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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?

#451

Post by robertlagrant »

time_to_smile wrote: post #277
yuan43 wrote: post #139

> As several of these statements blatantly contradict one another, I went back to the data and ran the same sanity check that I did with Facebook above. In other words, what if Google is using the hiring freeze as a smoke screen and only continuing with the strongest candidates, while keeping the rest on the bench? An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it…

> the business cycle Just an aside, that this rebranding of Marx's theory of crisis never fails to get a chuckle out of me. In mainstream economics is presented as some magical property of the way economies work, where Marx specifically predicts cyclically economic crisis created by contradictions inherent in the structure of capitalism, the periodically build to a tipping point leading to crisis and ultimately the r…

> But "business cycle" sounds much better, and leaves off all that spooky "systemic problem" stuff.

It all sounds better than his "mass murder/starvation death" systemic problems.

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

#452

Post by EddySchauHai »

haliskerbas wrote: post #437
happyopossum wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, not really - L3 and L4 are entry level roles, for folks just out of college. No FAANG is paying a newb college grad $400k/yr. Either your friends didn’t understand the comp plan and how equity is paid out, or they were BSing you.

In a bull market it’s pretty easy to clear the 3xx/4xx in a single year in those levels at competitive companies. I know many folks who have done so.

> pretty easy

It's not "easy" to achieve this, but it might be possible. One doesn't just wake up and decide to go work at a FAANG and get a >90% percentile salary from them for the level.

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

#453

Post by io23joi23 »

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#454

Post by leereeves »

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…

> We're not in a recession. Yet.

Based on what?

Perhaps we can discard the classic "two quarters of negative GDP growth". But if we do, then from whose perspective does a 3% drop in real wages in six months [1] (and a 4.4% YoY drop in real weekly earnings [2]) not count as a recession?

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216259/monthly-real-aver...

2: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.htm

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

#455

Post by izacus »

badpun wrote: post #165
namdnay wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it depends on the EU country. this would be illegal in france for example, considered a "hidden employment contract" (which it is)

How is it solved in France then? I dont' think it's possible to have an trans-national employment contract (which labor laws would the contract observe? The French ones or the US ones?). So, how do French people work remotely for US companies? I don't think most countries' laws are set up for a situation where a company employs a worker that does not live in the same country.

> I dont' think it's possible to have an trans-national employment contract (which labor laws would the contract observe? The French ones or the US ones?)

Those contracts are of course possible and exist - although rare due to paperwork hell you need to go through. The labor law of the employee's country is observed and they usually need to handle pension/health contributions on their side. In most of EU at least.

It is true though that most EU countries also demand that you open a local subsidiary once you have a certain amount of employees there (~5-10).

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

#456

Post by culi »

knicholes wrote: post #313
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…

I told Google and Facebook to please stop contacting me, as after three attempts, either you know I suck or you'd accept me. It takes way too much effort to brush up on my algorithms/data structures each time I interview.

Does it feel worth it to go through it at least once though? I'm a junior engineer and I remember studying really hard for this one "hiring platform" (once you're in they find you contracts, sorta. One of the few non-scammy ones out there). The interview was pretty intense but I got a TON of good study material and really in-depth feedback

I guess a key difference though is that it's not very "data structures and algorithms"-y and much more "optimizing React performance"-y

I ended up actually passing but, being the only junior there, no company was interested in a contract with me. However, I don't really consider it a waste of time because I really learned a lot from that interview and I think it played into how I interviewed later

At the current company I work for they're really surprised at certain skills I have. Skills that I can trace back to having to study for that one interview

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

#457

Post by ubercow13 »

krschultz wrote: post #374
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.…

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.

No they are talking about private companies.

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

#458

Post by culi »

_the_inflator wrote: post #45
Tade0 wrote: post #28

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland. I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim. He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was...…

Same here. Approached by FAANG. Judging from my perspective as a manager of a large department, I never ever experienced such a thing as an hiring stop. It always translates into tighter processes for approval, that's all. For example Finance laid off thousands of workers years ago - however they were hiring IT stuff. After all, great staff is still the most important factor aka resource.

> FAANG

It's MANGA now :P

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

#459

Post by munk-a »

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.

Canadian here. Canadians are clearly the best developers out there and yes, unfortunately, you can slide quite a bit down the payscale to afford us.

I'm surprised cross boarder hiring hasn't become even more popular with the pandemic and forced work-from-homeness. Canadians mostly speak English (even most Quebecois do!) and are in a compatible timezone with the majority of the developers either in St. Lawrence valley or Vancouver and thus being either EST or PST.

Also, while the holidays differ I think the total number of stats is pretty close to the same.

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

#460

Post by mym1990 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #439
jshen wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Demand for pretty much anything is infinite, if you assume a price of 0. So in reality we almost always end up with a non zero price where supply equals demand.

This most certainly is not true. There are plenty of free things that don’t result in 100% consumption. Demand is based on peoples needs and preferences, not on how much is out there already. Think about libraries as an example.
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