721–730 of 1001 posts
Seriously, why people in tech are opposed to unions? In Europe, unions and Betriebsrat (works committee) are the norm. Why not in the US?
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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.
Then I'm super unlucky because my last phone interview there 3 weeks ago was definitely Leetcode.
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How does it make sense for Google to keep laying off people (many of them skilled overperformers) while continuing to hire? It seems they have alienated a large part of their workforce with these decisions. Plus they are running into legal fights in Europe where it's not so easy to randomly fire employees. I would truly like to understand this, but I haven't heard an explanation of why the actions make sense for the…
people are constantly job hopping, Google has to always be hiring just to negate attrition. Second, there isnt a single budget for hiring that interviews everyone and ships them out everywhere. certain groups/products can be growing within google while others are shrinking. should the chrome team not be allowed to grow because google+ was in the trash can? third, not every employee is exchangeable, you cant just shuf…
True, but even so, you can train the employee for the new role. You need to do the same anyway for a new, external candidate (and it's even worse because they will need to familiarise themselves with internal tools and processes that the Maps employee would already be familiar with).
I work in Core Eng at google. Woke up this morning and saw my director - who we all loved and had been at Google for 20 years - is gone. One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, all the way up. And they've announced that they are starting to offshore entire core products to India, primarily in bangalore IIUC.
Yup, that's a very visible pattern at this point.
The other one is when entire reporting chains are mainland Chinese (or in the process of being converted to via "reorgs" such as this one).
And before anyone calls racism into the discussion, it's fairly easy to objectively check that it is the case in the internal eng. org chart if you work there.
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I don't see this comment going down well here regardless of how much truth there may be to it.
jeez, i didn't know humor is not welcome here.
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Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe. The "best engineers" you're talking about were the best by which metrics, and why were these metrics so different from those that execs used to determine who to lay off? If they are indeed superior engineers, and your company is simply bad at evaluating talent, then they did a huge favor to these engineers by laying them off. Trust me.
> Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe. No, because when large corps want to reduce head count/payroll, it often comes as a top down directive for every group to trim by X%... In this type of environment being good at your job doesn't help - after a few cycles of these types of layoff all that are left are the better people, and the next X% layoff will be them.
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> 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…
In Denmark we rarely perform tech interviews the way you Americans do. Part of this is because of how available education is, so virtually everyone who’s applying for a tech job comes with some sort of academic education, meaning that they’ve proven their worth to get it. I’ve worked a side gig as an external examiner for a decade now, I’ve got good confidence in anyone I haven’t failed. Another part is that tech int…
I interviewed hundreds of people in my career, 95%+ had university degrees, and in my experience, this is a much weaker signal than you make it. Only consistent takeaway I have is people with CS degrees from elite schools are unlikely to be completely terrible, but not much beyond that: the people with these elite degrees didn’t even necessarily pass coding/algorithm interviews, and people with less elite degrees would pass or fail with no additional signal from the degree. I’ve seen many, many people with CS degrees fail at things that I wouldn’t expect someone who passed an intro programming class to fail, things like keeping track of running maximum and an index of element at which the maximum occurs.
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You do make some very good points, but I disagree on one. >Now look at how few companies in the EU become worth 1B compared to the US. That low ratio also applies to smaller (and larger) companies. Money is power/control, and not having a concentration of wealth is a good thing for society. Granted many of the ultra wealthy also support giving away their wealth - but (IMHO) the Benevolent dictator model for social ch…
> not having a concentration of wealth is a good thing for society The US has higher income for median, for the poor. for those in poverty, for every decile, by a decent margin. For example, US median income is around 46k. Germany is a reasonable first world country, yet median income is 33k (all in PPP dollars). This is huge. Most of the first world has similarly low income, at every level. If your argument against…
How did what I say in any way relate with making everyone poorer? You're just assuming what my position is, and also assuming the outcome based on what happened in other random countries, in a completely different setting.
I'm against concentrations of power because the government should not have a competitor when it comes to power. We elect the government, and in a functioning democracy the government's policies are decided on by voters. This in effect ensures only the people get to decide who govern them. There should never be another entity which can out compete a government when it comes to power and influence.
>I'd rather policymakers learn econ and history and learn that things like rent control, or various forms of taxes, have consequences that often hurt those they claim to want to help.
Its a common talking point, but in reality that is just an opinion masquerading as fact. It presumes everything in economics is an inarguable fact. It is not. Humans have been successfully governing themselves under various systems of governance. Anyway, that itself is a 4 hour debate, so I'll just leave it at that. If you want the final word you have it, I won't argue with it ;)
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…
> 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…
Architecture suggestions for a relatively simple problem, discuss the suggestions.
What is interesting is that now with all the layoffs we also have more CS graduates than ever [0] who were told that tech companies are struggling to find candidates to fill their vacancies. We are reaching a point, if not already at the point where we will have bunch of unemployed CS grads who will have to make a pivot into something entirely different. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.…
I had a theory that FAANG (et al.) are implicitly trying to solve the problem of developer salaries. If we take things back to basics: supply and demand. If your biggest cost is developer salaries, then making a huge supply of developers is the best way to suppress those wages. I have long felt that the push to get women and minorities into coding was driven by this: to get as many people coding as possible so that s…
They are literally the cause why fresh CS grad with 1 year of experience says no to a 140k salary in NYC/Boston. (at least before the first wave of layoffs)