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Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#621

Post by ken47 »

zooq_ai wrote: post #578
xtracto wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been interviewing people for Software Eng jobs for more than 10 years an I haven't used leetcode style problems for like 8 of those years. Leetcode interviewing is lazy interviewing. It's for when you don't want to put an effort in your interviewing process to check if the candidates have the skills you need for the position you are filling. For example. My interview process nowadays is one web API interaction c…

Have you built a $1 Trillion company? No. Has your company pioneered some great open source software (Kubernetes, Go, React, PyTorch, Cassandra? No. How do you even know that your method is correct, scalable? Answer is you don't know. It's mind-boggling that people who hire for software engineers who write CRUD apps used by 20 people, think they know how to hire for firms that serve 4 Billion+ users.

> people who hire for software engineers who write CRUD apps used by 20 people

It seems like you believe that anyone who doesn't work for Google works for a boutique web design firm?

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#622

Post by mcmcmc »

closeparen wrote: post #595
oaiey wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the individual layoff which is the issue for the people. It is the general feeling that the little man get squeezed under the argument of cost savings and the rich man takes out even more than the year before, independent of the market and company performance. In the past the entrepreneur took the yearly risks and was rewarded or not for it. The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on…

By any reasonable metric, Google SWEs are "the rich man" in American society.

The "little man" is the line employee, vs the machinations of the boardroom and the demands of the stock market. The salary level isn't that relevant.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#623

Post by hiq »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #570
hiq wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class. What would you do instead? Threads about tech interviews are always the same: we all complain about the process with no real alternative when you want to hire at that scale. In particular about: > Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engin…

> How would you assess them better than current common processes like leetcode interviews? OP said "just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer", for which leetcode is useless. Communication skills, organizational skills, hell, even general knowledge isn't covered by leetcode-like interviews. Personally, speaking as someone who doesn't like but has to interview potential hires, I have f…

AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.

They clearly don't help to evaluate organizational skills, but no one said you should only have these interviews. I'm guessing no company does only leetcode-style interviews, at least I don't know of any.

> I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.

You could only evaluate this correlation among people who did pass your leetcode interviews and were thus beyond a certain bar, unless I'm missing something. The question is whether selecting according to this bar is useful, but it doesn't look like you evaluated this. Or did you do leetcode interviews and just hired anyone regardless of how they performed in them? I agree with you that beyond a certain bar, the signal becomes lesser. But being able to tell whether a candidate can write a for loop is a pretty strong (anti-)indicator for many SWE jobs.

> The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.

I agree that there's probably some of that. But companies are made of people, and if so many are still doing that decades now after they started and don't see a competitive advantage in switching, maybe it's the best they've been able to come up with, given their constraints. Again, there's real money to be made for those coming up with an alternative that'd scale and perform better.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#624

Post by shenberg »

happytiger wrote: post #314
oaiey wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the individual layoff which is the issue for the people. It is the general feeling that the little man get squeezed under the argument of cost savings and the rich man takes out even more than the year before, independent of the market and company performance. In the past the entrepreneur took the yearly risks and was rewarded or not for it. The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on…

It’s one metric: revenue per employee. In a more capital expensive market, such as our current one, this metric is the one corporate managers are focusing on. For example, Google: https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-per-employee/ Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have…

"since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation" - I've seen this notion repeated and I assume it's a reference to M1 as published by FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

The actual story, as far as I can tell, is that money that had previously been considered as M2 (=less liquid) is also counted as M1 due to rule changes regarding savings accounts.

To see this is the case, you can plot both together. If in fact, new money was printed, you would expect M2 to have the same jump as M1, as M2 is M1 + more stuff. However, you see a much smaller jump:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1dwhY

The rule-change coincided with COVID relief measures which did include money-printing, but at a much smaller scale than implied.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#625

Post by ken47 »

lokar wrote: post #574
ken47 wrote: post #347

Google is overrated. It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class. You had talking heads yammering about how hard it was to get into Google, which to be honest, made the company even less appealing. Is this a software engineering company or some kind of hyped up nightclub? Yeah, maybe it's a hard interview if you'v…

I did over 400 interviews working there, and many hundreds more serving on hiring committees. I never gave a leetcode interview, and saw only a modest amount of them in committee. “It’s all leetcode BS” makes a great offhand d complaint but was not the actual truth.

Google reached out to me a few times to see if I'd interview with them. On the one or two phone calls I had with their recruiters, they explicitly advised me to practice algorithms (leetcode et al) if I wanted to move forward. Perhaps what you were doing was not the norm.

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#626

Post by [deleted] »

happytiger wrote: post #314
oaiey wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the individual layoff which is the issue for the people. It is the general feeling that the little man get squeezed under the argument of cost savings and the rich man takes out even more than the year before, independent of the market and company performance. In the past the entrepreneur took the yearly risks and was rewarded or not for it. The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on…

It’s one metric: revenue per employee. In a more capital expensive market, such as our current one, this metric is the one corporate managers are focusing on. For example, Google: https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-per-employee/ Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have…

[deleted]

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#627

Post by jack_riminton »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #480
jack_riminton wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a lot have sailed by doing very little work compared to other jobs

I have never personally met a "rest and vest" person in bigtech. Is this opinion based on anything?

I have.

Plenty of people here have too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#628

Post by thexumaker »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #230
nly wrote: post #35

My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %) Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense. After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers) You can't trust anything anyone above you in the…

Ossified tech companies who fire their talent are quite literally sewing the seeds of their own destruction. I expect in the next 2-5 years to see a dynamic flourising of innovative companies started by these unshackled workers.

Let’s be real the majority of these people getting laid off aren’t gonna grind for 2-3 years with low odds of succeeding. Same thing that happened with Twitter layoffs and any covid layoffs.

People wanting to build stuff to their hearts desire long left or didn’t start at google in the first place

Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

#630

Post by [deleted] »

nly wrote: post #35

My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %) Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense. After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers) You can't trust anything anyone above you in the…

[deleted]
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