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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?

#441
post #348
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because investors don't see a good future for that company. It is basically failing on all fronts.

this is response to this comment: > 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. which has nothing to do with investors

In case you're not aware, your response is heavily implying that FB's stock falling is proof of a recession. That's why they responded by clarifying that the drop is due to future outlook of investors and not the economy at large.

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

#442

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.

Anyone can learn to code. However, few want to and even fewer want to pursue it as a career.

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

#443
post #412

A legit Google recruiter emailed me about multiple roles this week. But then, that’s just the kind of quality (none) and attention to detail (nil) I already have learned to expect from Google. Comment from kleinsch in this thread is spot on.

Google knows you wont get an offer for months, and the hiring freeze will be long over by then.

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

#444

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…

> Once Google and Facebook started growing it's clear they realized that every talented engineer on the market is a potential threat.

You could count on one hand the number of startups that are serious threats to either. And when one arises, they can pretty much just buy the company, as Facebook has done repeatedly. They hardly need to be concerned with individual engineers, and even if they were, the idea that they could hire them all is pretty far-fetched

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

#445
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There might be a hierarchy of value, but that to me doesn't imply lower classes in the normal sense. We're talking about people being paid some of the best salaries in the history of the world, and with very little personal risk.

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

#446
post #19

maybe they realized hiring leetcode junkies is not a great strategy and they want to freeze that while they find a better interview system

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.

it's not a company requirement that no one questions. it's an industry requirement that literally everyone questions all the time.

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

#447
post #334

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…

As so many people learned over the years in storage org, essential modus operandi was “just do your current shit, this new shit you are proposing is too hard and we don’t want to do it”. I lost count of improvement proposals that ultimately were not getting supported (there was a funny one with (first) hosted NFS prototype, when they tried to turn it off, turned out there were pissed-off customers running business workloads already). Instead we tried to fit square pegs into the round holes “by using existing technology”.

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

#448
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just startups. If someone wants to and can get an offer from one of the richer big tech companies (FAANG isn't really the right acronym as Microsoft at least is also in the mix) and is just going to go with the best offer, just about no one is going to be able to compete--at least in the US. I've heard plenty of stories of companies not even trying to match offers.

>FAANG isn't really the right acronym as Microsoft at least is also in the mix Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon: MAGA

> Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon: MAGA

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon: GAMMA

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

#449
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross Domestic Product is not divided by population. GDP per capita is what you're referring to?

The aftermath of a large storm requires a lot of clean up. The clean up costs would be added the the GDP.

Not even a little, storms destroy tons of productive businesses.

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

#450
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Similar story here. My wife and I were living in NYC together and she was searching for PhD fellowships and I was searching for my next job. Our intersections were NYC, London, and Amsterdam, but between her fellowships and my offers we didn't find any great match. The google recruiter kept stringing me along and warning about a lack of space and offers with NYC based roles but I had tons of match offers in MTV. It w…

Wow I'm sure that's been tough. Hopefully you will both have ample opportunities now though. Good luck!
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