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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?

#371

Post by [deleted] »

ep103 wrote: post #167
davidw wrote: post #146

I suppose this is "old man yells at clouds" material, but I feel like engineers should be practicing for their future jobs , not for interviews.

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…

[deleted]

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

#372

Post by Applejinx »

pharmakom wrote: post #366
baby wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's one of the things, though. If you are in a dire situation, like companies nationalized during wartime, you can't work or function. Certain things like advertising your services are clearly out the window.

In WWII, some companies who were turned to serving the war machine continued to advertise the things they couldn't make or sell, anyway. When things came back those folks were on top of the world. If the big FAANG companies can ride out business cycles without acting like they've become vulnerable, they're likely to further cement their positions.

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

#373

Post by pharmakom »

ryandrake wrote: post #305
ninkendo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.

I just don’t get how this is possible. Every single company I’ve ever worked at (large and small) has had at least 10x more work in the backlog than could possibly be done with the staff they have. Everyone’s JIRA queue is stuffed full, and since there is so much work, things have to be brutally prioritized and even high-value stuff has to be cut, since there are just not enough people-hours to get it all done. Where…

Tackle just enough of the tickets to not arouse suspicion. Managers won’t be able to estimate how hard the tickets really were.

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

#374

Post by krschultz »

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.…

Are you counting the equity at a large public company to be lottery tickets? Because it's absolutely not. Every quarter a bunch of real money appears in an account with my name on it, that's not a lottery ticket.

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

#375

Post by fenek »

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…

Very often advertising is the fist thing companies cut when they run into problems. Google and Facebook are both advertising companies and they control very large section of that market. It's possible the data they are seeing is showing them problems ahead for the whole economy.

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

#376

Post by nwsm »

ajkjk wrote: post #318
nwsm wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I didn't want to go this far into detail because it's embarrassing how much I put up with, but I actually let Google alter the direction of my life.

When I was interviewing, my significant other was looking to go to grad school in either NYC or Cambridge. NYC was her preference, so I told the recruiter I preferred NYC or Boston and I did my on-site in NYC.

After all my interviews, the recruiter told me that the NYC office was doing "renovations", and so some teams were holding off hiring until they had the physical space (in retrospect this excuse makes no sense). He asked if I was still open to Boston and I said yes. But at this point, my SO had to accept one of her grad school offers, and based solely on the fact that I thought I would have a Google job lined up in Cambridge, she committed to the Cambridge school.

At one point during the pointless team match process (after we were committed to Cambridge and after I had several unfruitful Cambridge team match calls), my recruiter actually asked me if I wanted to go back to looking for NYC teams. I couldn't believe it- what a slap in the face! (I had told him our priorities and timeline)

We live in Boston right now, 4 years later, solely because I thought Google would have a role for me here after having passed 9 interviews. Thankfully, everything worked out. I found a different job, my SO got a great degree and is using it here in Boston, etc. Of course I'm the lone idiot in this story, but it's incredible how flexible I was just because I thought big G was making my dreams come true.

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

#377

Post by pharmakom »

joshstrange wrote: post #127
ehnto wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more likely scenario for most is that there are other people or mechanisms making the money, or that they're living off the success of previous efforts. It's not necessarily their fault at a company that large, sometimes people are just grossly under-utilized or misallocated. People can just vanish in a manner of speaking, by getting forgotten about or by having your responsibilities taken from you but not replac…

If you have some producers that aren't "pulling their weight" then that just means you have others that are pulling 2x+ and still only making a fraction of the actual value they provide. I'll be the first to agree that FAANG and friends have ridiculous overhead and way more engineers than I think is necessary but these companies are making money hand over fist. If we are looking for fat to cut I'd start with manageme…

Impossible to cut only the dead weight though.

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

#378

Post by rnk »

shreyshnaccount wrote: post #253
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…

but this ends the dominance cycle, making it possible for startups to hire talented devs again, even if for lesser comp. doesn't it?

Until/unless faang salaries & hiring come back. This doesn't mean all fangs aren't paying. We just don't know.

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

#379

Post by rnk »

Applejinx wrote: post #367
coding123 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it's that simple. Google needs devs, it's a competitive market. Controlling or limiting the dev supply is definitely a benefit for big tech, but it's a separate benefit. I think competitive pressure on salaries is the top forcing function.

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

#380

Post by rnk »

robertlagrant wrote: post #342
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…

What shows that? Are you calling the < L7 engineering candidates at Facebook and Google the "lower classes"?

I thought the original comment was referring to all tech workers, ie not independently wealthy as the lower classes. But it's also true that below principal level at companies there is different treatment. Just like a cto gets treated better than the senior principal.
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