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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?

#461

Post by wrzuteczka »

namdnay wrote: post #304
balfirevic wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I was also referring to a scenario where you create a single-person company and have a single source of revenue from a de-facto employer. Is it really illegal in France or do you just owe more taxes/contributions than if you had multiple clients (which would allow you to take part of the revenue as company profits, instead of having to channel it all as a salary)? Looking at your comment [0] it sounds like it mi…

It would be illegal in France to do it without declaring yourself as an employee, and therefore paying contributions . “Illegal” as in if you get caught you’ll get a fin and back-taxes, not jail or anything

OK, so it sounds like it’s possible in France too, you just need to employ yourself (and then pay employment-related contributions). In Poland, this is a little simplified, as there’s a company structure called “single-person company” (I’m sorry, this is my own translation of the term, it’s probably not the best) which combines these two things (i.e. after creating this type of company you pay social security for yourself, without any extra employment contract).

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

#462

Post by ghaff »

alasdair_ wrote: post #431
michaelt wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Back in the day' the graffiti artist who painted the first Facebook office got shares that ended up worth $200 million [1] because in those days, investors hadn't figured out they could get away with offering a lot less. More recently, last time I was on the job market and interviewed with startups, their offers were more along the lines of "If the company value rises to $1 billion, your stock options will be worth…

The average price of a decent 3 bedroom home within 30 minutes of Palo Alto probably IS enough to retire on (modestly) as an individual if you move to a cheaper state. Few Americans have several million dollars in retirement savings. Even for most engineers, somewhere between five and ten million is enough to retire on (3.5% safe withdrawal rate) at a nice standard of living, again assuming you don't want to live in…

>Even for most engineers, somewhere between five and ten million is enough to retire on (3.5% safe withdrawal rate) at a nice standard of living, again assuming you don't want to live in the bay area, NYC, Seattle or LA.

Especially if you already own a place you're happy to live in long term, money in that range is enough to live very comfortably anywhere in the US. No, you're not flying private jets and maybe not employing multiple full-time domestic staff, but $200K-400K per year without even touching principal is absolutely enough to have a nice standard of living even in Manhattan.

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

#463

Post by bombcar »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #423
typon wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company. Took me 10 years of grinding to finally realize this. Now at this stage the only question is how do I do it?

You can just save your way out too. I started on the path to FIRE (check out /r/financialindependence on Reddit) about 10 years into my career, and it was a huge quality of life improver Now I'm always sitting on an enormous pile of savings and I have short- and long-term plans to move my career and life forward. It spares me a lot of stress.

This is likely a more "reasonable" path unless you "go into business for yourself" as a plumber or a consultant, neither of which actually makes a salable business.

Especially since you only need to keep your expenses 10% lower (or so) than your after-tax income to hit a reasonable target.

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

#464

Post by pedrosorio »

askafriend wrote: post #434
est31 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not be…

There is a difference between building a react app for your local bakery and building Facebook.com to scale. The experience in scaling products that big and that fast is concentrated and not evenly distributed.

The average SV developer knows nothing about building Facebook.com to scale.

More precisely, the number of people who were there when "scaling products that big and that fast" applied to Facebook (or other comparable companies) is a tiny fraction of all SV developers.

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

#465

Post by [deleted] »

jahnu wrote: post #254
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.

It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.

[deleted]

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

#466

Post by subsubzero »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #189
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.

> 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…

This is a very prescient idea, if so it would be a way to control the job market in a way that was not blatantly illegal - ala Steve Jobs and Google and a few others refusing to hire from each other to keep wages down. One issue I have with this is that google in particular pays alot less than it used to compared to industry(fangish companies), a friend of mine left to go there and his pay has somewhat stagnated where mine has gone up, up, up.

An alternate explanation is that managers in tech crave headcount, they want to feel important and to have their projects and teams very well staffed. During the past year they may have gotten excessive with hiring and now you see the end results which are hiring freezes, rescinded offers and small layoffs across the industry.

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

#467

Post by ghaff »

sbierwagen wrote: post #418
saagarjha wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day. And yet these people exist and get hired, even at Google. Perhaps not on your team, but they’re definitely there.

21% of Alphabet was hired this quarter. >Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said its head count rose 21% in the second quarter of 2022 to 174,014 full-time employees from 144,056 the year prior. https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/corporate-wellness/... SV talks the big talk about hiring the best of the best of the best, then hires 30 thousand people in three months. There probably aren't that many 10x programme…

Interview process gatekeeping notwithstanding, the idea that you can hire 30,000 people (admittedly a decent proportion is probably backfilling/growing administrative, etc. positions) who are all "the best and the brightest" doesn't pass the sniff test.

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

#468

Post by uf00lme »

munk-a wrote: post #459
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I raise you an Australia. Smaller market and different time zone but cheaper and in my experience they make some exceptional workers/engineers.

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

#469

Post by onion2k »

tmpz22 wrote: post #422
onion2k wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.

> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day This is irrational. You're only able to generate $50m in revenue because a giant multi-billion dollar apparatus exists and is maintained around you and that is not free. In almost all circumstances you were not the sole driver of that revenue.

That doesn't matter. If your two hours are a key component in the work needed to make that $50m then nothing changes - you're still brilliant and asking you to work longer is still silly.

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

#470

Post by smokeypanda »

cloverich wrote: post #295
time_to_smile wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

FWIW i first learned of it from a libertarian angle, which equated business cycle with economy wide (mal) investment which was, in practice, usually driven by the fed or some comparable government program. Whether consistent or not it holds at least some truth and was an interesting angle to start learning about economics.

Libertarianism and Austrian economics has a perception of outright rejecting empiricism and other rational thought, so I'd like to add a clarification. Libertarian theory doesn't deny naturally occurring downturns in economies, but that the severity and length of them are lessened without state mismanagement. Potentially, to the point that nation-spanning busts would be a thing of the past.
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