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.
I wonder if so many layoffs, freezes etc. happening at the moment are directly due to the crisis or something that was long overdue and can now be done without much negative PR.
I’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
It's briefly mentioned in the article, but Google actually shed jobs during the financial crisis. Facebook is the company that ramped up hiring newly available talent.
Makes sense if they can't onboard the talent, and can't manage a 100% distributed workforce.
Nevertheless, seems like a great time to acquire talent on the cheap, so long as you can effectively use it.
I recently posted a Ask HN asking about the effect of how drop in ads money would affect Google/FB and someone did a quick and dirty analysis for their runway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042
A lot of companies are cutting back big time on advertising spend and that’s Google’s sacred cow of revenue so this isn’t a surprise.
Maybe the travel, restaurant etc industries have stopped paying for clicks so Google gets less cash? My work cut down on PPC by a lot and we spent a lot of money on it.
One thing is that people just aren't leaving their jobs in general. Most hiring rates take into account natural attrition, but if your attrition is close to zero, then you just have to scale back your hiring to even hit the rates had planned before the crises.
I guess I'm lucky I got my approval just today. My recruiter did mention things are slowing down drastically.
It will be interesting to track the frequency of Google walkouts while the economy has tanked, hiring has slowed to a crawl, and layoffs could be in the future.
I think... there will still be work. I think it means they will be going heavier on contractors, so they have more 'cushion' to preserve FTE when things unexpectedly go south. At this point, companies simply don't know how the rest of the year will pan out.
Seems like some layoffs too, https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168...
Ooof. I've been studying for months for my upcoming virtual onsite interview at Google. I wonder what this means for my interview. I was also recently laid off.
I've also seen slow hiring and hiring freezes used by orgs to reduce head count by letting natural attrition take over. IMHO it is better than layoffs.
Damn, will be interning this summer. I guess conversion to FT will be even more unlikely now
As a counter point there was an article the Wall Street Journal two days ago that large tech companies(Apple, FB and Amazon) are all looking to hire:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-s...
Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.
I just chickened out of Google interview last month. I dont know how I feel now.
People on Blind are posting that it's more than just slowing.
Fingers crossed for the end of surveillance capitalism.
This is just getting started. Everything is so interconnected. Each chunk of the economy that falls away will have a cascade effect that takes weeks or months to knock the next piece out. Once everyone finally heads back to work it will take years to regrow everything to the point it was.
The whole world is suffering. Why did you expect to be immune just because you're a...checks notes...codemonkey?
Good. Shut down the bootcamps. Stop telling people to learn to code. Lower the salaries. Move companies out of SV and spread across the country. We are long overdue for a bloodbath like 1999. It's not over until Level 10s are laid off and the computer science departments are empty.
Google is a one trick pony that just took a baseball bat to the knee. I hope covid knocks them from their heights and forces them to create better products. Years of easy advertising money from their search monopoly has led to internal rot and fat, a thinning of the heard could force them to use their employees productively. Or alternatively, nothing will change, they will experience no pain, and the world will go on in six months.
How many jobs will go to India?
If even Google, which is pretty much the pinnacle of Silicon Valley tech, is slowing down, imagine what the Chinese tech scene must be like.
Open source foundations will go to bankruptcy without subsidies from Google and others.
Are you ready for the dot com bubble 2.0? :-D
This is the outcome of crazy hiring, more than you can actually make use of in the past few years.
With the number of people who go through Google's interview process, this might actually change the industry to think more carefully about the interview process. If Google isn't making whiteboard interviews the norm, who will keep it going?
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 significant growing pains later.
Is the situation the same now? I'm not so sure. I think this economic shock is potentially far more serious and could last much longer. But also, I don't think Google really knows what Google is anymore. We're long passed the mission statement of making the world's information accessible and useful. And certainly my impression from working there (now >3 years ago) was that even then there were a ton of teams and orgs that didn't really have a reason to exist.
Have people sitting around and they will find things that "need" doing. I saw many a project that was simply rewriting something where I at least had questions as to the real need for that. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy as they say.
And there was (and I imagine still is) too many layers of middle management. The ideal is (IMHO) CEO -> SVP (PA level) -> VP -> Eng Director -> Manager (of managers) -> Manager (of ICs) -> IC. That's 7 levels. I don't know what Google's mean org depth is in engineering but my guess is it's closer to 11, maybe even 12.
In fact this would be a good metric:
Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees)
where
Mean org depth = Mean of how many layers each IC has above them