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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?

#541

Post by tytso »

vl wrote: post #447
tytso wrote: post #334

Earlier 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…

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 wo…

Oh, you can certainly do big projects. My project[1] spanned 3 departments, and involved dozens of engineers, and required that we work with multiple hard drive vendors (our first two partners for Hybrid SMR were Seagate and WDC) on an entirely new type of HDD, as well as the T10/T13 standards committees so we could standardize the commands that we need to send to these HDD's. So this was all a huge amount of "new shit" that was not only new to Google, it was new to the HDD industry. You just have to have a really strong business case that shows how you can save Google a large amount of money.

[1] https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/dynamic-hybrid-smr...

[2] https://www.t10.org/pipermail/t10/2018-September/018566.html

On the production kernel team, colleagues of mine worked on some really cool and new shit: ghOSt, which delegates scheduling decisions to userspace in a highly efficient manner[3]. It was published in SOSP 2021/SIGOPS [4][5], so peer reviewers thought it was a pretty big deal. I wasn't involved in it, but I'm in awe this cool new work that my peers in the prodkernel team created, all of which was not only described in detail in peer-reviewed papers, but also published as Open Source.

[3] https://research.google/pubs/pub50833/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ABe4dsbIY

[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483542

We have some really top-notch engineers in our production kernel team, and I'm very proud to be part of an organization has this kind of talent.

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

#542

Post by advael »

mattmanser wrote: post #532
advael wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not claiming the hiring freeze makes the stability illusory, I am claiming that the entire concept of stability is fictional EDIT: Actually, you've also missed my point in another respect: Even if there's a real hiring freeze the immediate impact would be on people seeking FAANG jobs, not those who already have them. Honestly I don't even know what you think you're responding to. Maybe you're at a FAANG and thin…

You don't really have a point, or if you do you're referencing it so obliquely and mysteriously it's almost completely impossible to tell what it is. As far as I can tell you hate big tech. You think the programming job market will collapse. And it'll be good for us, as we'll learn to deal with uncertainty! Woo hoo. But you have no actual advice on how.

Dope, you want strategies for dealing with uncertainty? That's what we like to hear. There's a wealth of standard advice out there, but I can tell you the biggest three disparities between what I have gleaned from personal experience and what I see many others do:

1. Accept that nothing you care about in the future is truly certain. This may seem obvious, and it's good to plan ahead, but it seems like a lot of people get wrapped up in guarantees they think they have and panic when those guarantees don't pan out

2. Consider failsafes, contingencies, and alternatives an essential part of your planning. For example, even if you think your job is pretty stable, do you know what to do if you lose your job? Do you know where to look for jobs? Do you have a network of contacts in your industry? Do you have savings or investments that you can fall back on for your needs? Do you have friends who can help you? How much are you investing in skills, opportunities, assets that are unlikely to be valuable in other scenarios than the one you consider most likely?

3. Think in degrees and probabilities. When you're weighing the risk-reward of a plan that involves contingencies, you don't have infinite cognitive, financial, or temporal resources to devote to all of them, so you need to know what to care about. Even though failure to optimize a best case is often not as bad as failure to survive a worst case, sinking everything into worst-case planning for an unlikely scenario can still be worse than sinking everything into best-case planning for a likely one. Ask yourself: How bad is the worst outcome? How does it compare to the next-worst? The best? A different one that's equally good or bad? How likely do you think it is? How much do you have to prepare differently for it? What is the cost of that preparation?

My point is that the world will not give you guarantees. Yes I dislike big tech monopolies. I think it's apparent that concentration of power in tech as well as other sectors is a massive net harm to a lot of outcomes I care about, including the autonomy and privacy of individuals, the robustness of the economy to shocks, the capture of governments to privilege the needs of their industries over those of their citizens, and numerous more subtle latent effects it has on the social fabric of communities. That doesn't matter on the scale of individual choices though, and the point I have made was that if one is worried that the fortunes of these monstrosities will affect one's own career prospects, one should pursue strategies that do not rely on that not happening

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

#543

Post by eclipxe »

pharmakom wrote: post #373
ryandrake wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this based on your actual experience at Google/Meta or are you guessing?

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

#544

Post by VirusNewbie »

Kharvok wrote: post #397

I think companies have had to lower expectations for new hires over the last several years. These companies now see an opportunity with a slight market correction to freeze hiring to deal with the lower performers and possibly replace.

I think hiring standards have gotten higher but performance standards took a back seat the last couple years.

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

#545

Post by aksjdhmkjasdof »

baby wrote: post #343
aksjdhmkjasdof wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. I don't agree with this analysis. I'd be shocked if Google did any layoffs (though it's always possible) instead of just freezing hiring and letting natural attrition happen for a while. As for the signal to empl…

FB is still printing money so I'm not sure how it's not a stable business

It's certainly stable for now but it doesn't feel as stable as Google's, at least to me. The main FB product is in a slow decline and IG, though doing well, is under constant threat from the latest social media app du jour. The whole VR push could work out but right now it feels like a long shot and if I were working there I wouldn't be happy betting the farm on it. I mean the very fact that they are anticipating such a drastic pivot to their core business in the future should surely be a cause for some concern.

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

#546

Post by tytso »

jtefera wrote: post #269
Balgair wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to make sure I'm on the right page here: PM = Project Manager. Projects can range from something like all of Project Loon down to some one small little thing. Project managers can manage many people (and other managers) down to only one other person. Project managers are given access to budgets, including hiring and project budgeting. The role is somewhat ambiguous, but you are definitely in the 'Management' s…

PM at Google is normally Product Manager. Project Managers are called Program Managers (PgM). Most program managers at Google do not manage anyone.

In my part of Google, we use TPM for "Technical Program Managers" instead of PgM.

In general a TPM at Level N will have the technical skills of a Level N-1 SWE. So many TPM's have a CS background, and a good TPM is an amazing partner/resource for a TL to have, especially for a large, complex project which spans multiple teams and multiple departments.

For my Hybrid SMR project, my TPM came out of a HDD vendor, and was very well versed in the technologies of HDD internals. At the same time, he could navigate all of the bureaucracy and process to get test racks ordered, populated with servers, and installed in data centers. He could also create the capital budget plan and get it submitted and approved through finance so I could concentrate on the technology. A good TPM is critical for the success of a large projects; I couldn't have done it without him.

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

#547

Post by askafriend »

est31 wrote: post #471
askafriend wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them. But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good…

This isn't quite right. I can see how you reached the conclusion you did, but you're missing a lot of context.

For one, developing frontends at the scale and complexity needed for quickly growing organizations is just as complex as backend scaling in a variety of ways.

If you're a frontend expert and can operate in the way needed to support a rapidly growing business/product - you can make just as much if not more than backend engineers (500k+ easily at senior levels). This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain. This is just simply experience not everyone has because it requires context.

Also programming ability alone is not the sole reason for the outsized comp packages. In my view, it is at most 1/3rd of the reason. There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.

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

#548

Post by est31 »

askafriend wrote: post #547
est31 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them. But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good…

This isn't quite right. I can see how you reached the conclusion you did, but you're missing a lot of context. For one, developing frontends at the scale and complexity needed for quickly growing organizations is just as complex as backend scaling in a variety of ways. If you're a frontend expert and can operate in the way needed to support a rapidly growing business/product - you can make just as much if not more th…

> This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain.

What do you mean by large scale abstractions?

Generally, small frontends are different from large frontends. Already because you need to work on a team instead of being able to do it alone. But adding features is a quite orthogonal concern to scaling by the number of users I'd say. There can be extremely complex frontends that only have a dozen concurrent users (think some company internal admin console), and nothing prevents a small frontend from targetting billions. E.g. Google search used to have a quite simple frontend 17 years ago, and it still looks quite simple to the outside, but the results side has obviously been heavily enriched since.

From the frontend point of view, it is just calling an API, and processing its results, while there is backend magic happening to make it scalable. I'm disregarding SSR here for a moment. It shouldn't matter if the same frontend code is loaded by ten users or hundreds, or billions.

> There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.

Can you list some of those qualities? I'm curious.

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

#549

Post by ska »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #533
ska wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. The idea is you scale your rate to include enough for a benefits package. Or they use a POE/EOR service, that's possible in Canada I think. Either way, incorporation still has some advantages, one being that you time shift your pay as needed. It can make it easier to subcontr…

CRA will screw you if you incorporate and only have one client. My employer is using Deel, paying me as sole proprietor, and that's fine. Deel can also act as an EOR and I could be "full time", and that could offer benefits. But it feels like a bit of a veneer overtop over what feels like contracting anyways, and it would mean less $$ in my pocket. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Especially now that pharmaceuticals i…

As I understand it, it's not really about the 1 client, so much as about demonstrating you aren't really an employee-employer relationship masquerading as something else. It sounds like that's what you actually are, so in that case you shouldn't be incorporating. If you change contracts often enough it might make more sense.

FWIW an EOR/POE is more about the convenience for the employer, not you - they don't have to establish a local business presence, register a bunch of tax accounts, etc. You can end up technically employed by the EOR with access to a decent benefits plan etc., and paid directly by payroll. At least that's how it works in some jurisdictions, as you note. It's different all over, but can make a huge difference in somewhere with crappy medical coverage, or other benefits you want to keep consistent.

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