Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn’t know google had so many senior vice presidents ...
job title inflation is a thing.
But not at the SVP level, at least not at Google.
Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
251–260 of 305 posts
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, yeah, can confirm the travel segment cratered into the ground. I can see adwords being an unpopular product overall at the moment. It's just an awful format for rebranding/storytelling/marketing.
This is super interesting. I never thought of search ads from the lens of storytelling, only from the lens of click through. Interesting that a lot of SEO-built brands have no way to even reach customers to repair brand now, since search volume is so down.
I suspect this is one of the reasons advertising on Instagram is going gangbusters. The combo of better targeting + a format that naturally lends itself to storytelling makes for a much more compelling advertising platform.
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because it is perceived to be a fairly uninformed question. It's sort of like talking about the USPS potential insolvency and someone asking how many postmen will be replaced with gig economy workers. As far as I'm aware, major leading American tech companies have never really exported jobs to India, it has been almost entirely companies that need mediocre quality work contracting out to companies that fill…
Is it a joke? In many industries it's not uncommon to subcontract a service by a subcontractor which himself subcontract the same service to another subcontractor (usually cheaper). In the end it is only a question of money! Actually top american tech companies don't have to go directly to India to get cheaper workers but instead they call american subcontractor to get cheaper workers anywhere in the world. Even more…
i don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right.
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
As third party observer, why this gets downvoted? I’m genuinely asking.
May be you should consider posting some data-driven citation. AFAIK, jobs have stopped going to India for sometime now. Indian IT companies which relied heavily on offshoring had significant contraction as a result. A lot of modern IT jobs in India are in fact for new startups/companies meant for Indian population itself. Before COVID, India was seeing China like internal uprising with equivalent of many US tech comp…
The Indian ITO firms have been seeing pressure for a while, but that doesn't also mean US tech companies have stopped hiring in India (or that they've stopped hiring contractors through those Indian firms).
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#255So 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…
I think it's also important to look at scale - in 2007/2008, Google had ~25.000 employees. Now it has over 100.000. If I'm looking at the graph correctly, Google hired 20.000+ of those in last year or two. The size of whole company in 2007! That's a whole different ballpark than what hiring was in 2008. A slowdown in this scale can easily mean "just" hiring more people than anyone else.
I think part of this it's easy to feel like you have multiple managers. Typically you only have one true manager but you probably have multiple ppl who tell you what to do and not all of them have direct reports.
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#256So 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…
> Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He had the benefit of hindsight. In 2008 noone could predict if the GFC would last for one year or three years and how deep it would be.
The problem with hiring freezes (or reduced hiring) is that it creates a bathtub curve in your company. You'll end up with a lot of senior people, a lot of junior people, and a gap in the middle. This is a problem (somewhat recovered by this last decade of hiring) in the US DoD, primarily on the civilian side but also the military side.
In the 90s through the 00s there was a massive reduction in hiring for civil servants. So you had a lot of people who were there from the 80s and early 90s, and then a massive drop. Around 2010 or so they started ramping up hiring again, because they finally acknowledged the need (they had a huge percentage of civil servants who could literally retire at any point). So you ended up with (in some orgs) 30-40% of the staff being able to retire, 30-40% under 28, and the rest spread randomly from the age of about 28-55.
As people retired (biggest loss of personnel before other kinds of attrition), teams were literally losing centuries of experience in a year. The mid-career people were moving into leadership roles, and leaving the junior people to learn the processes and technical work largely on their own.
I saw something similar in private industry as well, but that was due to a preference to hire junior people over experienced people (either the manager wanted people who could be molded or cost).
Sometimes hiring freezes/slowdowns are important. But if your business is healthy, it'll end up backfiring on you more often than not. Even a year or two of this can create problems, though not as dramatic as what the DoD experienced.
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#257I’ve been stuck in the final SVP approval part of their hiring process for a week. At this point I think I’m just going to keep my current job. Too bad — seemed like a good time to get equity at a good “strike” price
Google has a notoriously slow hiring process. For new grads and internships, the time between initial coding assessment to final hiring confirmation is often several months.
Pretty much all of my University friends got into team matching at Google for an internship position (myself included). All of them would have taken the job, and none of them were able to because the process was too long. It's pretty absurd, they even set up a call with myself and a dozen other people in team matching to basically tell us that we should take any other offers we have because Google is too slow. And then for full time it was the same thing - my time from application to on-site to offer was like 2 weeks for Jane Street, why is it 3 months for Google? The worst was that the deadline kept getting pushed back - for a month, I was told that I would be matched with a team that week, and I never actually got matched before my other offer deadlines.
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The ideal is ... Nope. That was perhaps the case in the 50-80s, but today we can do much better, and it's dependent on the people, the culture, and the market/product structure and strategy.
I don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right. It's also the reason why there are plenty of directors at google with no team, and plenty of lower level managers with 20, 50 or more directs (often lots of TVCs). An observation from my work experience is that, while things run efficiently with smaller teams overall, small teams also tend to make it easier for any given leader to have a reasonably good ide…
Not just google. All large companies I've inspected have had similar issues. Appearance becomes important. People loose agency and autonomy. Communication stalls. Things take longer. More misunderstandings. More mistakes. No one takes responsibility. Redefinition of words like "success" and "failure". Endless meetings. Etc, etc.
Smaller companies tend to have stronger focus of just getting stuff done. It's clear who has responsibility. People can more easily make a decision on their own or in small groups and just get it done, without involving a clown car of middle managers.
When I build projects I only have two "levels". Management have final say on budgets, targets and priorities. Experts/devs/techs get the work done. They generally make decisions with full autonomy and self organise. If they need help with coordination, planning, followup, etc then management steps in. Management also monitor and track. Usually my management has very strong technical skills and tend to be part of the daily work in the trenches.
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
Management overhead is a self inflicted wound. But very common.
I often come in and ask people to stop doing meaningless tasks, just to be told that the previous, much more expensive, consultant had told them it's the bees knees.
There is also a common misunderstanding that if a bigger or cooler company is doing something it must be the right thing.
Cargo cult.
Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s possible they would have just built yet another chat app for Google to shutdown. I’m not sure what Google even does anymore innovation wise with all their wealth and resources.
They do some great machine learning research and I am sure good research in other fields.
Surely their research is a small percentage of all hires.