Google's freeze was supposed to last two weeks since May.
Are they still doing the freeze?
What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
511–520 of 637 posts
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#512Earlier 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…
Sure, but this is all quibbling.
Join an early stage startup as a senior engineer and you'll probably be getting less than half or a third of a % of equity. If they even deign to tell you how many outstanding shares there are. Say that company gets super lucky and sells for a $1B? You might be lucky get $1M out of it. Assuming they didn't play funny business with the paperwork during acquisition, or dilute your shares a whole bunch.
$1M is a lot of money, but it's not "goodbye workforce" or "I'm off to invest in seeding my own startup" money, not when you have a family, home, and are still youngish.
Meanwhile the founders and other major stock owners will be doing quite well for themselves.
It's not unjust necessarily. But it definitely should inform just how much passion people put into the startups that hire them. Don't be fooled. Treat it like a job.
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We're not in a recession. Yet. We are by the most common definition: two quarters of negative GDP growth. Some folks in the US are weirdly insistent that recessions are defined by the NBER -- a self-appointed group of wonks at a private and secretive non-profit. But they're just one measure, and an arbitrary one at that.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/193280/seasonally-adjust... That isn't the unemployment graph of any recession I'm familiar with.
Recessions are by definition a decline in GDP, not a rise in unemployment.
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#514We'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…
I mean FB's stock got halved in the last few months
Stock markets are investor sentiment, they aren't the real economy. They're connected, but they're not the same. Black Monday 1987 didn't correspond to any recession.
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> proficient kernel engineers How is the world does one become a proficient kernel engineer? Without already being at a FANNG.
Here are the latest development statistics from the just-released 5.19 kernel. (Please consider supporting Linux Weekly News by subscribing if you find content like this useful; one of the benefits is you can help share subscriber-only content to friends and colleagues via Subscriber Links):
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/902854/b788a6a3d77aba7a/
If you scroll down to the Most active employers in 5.19 by commits you'll see:
1. Intel 10.9% 2. (Unknown) 7.5% 3. Linaro 5.7% 4. AMD 5.5% 5. Red Hat 5.2% 6. (None) 4.3% 7. Google 4.1% 8. Meta 3.5% 9. SUSE 3.1% 10. Huawei 2.9%
The statistics are slightly different if you count by lines of codes changed, but either way, it's not all FANNG companies, not by a long shot. There are plenty of people who get started coding via kernelnewbies.org and other resources.
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick. I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here. I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scat…
The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
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Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#517Earlier 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.
It's what we ended up doing (indirectly through an acquisition). But it didn't end-up costing less in the long run. I'd say about a third of employees ended up coming to the Bay anyways during the first year. Something you have to keep in mind is that there are two parallel markets over there: SV caliber developers and the rest. The former won't have any issue getting a job in the US (takes maybe a week for a talente…
Engineers with good track record and interviewing skills will have no problem getting US salary in Canada.
In fact Google pays Canadian similar to their non-premiun US locations like Raleigh.
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/193280/seasonally-adjust... That isn't the unemployment graph of any recession I'm familiar with.
Recessions are by definition a decline in GDP, not a rise in unemployment.
You've comfortably defined away any means of debate so you have to be right.
Lemme know what you think after the actual recession hits in 6-24 months and if it feels or looks any worse.
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#519Earlier 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, and this checks out. I think the reason this isn't more popular is that our talent pool is small enough that unless you already have a Canadian presence it's not really worth opening up a business unit/office/whatever here. Obviously some big players have done it (MS, Amazon, EA) but if you're a medium sized company it may not be worth it. I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. I…
> I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
It's extremely easy to be self employed in Canada with a foreign corporation. You just start getting your money wired through Wise or whatever service and declare it on your income taxes. As you work for a foreign corporation, no need to charge sales tax. That's it, no separate entity or incorporation needed. You can still expense your tools expenses, part of your housing, etc.
Sure if you want to incorporate, it becomes more complicated. But you wouldn't be incorporated either if you had a salaried job for a tech company locally.
Re: What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?
#520Earlier 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.
Not that simple for startups/small businesses. Dealing with labor law is no joke. I've been unable to hire FTE Canadians due to the legal burden that was going to come with setting up those operations. Larger corps can take advantage while small businesses sometimes can't deal with the paperwork overhead.