afford going to retire wealthy" or "I can now afford to seed my own startup wealthy") out of the equity package that a startup will offer unless you're the cofounders or a founding employee

Statistically that's likely, but it's not always the case.

If you luck into one of the companies that IPOs and grows big (and doesn't need to be FB/GOOG-level big, just in the handful of billions in market cap), even the tiny sliver of options of a regular employee can become retirement-level money.

There are many public companies in SV that have market cap in the dozens of billions who made their regular employees who joined pre-IPO very rich even though the companies aren't FAANG and don't have such brand recognition.

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

#370

Post by ffggvv »

nosefrog wrote: post #179
anonymoushn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a multi-month team matching phase followed by a 4-day exploding offer for ~50% below market and got blacklisted for a year or more when I didn't sign it. Great.

That's weird, most people I know with Google offers say they're good for a year or more.

think they tell you its exploding. but if you end up turning them down they reach out a few months later and tell you its valid for a year
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