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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

#281

Post by comzilla »

imprettycool wrote: post #280
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.

If I were to guess, Facebook's recruiting pipeline is centralized. Whether or not to hire is done at the executive level. When Facebook hires someone, they are first a "Facebook employee", go through the bootcamp, and decide on a team 1-2 months into the job. Google on the other hand, the recruiting pipeline is more spread out. Whether or not to hire is done at the organizational level (i.e. Cloud, Ads, Search, Core,…

Going by your words, Google’s hiring process seems to be hurting them right now (which makes sense). But what are the benefits of hiring this way over Facebook’s style? (or rather where does centralized hiring fall short?)

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#282

Post by what_ever »

themdonuts wrote: post #193
mav3rick wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sole view is not the final authority on what's right for a company. Google has done many things right while growing to this size. It still retains top talent something that other big companies struggle with. And yes I'll just wait for HNers who are disgruntled about being rejected downvote me. But the truth is 99% of the people will take a job at Google in a jiffy. I'm also proud of the response and employee sup…

I'm not so sure if Google did that much to help with the Covid situation. Yes, they checked the box of throwing a bunch of chromebooks at the problem and money and are also extending the tracking of people to "help identify potential new cases". But did they actually do anything out of the box that doesn't directly help them? As an example, my company allows us expensing up to 2 family meals per week from local busin…

> As an example, my company allows us expensing up to 2 family meals per week from local businesses to help these.

How is it different that "throwing money" as you describe Google doing?

> They are also extending the deadline with holidays not spent from last year so employees don't lose them.

It's same at Google.

There are multiple other things, most you can see at http://blog.google, including but not limited to working with governments, reducing the pricing for gsuite features, classroom software and others I can't comment on.

Disc: Googler.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#283

Post by defectbydesign »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #216
0xFFC wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As third party observer, why this gets downvoted? I’m genuinely asking.

Because it's silly and ignorant and possibly xenophobic. It probably doesn't help that elsewhere in the thread they're making comments that make them sound kind of crazy: > [open source orgs are] communist organizations living on private money from anticompetitive tech giants.

What's wrong with xenophobia? Every country in the world are xenophobic and it's called nationalism! ;-)

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#284

Post by defectbydesign »

sytelus wrote: post #134
0xFFC wrote: post #68

Earlier 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 indiatimes... well sourced! LOL

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#285

Post by joshuamorton »

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…

I think you're overestimating the mean org depth.

> In fact this would be a good metric:

On a slightly different note: this isn't a good metric. It's a metric of how "balanced" the company is, not the management overhead. If you imagine a company with 150000 engineers and one salesperson, with sales reporting directly to the CEO, hiring more people under the sales director will decrease this metric, while increasing the mean org depth. That probably doesn't measure what you want it to.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#286

Post by mav3rick »

mywittyname wrote: post #267
JSavageOne wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

2. They released Inbox, which was amazing and had a cult following. Then they killed Inbox. Presumably because they could not figure out how to capitalize on an extraordinarily useful, fast paradigm-shifting email client.

Just the insight we were longing for. How about very few users define "cult following" for you ?

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#287

Post by Nicksil »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #215
Nicksil wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it surprising that some people may value things other than just money? Of course there are people who would decide against an opportunity to go work for Google, FaceBook, Twitter, et al. I like to think there are more than a few, but I've no sources to backup any assertions right now.

How is that relevant in the least to someone who applied for a job there?

I don't understand your question. Did you read the post I was replying to? That may add missing context.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#288

Post by nostrademons »

Jtsummers wrote: post #256
credit_guy wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 serv…

It also introduces cultural problems.

In a healthy organizational culture, the org grows steadily at a pace that's not too quickly, and more senior members acculturate new recruits into the organization. Acculturation can't be rushed; it's the process of transferring all the unconscious, tacit knowledge about how and why things are done the way they are, and because it's unconscious, it happens only through long exposure.

When you have a hiring freeze, the existing culture ossifies and becomes more insular without any new blood. And then when the hiring freeze lifts, you usually need to "catch up" on hiring, which means that you have a sudden rush of new recruits and relatively few senior people. The new people don't have enough old hands to acculturate them, which means that they end up forming their own culture that may be entirely divorced from the existing org culture. Because the new culture outnumbers the old, eventually the old hands leave (taking their institutional knowledge with them), and the dominant org culture reflects that which the newbies brought with them.

Google's culture changed dramatically from 2011-2013, driven by the combination of rapid hiring, a new CEO (this may've been deliberate: if you want to change the culture, one way to do it is bring on a lot of people who agree with you), and the departure of key early employees like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Marissa Mayer, et al.

Come to think of it, the U.S's culture wars are largely a result of the "birth dearth" of Gen X. Instead of a continuous shift in culture, you have two "big" generations of Boomers and Millenials and the latter developed a distinctive culture amongst themselves without regards to existing American culture.

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#289

Post by donalhunt »

kapuasuite wrote: post #227
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…

“ 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 caus…

Probably. I can't be bothered looking for a reference.

I was an engineering program manager and people manager at Google previously and around 2010-2012, there were opportunities for the company to really accelerate revenue, product development but they couldn't hire fast enough to take advantage. This stemmed from many orgs freezing hiring for a significant period (maybe 12-18 months).

At large companies, you have queues setup for most roles because you often growing the n count of that role by 5-10% per annum.

Also very few orgs plan for attrition (I don't get why because it's always been in the range of 4-20% in my opinion). Freezing hiring means a company's ability to execute reduces. Sometimes that is needed but often you must backfill to keep the lights on. Guess the messaging is easy ("no hiring. No exceptions").

Re: Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020

#290

Post by donalhunt »

smueller1234 wrote: post #174
fergie wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody get hired for SWE positions at Google _without_ an internal referral? When I was interviewing there 6 or so years ago I was under the impression that you, in practice, had to have an insider vouch for you.

The only internal reference I had was a distant acquaintance who - as they said themselves - just submitted one that basically read "don't know them much but they don't seem to be a jerk". So you can absolutely get hired in engineering without internal references. (I'm also on a hiring committee myself.)

When I got hired back in 2004 that was pretty much the bar (helped that I knew how to fix servers I suspect too)!! :)
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