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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?

#561

Post by puffoflogic »

kleinsch wrote: post #75

Google has always recruited and interviewed independently of whether they actually have roles open that make sense for you. Earlier this year, I passed the interview and spent six weeks in "team match" before I gave up and took a role with another company. Had a friend who did the same for months for a PM role. Just bc you're getting contacted by Google recruiters this week or interviewing doesn't mean you'll ever fi…

I passed the interview (for the second time) last year and eventually turned Google down in no uncertain terms. But the last thing I was told is that the offer is good for a year — presumably not for the team I was looking at (I was being hired to a specific team which was a bit strange, perhaps?), but to go in the team match system.

Of course I'm sure it's no longer good with the hiring freeze, but the point is that Google is so heavy on the "no role needed" train that even when you're recruited for a role, you're apparently still able to turn it down and still join Google later on a whim.

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

#562

Post by puffoflogic »

vidarh wrote: post #384
Balgair wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, someone must have spiked my coffee this morning. Am I reading this right? Your friend spent 9 months interviewing for a single job? And then he decided that the company that had been trying to hire him for a pregnancy's worth of time was somewhere that he wanted to work after already having a job that hired him in a month? Is this 'normal' for the Goog? If so, why am I not shorting this company? No really,…

Turned down Google receuiters way too early to know if that's typical, but Facebook recruiters told me from the outset the process was 6 months and that they'd provide me with a reading list, and was then surprised when I told then I'd let them know if I was willing to consider that if they provided me with a compensation range. Days after, once they'd figured out the comp range, I told them I wasn't interested. This…

In my experience the reading list thing (seen at other companies) is either DEI lipservice or a trap for the tryhards, or possibly both depending on how cynical you're feeling.

There's a ton of people on the internet who claim that they just haven't done enough leetcode to get into FAANG but they're sure it's The Way, and anyone who is in FAANG cannot possibly dissuade them from this belief. I imagine they're reading the interview prep books too and still not getting in.

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

#563

Post by puffoflogic »

anonymoushn wrote: post #535
compiler-guy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying an exploding offer didn’t happen, but it is very uncommon. The blacklisted for a year thing sounds like the normal Google, “Try again in a year” messaging that happens whenever someone doesn’t get an offer for failing interviews. Again, don’t know if that is what happened, but it hardly constitutes anything nefarious.

> The blacklisted for a year thing sounds like the normal Google, “Try again in a year” messaging that happens whenever someone doesn’t get an offer for failing interviews. Again, don’t know if that is what happened, but it hardly constitutes anything nefarious. To be clear, this is the "You are not permitted to apply for any positions at this company" messaging for people who pass interviews and fail to sign offers…

That is crazy; I had the exact opposite experience I just mentioned in another comment. When I turned Google down I was told I could come back and skip the interviews any time in the next year. (Presumably no longer valid with the freeze, but still.) And this is the second time I've turned them down after getting a concrete offer! Personally I did not expect "aw shucks, hope you change your mind" when I did that and yet that's precisely what I got.

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

#564

Post by nwsm »

rexreed wrote: post #557
nwsm wrote: 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…

Can I ask what exactly were your Google dreams? What about Google made you scramble your life like this? I'm really curious why people go Gaga for Google

It wasn't really just about Google. I was applying to lots of companies but wasn't interviewing at anywhere at the level of Google at the time. More of a "Big Tech" dream

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

#565

Post by sangnoir »

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…

> As time has moved on the gap in pay between startup and FAANG and now startup and any company offering RSUs is just too large for startups to compete for talent.

My reading is that founders and VCs got greedier (or they were always this greedy, but the reality distortion field has since failed). Back in the day, working at a startup appeared to offer a plausible path to life-altering wealth to employees with stock options - these days, the cat is out of the bag: dilution by endless funding rounds, no route to IPO, preferred stock fuckery, and a countless other ways of being screwed over by information and/or power asymmetry.

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

#566

Post by vl »

tytso wrote: post #541
vl wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

I'm not saying storage didn't do big projects. I'm saying that over time it got calcified and instead of doing proper stack refactoring and delivering features beneficial for customers, it continued to sadly chug along team boundaries.

For example:

RePD is at just wrong level at all. It should have been at CFS/chunk level and thus benefit other teams as well.

BigStore stack is beyond bizarre. For years there were no object-level SLOs (not sure if there are now), which meant that sometimes your object disappeared and BigStore SREs were "la-la-la, we are fully within SLO for your project". Or you would delete something and your quota would not get back, and they would "or, Flume job got stuck in this cell, for a week...".

Not a single cloud (or internal, for that matter) customer asked for a "block device", they all want just to store files. Which means that cloud posix/nfs/smb should have been worked on from the day 1 (of cloud), we all know how it went.

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

#567

Post by tintedfireglass »

bob29 wrote: post #493
maxfurman wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon: MAGA Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon: GAMMA

Facebook Apple Google Microsoft Amazon Netflix:

is Netflix actually such a big company to include it with those tech giants?

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

#568

Post by maxfurman »

tintedfireglass wrote: post #567
bob29 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook Apple Google Microsoft Amazon Netflix:

is Netflix actually such a big company to include it with those tech giants?

Netflix is in the original FAANG so I guess they get grandfathered in

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

#569

Post by Consultant32452 »

mikeyouse wrote: post #436
Consultant32452 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me have a $10 Trillion deficit and I will show you tons of "growth" in GDP.

Why is it any different if the government takes out a loan to pay for work instead of someone like GE doing the same? If someone takes out a loan, and then spends the money building a plant or hiring employees, the economic activity is real..

It's the age old problem of once you choose the system of measurement, it's going to get manipulated by the people who get measured by it. GE is not going to rack up a bunch of debt for the explicit purpose of making sure the GDP number goes up. When the government creates a bunch of money just to make sure the GDP number goes up, GDP stops being as useful at telling you how things are going.

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

#570

Post by nowherebeen »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #363
nowherebeen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance > Past experience is unfortunately also a weak indicator If past experience of doing the actual job is bad indicator and these test are not a good proxy, then according to your logic, experience is worthless and we should all optimize for these tests. And this is exactly what is happening in the industry. Younger professionals spent hours memorizing Leetcode be…

The questions I see don’t use any tricky DS/algo that needs memorising. They are all solved by some loops and a simple data structure like an array or dictionary. If you can’t use those comfortably then you probably aren’t actually going to do well at the job. I don’t practice at all for interviews and have had no problem passing, I get an offer maybe 70% of the time. If anything companies are desperate for experienc…

> The questions I see don’t use any tricky DS/algo that needs memorising.

That's kind of anecdotal. If it was that easy, everyone would pass. My experience has been entirely on the interviewer. The younger the interviewer, the more they have to prove by giving dynamic programming or direct acyclic graph questions. I am not denying your experience, but it just isn't universally true.

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