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Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

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Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#241

Post by eitally »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #161
sytelus wrote: post #108

Before everyone starts painting bleak picture, reminder: Facebook's Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated hiring spree this year, opening massive 10,000 more positions! Google as well as Facebook both depend on ads so I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion.

Besides New Hiring, I would be impressed if large companies honour their existing job offers; Which IT services firms which does bulk recruiting in India seem to be doing. IT firms such as TCS (30,000 recruits this financial year), Wipro (12,000), Cognizant (20,000) and Capgemini (10,000 over January-June) say they are sticking by their offer letters[1]. I've personally witnessed jobs from these companies lift severa…

Part of Sundar's letter says Google is honoring existing job offers.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#242

Post by notyourday »

ibejoeb wrote: post #119
coliveira wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google depends on advertisers to make money, and the writing is on the wall for these advertisers.

Call me dumb, but are people not sitting around consuming advertising 10x nowadays? There's never been a better time to get someone's attention.

Conversion cratered.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#243

Post by jefftk »

cletus wrote: post #176

So years ago this came up with Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google through the GFC. After 2007, Google had selective layoffs (probably not in engineering) and slowed hiring. They also paused construction projects in Mountain View and probably elsewhere. Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused…

A major way that things are different now is that it's much harder to get new people up to speed. My team is doing ok remotely, but we're not that good at it and I think the only reason it's going as well as it has been is because we had a lot of face to face time earlier. Bringing someone new on where we didn't previously have that time is a lot harder.

If we were going to be fully remote forever this would be different, but since this is (very likely!) temporary that's a reason to prefer to hire more later.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself) (Well, I guess I work at home, but Google is my employer)

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#244

Post by amf12 »

cletus wrote: post #176

So years ago this came up with Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google through the GFC. After 2007, Google had selective layoffs (probably not in engineering) and slowed hiring. They also paused construction projects in Mountain View and probably elsewhere. Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused…

> Is the situation the same now?

There is some difference in the current situation, however I am not sure how much it factors into this decision.

Hiring and onboarding people is logistically very difficult when travel has been affected worldwide and everyone is working from home.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#245

Post by deegles »

JSavageOne wrote: post #229
cletus wrote: post #176

So years ago this came up with Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google through the GFC. After 2007, Google had selective layoffs (probably not in engineering) and slowed hiring. They also paused construction projects in Mountain View and probably elsewhere. Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused…

On the topic of not having enough work to do, here's a couple questions to any Google employees: 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company? To be fair I can't think of any other search engine that returns better results. But I feel like Google's gotten very complacent with their search, which i…

The cynical view about search quality is that the metric being optimized for is not how satisfied people are with the results, but the amount of ads and therefore revenue earned. Search results only need to be good enough to get you to come back and not worse than the competition.

I wish Google had a subscription option (with actual support) that eliminated all ads across their products. Imagine Amazon's customer obsession with Google tech... I'm sure it would do well for the 4 years they would support it.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#246

Post by notyourday »

georgeburdell wrote: post #104
third_I wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like... exactly the reality of such times, indeed. Well worded. There is a question, each time, of concurrent or even deeper cycles coinciding. The last recession is often thought to have been a prime factor in the revolutions of 2011 (Arab Spring etc). Regardless of their eventual conclusion, the push is deemed to stem (as always in history) from the economic situation. European kings knew all too well t…

>hitting the middle-upper class super hard What are you talking about? White collars are working from home, by and large. None of my engineer friends have lost their jobs yet (one is getting furloughed for a week though)

That's because we are only in the fourth week of this. The revenue of non-essential companies plummeted. They are going to start cutting headcount by mid-may.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#247

Post by rubidium »

mkoryak wrote: post #86
nilkn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend interviewed with Google a few years ago and the process took well over six months before he actually got an official offer. It really is amazing how slow they are.

Counter point: The time between my on site interview and hire date was 1 month and 1 day. I skipped the phone interview so the time from initial referral to offer was under a month. Having an internal reference may have helped, as did the fact that I told them I was actively interviewing and had offers.

Sure, but my Fortune 500 employer takes 2-3 weeks to do that on average. Longer only if the new hire needs longer to unwind from prior commitments.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#248

Post by ashtonkem »

JSavageOne wrote: post #229
cletus wrote: post #176

So years ago this came up with Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google through the GFC. After 2007, Google had selective layoffs (probably not in engineering) and slowed hiring. They also paused construction projects in Mountain View and probably elsewhere. Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused…

On the topic of not having enough work to do, here's a couple questions to any Google employees: 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company? To be fair I can't think of any other search engine that returns better results. But I feel like Google's gotten very complacent with their search, which i…

On 2: any initiative to rewrite Gmail will get shut down or reworked again without notice. See, Google Inbox.

Highly recommend giving up on Gmail as an interface, and treat it as an IMAP/SMTP server only.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#249

Post by ashtonkem »

netjiro wrote: post #203
cletus wrote: post #176

So years ago this came up with Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google through the GFC. After 2007, Google had selective layoffs (probably not in engineering) and slowed hiring. They also paused construction projects in Mountain View and probably elsewhere. Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused…

> Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees) Your model is in the right direction but misses more important aspects. When consulting I measure overhead of the orgs I'm working for in great detail. Cultural aspects like fear, autonomy, transparency, etc have a much higher impact on management overhead than the org chart structure itself.

I’ve seen tiny organizations with massive management overhead. Friend of mine got a vacation denied by a 5 person all remote company because they didn’t file the correct paperwork asking for a day off!

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#250

Post by eitally »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #231
jyrkesh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was brought back after the final interview to do another round and was verbally told by the recruiter that everything looked great and that she would be extremely surprised if I didn't get an offer. Guess who got to tell me I didn't get it (again)? Note to recruiters: don't say that stuff. Fortunately, I'm still happy in my current job.

Being brought back to do another interview is not a good sign at Google. Best case is your interviewers totally forgot to cover something important, but more commonly it means somebody has serious doubts about something and they need to check it again.

Or that you're being considered for a similar job but under a different hiring manager.

Another thing to note about Google hiring is that it's very different for different role types. Specifically, for SWEs, Sales, and other roles that are expected to function in a largely boilerplate manner, it's fairly cut & dried how things work, but for roles that are less clearly defined (for example, "program manager" or "solutions consultant") the actual responsibilities can be so highly variable (or so niche) that interviewing for them is a specialization in itself. These kind of one-off situations is where Google's "automate all the things" general mentality falls apart.

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