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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?

#621

Post by pzduniak »

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...…

Market rates? Oof, I thought they were still more competitive. They flat out refused to discuss comp with me before passing the interviews.

Fascinating that now VC-funded companies are suddenly getting more and more competitive by not discriminating by region. Everyone tries to beat the market and they're more flexible regarding the employment contract, so eg. you can be self-employed and save 20% of your income from taxes.

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

#622

Post by ninkendo »

ryandrake wrote: post #305
ninkendo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.

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…

Just because you have a full JIRA queue doesn't mean any of the work is worth doing. Management tends to want to build empires, and that can mean taking on projects that don't contribute at all to the company's bottom line, or are so high-effort/low-impact that any sane company wouldn't even bother with the project. See also Google's new chat app every year, or how companies decide to rewrite their UI every six months, refactoring legacy code that works just fine, chasing the latest framework du jour, etc etc etc. Teams tend to take on work on a whim, and there's rarely anyone at the top keeping tabs on which of the projects are actually useful vs just spinning your wheels.

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

#623

Post by belval »

thrown_22 wrote: post #615
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.

Anyone whose good in Canada is already in the US or they don't care about compensation to begin with. Either way you're not getting a top engineer working on your ad-tech business for a third the cost. But if you're building a startup that uses ML to look for 3d printable compliant mechanism you'll be drowning in applications and starved for cash.

As a Canadian that's not really how I see it. I worked for a bit in California and while I was earning more than I do now, the cost of living was probably double what I have right now so the math really wasn't as simple as "move to the US to make more money".

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

#624

Post by edmundsauto »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #582
edmundsauto wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s as much about the challenging technical problems as it is the ability to get shit done. Wherever I’ve worked, most developers are unable to own e2e work. At big tech, you are expected to be decent in a lot of related areas (communication, project planning, etc). Software is a people problem and what big tech looks for is top notch technical skills and the mindset/ability to solve them in a chaotic…

Doesn't jive with me. Many companies paying at best domestic market rate are asking for top notch communication skills and people persons over tech skills. Meanwhile, most FAANG have far higher tech requirements, but would hire individuals who can barely speak proper English and even put them in the spot of hiring managers. If you value communication, you need a really good argument to look past hiring practices pref…

I think my post sounded more indexed on communication than the "get shit done" part of things. What do you think of the perspective if I changed the desired skill to "ownership" instead?

Most of the big tech companies' engineers are doing the same type of work as outside big tech. However, their internal practices are scattered and faster than outside (IME), which means you have to be able to keep your head above water, drive your own career, and deliver impact. You need to understand the product space quite well, as you are expected to be a partner. Rather than delivering code, you are delivering value.

Maybe 1 in 20 engineers that I've worked with outside big tech had this trait. I think they set the tech bar high, but the real skill differentiation I have seen is ownership.

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

#625

Post by thrown_22 »

belval wrote: post #623
thrown_22 wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone whose good in Canada is already in the US or they don't care about compensation to begin with. Either way you're not getting a top engineer working on your ad-tech business for a third the cost. But if you're building a startup that uses ML to look for 3d printable compliant mechanism you'll be drowning in applications and starved for cash.

As a Canadian that's not really how I see it. I worked for a bit in California and while I was earning more than I do now, the cost of living was probably double what I have right now so the math really wasn't as simple as "move to the US to make more money".

There's a rather simple answer for why you weren't getting paid more.

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

#626

Post by dghlsakjg »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #602
dghlsakjg wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, I show up at a company as a consultant and in two weeks I singlehandedly take care of something ten people have been struggling with for a year

Has it occurred to you that hiring a consultant is, by definition, an unusual situation?

That, perhaps, you have never had to come in and save any team at my company, or thousands of other companies, because we are competent developers?

Being able to do the work of 10 people once, does not mean that you are able to take 10 people from any company outside of a specific geographic area and replace them with one of you.

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

#627

Post by belval »

thrown_22 wrote: post #625
belval wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian that's not really how I see it. I worked for a bit in California and while I was earning more than I do now, the cost of living was probably double what I have right now so the math really wasn't as simple as "move to the US to make more money".

There's a rather simple answer for why you weren't getting paid more.

Are you suggesting that I was bad at my job? If so that seems irrelevant as I'd be bad at it on both sides of the border.

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

#628

Post by hnfong »

advael wrote: post #542
mattmanser wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a pretty avid believer of Murphy's principles.

Your points above are definitely true, and I've been thinking hard about this myself for the past couple years.

My conclusion? I'm probably gonna keep my $300k+ FAANG job until the recession is over. That gives me more savings to fall back on in case something bad happens. It's ridiculous to suggest that it's a good idea to quit your job (or reject a high paying job) at the time when industry-wide layoffs are happening.

If your point is just about broader social responsibility and not fueling monopolies, you might have a point. But dealing with uncertainties on a personal level? Your advice about being prepared to lose your job and make sure to have enough savings and investments to fall back onto sounds a lot more reasonable than your initial toxic advice for people to reject a high paying stable-ish job at large corp right when the future is becoming uncertain.

When one makes two points that contradict each other, do they have two points or none?

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

#629

Post by hnfong »

nowherebeen wrote: post #570
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If it was that easy, everyone would pass.

The implication is not that the questions are easy for the average person, but the questions are relatively easy to programmers talented in solving these kinds of questions (even if they don't actively grind problems on leetcode).

I personally think it's true that there might not be a high correlation between being good at solving leetcode style problems and being good at software development in general, and there's definitely a valid point to be made that some FAANG companies are essentially off feeding unconscionable ad money to a class of "smart" people who can leetcode without a bitter grind.

But when people complain about mandatory leetcode grinding, I just can't help but find it kind of ironic that they're simultaneously feeling bitter about not being able to get that $300k+ job, yet also feeling self-entitled because they have some so-called industry experience (which may or may not be relevant), and also proud of forgetting what they were taught in their CS curriculum... I suspect the Dunning–Kruger effect is strong in those cases.

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

#630

Post by hnfong »

nowherebeen wrote: post #572
ascar wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How do you assess and verify past experience of doing the actual job? That's the tough nut to crack and that's why they ask questions to assess your ability on the actual job. There are a lot of decent engineers out there w…

> why they ask questions to assess your ability on the actual job You already said LC isn't an ideal proxy to the job. So I am not sure what point you are making. If I work at Stripe for 5 years as a software engineer, are you saying I am lying about my experience? How about Google? How about Coinbase? How did these people survive for so long? It seems like you default to the candidate being liers. Maybe you are youn…

Unless the previous employer is known to fire underperforming employees quickly, and willing to explicitly say so during reference checks, how does a prospective employer know whether a candidate's $n years in $company is a productive one or not?

So you haven't seen underperforming people survive at large famous companies for multiple years? Are you sure you have that much experience in $bigco? How old are you really, since you say the GP is "young"? I wouldn't be so patronizing to others if I were you.

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