The people I know who are still inside (Google) seem optimistic that maybe the company is taking a pause to deal with some of its bureaucracy and internal politics issues and with people's complaints about perf. I suppose that's good.
From my perspective: They've got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.
> And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.
My understanding was that asphyxiating the industry was always the plan.
For those who worked in industry pre-2008, one of the major drivers that allowed new startups to be so disruptive was that startups could very often compete with the then major tech companies on compensation. If there was a difference in pay, it was usually minor and could easily be made up for by better quality of life and a nice promotion in title.
Once Google and Facebook started growing it's clear they realized that every talented engineer on the market is a potential threat. As time has moved on the gap in pay between startup and FAANG and now startup and any company offering RSUs is just too large for startups to compete for talent.
I generally prefer startups to large companies, but can't find a single startup offering comp even remotely close to what I have in my current role. Unless I started to absolutely hate my current position, and found a startup that had essentially my dream role, there's no way I would seriously consider a switch.
My suspicion is that as funding for startups starts to dry up as money becomes more expensive, we'll see large, high paying tech companies start to let go of more staff and start driving comp down. When the market cools Google and similar companies asphyxiation strategy will have been completed. Startups starved of talent and finally starved of dollars will be no threat, that means they can safely reduce labor costs while maintaining market dominance.
Yes, I mean, I came to Google through an acquisition (of an adtech company) and it was pretty clear to me that the goal of the whole process was a) make your company go away and stop your customers from using you instead of us and b) get as much of your talent out of the job market as possible.
They totally didn't care about our product or the productivity of the employees they brought in. They let us sit and twiddle our thumbs and "rest and vest" for at least a year, after making a big show for the DOJ about how this aquisition wasn't an anti-competitive move ([1])
And I hung around there moving protobufs around and fixing the odd bug for 10 years but getting paid stupid money to not go and do anything for anybody else or keep on top of industry trends etc. (Not claiming I'm some shit hot engineer, just speaking for my personal situation)
I don't think most people who are 'organically' hired into Google see it this way because for them it's a thing they seek out, a life goal they pursued. For me it was always in the back of my mind.
Which is one of the reasons I eventually had to leave despite it putting my family in a more precarious financial situation. It wasn't a place I was ever going to find meaning in my work or feel like I fit in.
Re: startups and compensation one major thing that has changed since 20 years ago is that it is simply not possible to become wealthy (like "I can afford going to retire wealthy" or "I can now afford to seed my own startup wealthy") out of the equity package that a startup will offer unless you're the cofounders or a founding employee. The packages they'll offer will be a fraction of a % of equity, which if you're really really lucky will turn into a few hundred thousand in an exit after busting your ass for a few years. From a strictly financial POV there's no reason to choose working at a startup over a FAANG. Most will simply not offer anything to make it worth the risk. You should only choose to do it for lifestyle or enjoyment reasons, really. (That said, I'm working for a startup again right now.)
It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.
Hire Canadians. Currency conversion advantage. Same time zones. Same language. Mostly same culture. Very well educated. Cheaper health care benefits. And $150k USD is a generous compensation level, and $250USD is about what a Canadian Googler @ L4 gets paid. $100-$125k USD gets you reasonable non-senior talent.
I think the reason this isn't more popular is that our talent pool is small enough that unless you already have a Canadian presence it's not really worth opening up a business unit/office/whatever here. Obviously some big players have done it (MS, Amazon, EA) but if you're a medium sized company it may not be worth it.
I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
> I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
It's extremely easy to be self employed in Canada with a foreign corporation. You just start getting your money wired through Wise or whatever service and declare it on your income taxes. As you work for a foreign corporation, no need to charge sales tax. That's it, no separate entity or incorporation needed. You can still expense your tools expenses, part of your housing, etc.
Sure if you want to incorporate, it becomes more complicated. But you wouldn't be incorporated either if you had a salaried job for a tech company locally.
But "extremely easy" is relative. It's still more hassle than being a salaried employee. If you make a non-trivial amount of money you'll need to pay your income taxes in installments and set it aside yourself (no deductions after all). You need to pay 100% of your CPP contributions. You're likely getting paid in non Canadian currency so need to get set up with a good forex provider or get ripped off by your bank (I use xe, but there's a few out there).
Also your point about not needing to charge sales tax depends on what country your employer is in. In my case it's true I don't need to charge because we have a tax treaty with the USA; for other nations this may not be the case. If no tax treaty is present, you need a GST registration #, charge your employer said GST, hold it yourself and then pay it out just like your income tax.
Also the extended health can't be overstated. If you have dental issues, bad eyesight, are on prescription drugs etc. it can make a real difference.
Generally I'd recommend contracting to people but I just want to be realistic.. it has it's downsides.
Yep I had a job offer fall through after several months of verbal offering & negotiation because the company was acquired and the new parent company had logistical problems hiring Canadians. Though mostly due to their own incompetence, it sounds like (their employer of record situation was charging insane overhead for Canadians).
So I'm also working as a contractor for a US (well, international remote but US incorporation I guess) company right now. And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself.
Also a bit of a bummer that CRA has tightened up incorporation stuff a bit since the last time I did this. Given I have a single client only right now, I'll just be doing sole proprietorship.
> And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself.
The idea is you scale your rate to include enough for a benefits package.
Or they use a POE/EOR service, that's possible in Canada I think.
Either way, incorporation still has some advantages, one being that you time shift your pay as needed. It can make it easier to subcontract people too. And it's easy, and only costs a few hundred dollars.
CRA will screw you if you incorporate and only have one client.
My employer is using Deel, paying me as sole proprietor, and that's fine. Deel can also act as an EOR and I could be "full time", and that could offer benefits. But it feels like a bit of a veneer overtop over what feels like contracting anyways, and it would mean less $$ in my pocket. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Especially now that pharmaceuticals in Ontario are free for kids whose parents don't have a plan.
Also, it seems that telling my dentist and physiotherapist that I don't have a plan seems to make them behave more responsibly, on the whole.
If I end up at some point landing more clients and I end up being more consultant than single-client contractor, then I will incorporate.
As I understand it, it's not really about the 1 client, so much as about demonstrating you aren't really an employee-employer relationship masquerading as something else. It sounds like that's what you actually are, so in that case you shouldn't be incorporating. If you change contracts often enough it might make more sense.
FWIW an EOR/POE is more about the convenience for the employer, not you - they don't have to establish a local business presence, register a bunch of tax accounts, etc. You can end up technically employed by the EOR with access to a decent benefits plan etc., and paid directly by payroll. At least that's how it works in some jurisdictions, as you note. It's different all over, but can make a huge difference in somewhere with crappy medical coverage, or other benefits you want to keep consistent.
As a Canadian PR I've always thought this would be a good option except that the Canadian government seems determined to make it difficult.
When the most practical option is to form a corporate entity with a single employee, and BTW you may have to pay GST + PST on labor depending on if other Canadians use the service, it begins to look really unappetizing.
I get that employees as contractor relationships are rife for abuse, but, like so is exempting tech employees from overtime protection (BC and Ontario).
It really just shouldn't be this hard to do work for a company that isn't in Canada.
CRA now frowns heavily on "personal service corporations." There is no tax advantage (in fact there's disadvantages) to incorporating unless you have more than one client.
So it ends up being sole proprietorship only, which has far less tax advantages.
I mean, as a tax payer and citizen who paid exorbitant personal income taxes for years as an employee of a FAANG, I think this is probably equitable. But as a contractor, now... damn I'd like to be able to take advantage of corporate tax rates like I could 13 years ago when I did this last.
It's what we ended up doing (indirectly through an acquisition). But it didn't end-up costing less in the long run. I'd say about a third of employees ended up coming to the Bay anyways during the first year.
Something you have to keep in mind is that there are two parallel markets over there: SV caliber developers and the rest. The former won't have any issue getting a job in the US (takes maybe a week for a talented engineer to get one). Therefore, comp has to be priced appropriately. The later can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier and the quotas are close to 10x per capita compared to the US). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary.
The "SV caliber" developers you identify [honestly, that's kind of offensive, but whatever] who can and do actively consider relocation to the US.
The same caliber of developers, but have no interest in ever living in the US, for personal or obligation reasons.
The permanent resident non-Canadian citizen category you allude to.
Google Waterloo for example is mostly full of the second category. Plenty of high caliber talent who are there and not in Mountain View because that's where they chose to be. Because any of them could relocate / transfer to MTV any time they liked, but prefer not to. In my last few years there, there were dozens of people who I met who had transferred (back) into Canada from SV/Bay Area because they simply couldn't stand living there anymore because of cost of living, politics, family, home sickness, etc.
There are other companies that set up shop in Canada merely to siphon the first. They offer an "ok" experience for people who choose to stay, but push hard to get talent to relocate. I get the impression there's lots of this happening in Vancouver in particular.
The prominence of the last (recent immigrant / PR) category is really something that has held back the Canadian tech scene in general TBH. It's a product of international recruitment by the Canadian immigration system. There are shops full of people essentially fresh off the boat from the PRC or Eastern Europe. Many of these are highly qualified -- but in the context of our industry as a whole -- underpaid/mistreated. Others are not as competent. And it's all mixed up, and it has messed up the local tech market, compensation ranges, and quality of work produced.
Of course all of this is in flux and changing because of the rise of remote work.
Implicit in your argument is that people would always value SV > the rest of the US > Canada > Poor countries.
There are a lot of very talented people that have values that don't align that way for a variety of extremely valid reasons.
As someone who has the right to work in both Canada and the US, and who has been attempted to recruit by SV companies, I prefer the benefits of living where I do in Canada over the lifestyle costs of living in SV with 3x the money.
Not that simple for startups/small businesses. Dealing with labor law is no joke. I've been unable to hire FTE Canadians due to the legal burden that was going to come with setting up those operations. Larger corps can take advantage while small businesses sometimes can't deal with the paperwork overhead.
Anyone whose good in Canada is already in the US or they don't care about compensation to begin with. Either way you're not getting a top engineer working on your ad-tech business for a third the cost. But if you're building a startup that uses ML to look for 3d printable compliant mechanism you'll be drowning in applications and starved for cash.
As a Canadian that's not really how I see it. I worked for a bit in California and while I was earning more than I do now, the cost of living was probably double what I have right now so the math really wasn't as simple as "move to the US to make more money".
Having a team completely unavailable during the USA working day is a real pain for collaboration and it's hard to sue people in other countries that "borrow" your source code to make their own version. Also, knowing exactly how to pay (say) a German developer and how taxes work and what the labor laws are is always an issue.
Aside:
The very best contractors I ever hired were Ukranian. So many absolutely fantastic talents at around $30 an hour. Then Russia invaded (the first time) and annexed Sevastopol and the USA made it illegal to pay them any more.
I'm in Uruguay, South America, and we're on the East Coast timezone and IP laws are friendly, and if you hire as a contractor, there's no labor law issues.
Of course, people realized that and there's 0 unemployment in IT, however, there's still a long way to go before we get to the Bay Area salaries - 6 figure salaries are only for the top 1% devs and only working for the USA and usually short term contracts, but a decent developer makes north of 50.000 dollars a year which is a pretty good salary here.
+1 I've only had incredible experiences with Ukrainian devs and designers- I hesitate to say best because I've worked with amazing people all over (I was at two gig economy companies that did custom software dev with freelancers) but Ukraine as a destination often stood out for high quality, low prices, and not needing a ton of supervision/detailed instruction.
Shameless plug- a buddy runs a dev shop out there, they have great devs and exceptional designers (and also are doing a fund for Ukrainians impacted by the war). If you're looking for help in that region, they're great people to chat with: https://beetroot.co/
Ukrainians were given full employment rights in Poland after the Russian invasion, so they can just move to Poland (at least the female ones, as males aren’t allowed to leave Ukraine for now).
1. timezones are a PITA. Collabroation with Europe/East-Asia is barely manageable from the West Coast. India is the most painful.
2. english language barriers - half the people I have worked with in South America (Colombia, Brazil) and China were so bad with English that it seriously affected the team's productivity.
Canadians fit the bill on both counts - same timezones and language.
Canadian here. Canadians are clearly the best developers out there and yes, unfortunately, you can slide quite a bit down the payscale to afford us.
I'm surprised cross boarder hiring hasn't become even more popular with the pandemic and forced work-from-homeness. Canadians mostly speak English (even most Quebecois do!) and are in a compatible timezone with the majority of the developers either in St. Lawrence valley or Vancouver and thus being either EST or PST.
Also, while the holidays differ I think the total number of stats is pretty close to the same.
I am quite uncertain about the cheaper portion - but the timezones hurt quite a bit and the costs for in-person visits are extremely high. Australia and New Zealand are awesome places (and I'm highly jealous of New Zealand in particular) but a 13+ hr flight to get to the west coast is extremely fatiguing so meetups are highly unlikely - compare that to flying someone down from YVR to SFO and it's a huge price and time difference and SEA and YVR are close enough that the train/bus is usually a very reasonable option.
But who doesn't love a trip out to Oz to 'meet the team'! Same thing with lots of US companies in Ireland (whilst mostly for tax reasons initially, Ireland now is stacked with talent) - trip to Ireland to 'meet the team', pre-covid ain't no one going to say no to those off-sites.
It is going to be an interesting decade, the rise of working from home and ai creeping into every profession will make for some radical changes. Engineering managers can only hold their accountants overlords back for so long. I do hope SFO stops being the centre of the tech world as it is very inefficient, but that's probably 30-40 years away at the earliest unless all out war is triggered.
You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.
Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick.
I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here.
I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.
I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
I don’t think it’s as much about the challenging technical problems as it is the ability to get shit done. Wherever I’ve worked, most developers are unable to own e2e work. At big tech, you are expected to be decent in a lot of related areas (communication, project planning, etc).
Software is a people problem and what big tech looks for is top notch technical skills and the mindset/ability to solve them in a chaotic environment.
Doesn't jive with me. Many companies paying at best domestic market rate are asking for top notch communication skills and people persons over tech skills. Meanwhile, most FAANG have far higher tech requirements, but would hire individuals who can barely speak proper English and even put them in the spot of hiring managers. If you value communication, you need a really good argument to look past hiring practices preferring to hire someone who'd be hard for strangers to understand in a presentation setting.
I'm fairly certain you're confusing anecdotes and culture with "big tech vs. your local shop". Software being a people problem meaning big tech is more people focused is a false dichotomy.
I think my post sounded more indexed on communication than the "get shit done" part of things. What do you think of the perspective if I changed the desired skill to "ownership" instead?
Most of the big tech companies' engineers are doing the same type of work as outside big tech. However, their internal practices are scattered and faster than outside (IME), which means you have to be able to keep your head above water, drive your own career, and deliver impact. You need to understand the product space quite well, as you are expected to be a partner. Rather than delivering code, you are delivering value.
Maybe 1 in 20 engineers that I've worked with outside big tech had this trait. I think they set the tech bar high, but the real skill differentiation I have seen is ownership.
You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them.
But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good people from outside the US who don't make 250k+ total comp in basically any benchmark.
Most SV employees never have to solve these problems.
I picked frontend intentionally because it's probably the area that's the furthest away from these problems, but still compensated at 250k+ levels, if you work in SV for the right employers.
But even among backend engineers, most have never touched hard to parallelize problems. I'd argue that most (definitely not all) FAANG backend tasks are easily scalable. Implementing them still takes work, whch is done by most FAANG engineers. FAANG level tooling definitely helps, and while developing that tooling is hard, the people who have built such tooling are only a tiny subset of FAANG employees (regardless whether they are more skilled than the average FAANG employee or not).
This isn't quite right. I can see how you reached the conclusion you did, but you're missing a lot of context.
For one, developing frontends at the scale and complexity needed for quickly growing organizations is just as complex as backend scaling in a variety of ways.
If you're a frontend expert and can operate in the way needed to support a rapidly growing business/product - you can make just as much if not more than backend engineers (500k+ easily at senior levels). This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain. This is just simply experience not everyone has because it requires context.
Also programming ability alone is not the sole reason for the outsized comp packages. In my view, it is at most 1/3rd of the reason. There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.
> This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain.
What do you mean by large scale abstractions?
Generally, small frontends are different from large frontends. Already because you need to work on a team instead of being able to do it alone. But adding features is a quite orthogonal concern to scaling by the number of users I'd say. There can be extremely complex frontends that only have a dozen concurrent users (think some company internal admin console), and nothing prevents a small frontend from targetting billions. E.g. Google search used to have a quite simple frontend 17 years ago, and it still looks quite simple to the outside, but the results side has obviously been heavily enriched since.
From the frontend point of view, it is just calling an API, and processing its results, while there is backend magic happening to make it scalable. I'm disregarding SSR here for a moment. It shouldn't matter if the same frontend code is loaded by ten users or hundreds, or billions.
> There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.
Can you list some of those qualities? I'm curious.
You run into all sorts of bugs you'd never even conceive of when things scale up, even basic frontend code
Some problem that would hit one customer every few years and go away on refresh for a local mom & pop website will irritate thousands of people a day on Google.com, and those people will band together on Facebook into a support group, and that support group will get media coverage
You try to look into the issue and you can't reproduce it at all, you just have to figure it out from tiny wisps of clues
The average SV developer knows nothing about building Facebook.com to scale.
More precisely, the number of people who were there when "scaling products that big and that fast" applied to Facebook (or other comparable companies) is a tiny fraction of all SV developers.
The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
And yet, I show up at a company as a consultant and in two weeks I singlehandedly take care of something ten people have been struggling with for a year
Has it occurred to you that hiring a consultant is, by definition, an unusual situation?
That, perhaps, you have never had to come in and save any team at my company, or thousands of other companies, because we are competent developers?
Being able to do the work of 10 people once, does not mean that you are able to take 10 people from any company outside of a specific geographic area and replace them with one of you.
Have you considered that a consultant hired to fix a specific problem, and salaried employees seeking to justify their existence, may have slightly misaligned incentives?
Small startups need to be poaching ‘Big Boys’ employees, not the other way round. I see many boutique shops offering (nearly) the same pay, and poaching from FAANG+M (The M is Micro$oft)
They have to because that's the status quo now. Go back a few decades and ask yourself who started this trend.
If paying 250k+ for a developer is insane, then so is a company able to pay 250k+ without running huge losses. Those developers still make peanuts compared to what the stakeholders and executives do, despite these salaries. It's ignoring the elephant in the room which is fat profits being with a few companies, subsequently making it tougher to compete for anyone not born in wealth or able to get VC money to play with.
SV could both bankrupt dozens of companies outside SV, slash that 250k locally and up to ante globally if it had a mentality shift, in less than a few years. That's how insane the profits are.
Who will then fuck up the interview process and then return to complaining that there are no decent developers. There isn't a lack of them, there's a lack of being able to identify them.
Thanks for this. It's not just the interview process either, it's the entire industry which works against utilizing decent developers. If we really needed more decent developers, we've got thousands of companies pushing them into management, obtuse hiring practices and wades of middlemen to account for.
I think software engineering is actually quite difficult. If it feels easy it’s probably because you’ve been at it for a while. This severely constrains supply but demand is huge because even at high cost, software automation can deliver big returns for a company.
Learning programming is throwing yourself at a wall until you figure it out, a natural gatekeeping force that is exacerbated by the unfriendliness and complexity of development environments. An intentionally designed tool and system could enable far more developers at reasonable yet respectable salaries.
> It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.
While I think the premise is wrong - not anyone can learn to code - there are also levels of "learn to code" so it's simpler to spin up a create-react-app and modify it a bit for a code school credit compared to advanced Scala - it's also true that learning to code is nowhere near the hardest part of software engineering productivity.
It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.
Well then we should just keep moving Eastwards from California until we find the cheapest teams we can and outsource to those, right? Let me know how that works out.
Plus if you are US based communicating in real time with Europe is a pain. And many EU countries have strict labor laws that limit working hours. Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports.
I hear you, I think software is different because it has very few physical constraints.
My appetite for food is not infinite, I can only eat so much. Same, but less so, for cars, clothes, etc. in some abstract sense, maybe, there are people that want 100 cars, but not really.
Even with housing, demand is not really infinite. I don’t want to redo my kitchen every year.
But software, every company has a backlog far longer than they will ever be able to do, and the ROI is there for the most part.
This most certainly is not true. There are plenty of free things that don’t result in 100% consumption. Demand is based on peoples needs and preferences, not on how much is out there already. Think about libraries as an example.
Oxygen is definitely still monetized. Think about the canisters or the tanks that people use to go into high altitude environments. Hell, even in Denver or Aspen or Telluride you can go to an 'oxygen bar' for absurd prices. Hospitals will put you on oxygen and then bill you thousands for the service.
Beyond that, I have no doubt that there are some people who would willingly charge everyone for oxygen, if there was only a way. This would be driven by the idea that even though there is plenty in the atmosphere, a person only needs to be deprived of it for a little while before the situation becomes dire.
I do believe that everyone should learn to code, but not be a professional software dev. They are vastly different things. Coding can be just automating a task to reduce the human factor or making it more frictionless, with throwaway code of 100 lines.
You literally can go on indeed.com and check for "$250-500K/yr for a single developer". It. Does. Not. Exist. Yes there are a few at FAANG that do make this, but this isn't the current market.
Yeah, not really - L3 and L4 are entry level roles, for folks just out of college. No FAANG is paying a newb college grad $400k/yr. Either your friends didn’t understand the comp plan and how equity is paid out, or they were BSing you.
e.g. Amazon was giving out SDE II (google L4 equivlant) @ 400k (first year no RSU but cash bonus paid out monthly) about 2 months ago.
re L3 level, if you have a master's or 1+ yr exp, while you're still at the entry level, you are considered "industrial hire" and 300 is very attainable
in my current company for new hires (again justed to google's leveling) we have L5 550+ and L6 650+ (200~300 cash + RSU , not pre-IPO bs)
In my earlier years I used to doubt those "ridiculous" numbers until I simply asked for more. There are plenty of companies out there, many medium-big sized non-FAANG companies pay just as well.
It's not "easy" to achieve this, but it might be possible. One doesn't just wake up and decide to go work at a FAANG and get a >90% percentile salary from them for the level.
Go on angel.co and filter for jobs in the Bay Area and you'll find roles around 250k base salary. 250k including bonuses and stock is far more common. This isn't just Bay Area btw, take a look at the contract market in London and there are multiple > 200k GBP roles (roughly 250k USD).
There are well over 100k US-based software engineers at the five FAANG companies alone, plus a long tail of other companies that compete with them for talent and offer similar (and in some cases higher) compensation. All of those companies can go over $250k in total comp for the equivalent of Google L4, i.e., one promotion above entry-level.
Non-FAANG, not even a company you've probably heard of, and all of my coworkers and I have TC is in that range.
I started my career in small companies and startups and it took me a long time to understand how TC works. Both in tech and finance base salaries are typically around 200 or less, but total compensations factoring in both bonuses and RSUs brings the amount of money you bring in each year much higher.
It's gotten much better in recent years with levels.fyi and the like helping more people to see this, but I found that a few years back if you didn't go to an elite school you likely didn't have someone explain to you how comp works.
If you want to make > 250k you absolutely can, and it doesn't mean selling your soul. Don't convince yourself that these TC levels are myths.
Though I do suspect we'll see dotcom level changes in comp soon.
I think the original post that gave that range was thinking of salary and not TC. Obviously, only a few companies can afford to give away crazy valuable equity.
are these all onsite FAANG? Know of any good companies hiring remote (US) in that range? Here in LA we have most of the FAANGs, but I'd rather not drive three hours a day.
> one major thing that has changed since 20 years ago is that it is simply not possible to become wealthy (like "I can afford going to retire wealthy" or "I can now afford to seed my own startup wealthy") out of the equity package that a startup will offer unless you're the cofounders or a founding employee
Statistically that's likely, but it's not always the case.
If you luck into one of the companies that IPOs and grows big (and doesn't need to be FB/GOOG-level big, just in the handful of billions in market cap), even the tiny sliver of options of a regular employee can become retirement-level money.
There are many public companies in SV that have market cap in the dozens of billions who made their regular employees who joined pre-IPO very rich even though the companies aren't FAANG and don't have such brand recognition.
Toss in dilution, liquidation preferences and other financial engineering put by the people who actually know the rules of the game, and your "tiny sliver of options" will still be worth less than 5 years of FAANG salary.
No, not always. Having been in SV over 20 years, I know plenty of people who've scored very comfortable retirement money out of IPOs despite having joined late as regular ICs. And a handful who became insanely rich even though none were founders or single-digit early employees.
>Re: startups and compensation one major thing that has changed since 20 years ago is that it is simply not possible to become wealthy (like "I can afford going to retire wealthy" or "I can now afford to seed my own startup wealthy") out of the equity package that a startup will offer unless you're the cofounders or a founding employee.
I guess it depends how you define a "founding employee". I know several engineers who made enough to retire who joined unicorns around the pre-series A time or at the time of the raise itself but were not founding engineers.
'Back in the day' the graffiti artist who painted the first Facebook office got shares that ended up worth $200 million [1] because in those days, investors hadn't figured out they could get away with offering a lot less.
More recently, last time I was on the job market and interviewed with startups, their offers were more along the lines of "If the company value rises to $1 billion, your stock options will be worth enough to buy a 3 bedroom family home within 30 minutes of the office" - a decent chunk of change, no doubt, but not enough to retire on, and far from guaranteed.
The average price of a decent 3 bedroom home within 30 minutes of Palo Alto probably IS enough to retire on (modestly) as an individual if you move to a cheaper state. Few Americans have several million dollars in retirement savings.
Even for most engineers, somewhere between five and ten million is enough to retire on (3.5% safe withdrawal rate) at a nice standard of living, again assuming you don't want to live in the bay area, NYC, Seattle or LA.
Join an early stage startup as a senior engineer and you'll probably be getting less than half or a third of a % of equity. If they even deign to tell you how many outstanding shares there are. Say that company gets super lucky and sells for a $1B? You might be lucky get $1M out of it. Assuming they didn't play funny business with the paperwork during acquisition, or dilute your shares a whole bunch.
$1M is a lot of money, but it's not "goodbye workforce" or "I'm off to invest in seeding my own startup" money, not when you have a family, home, and are still youngish.
Meanwhile the founders and other major stock owners will be doing quite well for themselves.
It's not unjust necessarily. But it definitely should inform just how much passion people put into the startups that hire them. Don't be fooled. Treat it like a job.
>Even for most engineers, somewhere between five and ten million is enough to retire on (3.5% safe withdrawal rate) at a nice standard of living, again assuming you don't want to live in the bay area, NYC, Seattle or LA.
Especially if you already own a place you're happy to live in long term, money in that range is enough to live very comfortably anywhere in the US. No, you're not flying private jets and maybe not employing multiple full-time domestic staff, but $200K-400K per year without even touching principal is absolutely enough to have a nice standard of living even in Manhattan.
I work at Google so my perspective is to be biased, but that's not what I see.
I work on infrastructure, and so a few years back, when I proposed a major project, I had to demonstrate how it would save *many* times the fully loaded cost of the engineers on the team, by reducing the Storage TCO for all of Google (for example). It was not enough for the project to "break even" --- the benefits had to do more than just exceed the "nominal" SWE cost. It had to be multiple times the cost of the SWE's, to account for the opportunity cost of those SWE's --- SWE's are a constrained resource, which is why a project needs to save $$$ (or increase profits) by many multiples the fully loaded SWE cost. (That project has since been completed, successfully, and I got a promotion to Sr Staff Engineer out of it.)
The reason why SWE's are a constrained resource is becaused finding good SWE's is non-trivial. As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day. I'm trying to find highly motivated, smart, and talented SWE's who can also be team players. And if they need to have domain expertise (say, be proficient kernel engineers), it's super-duper difficult.
So I don't see any indication of people getting hired just to starve statups of talented engineers. We need every single talented engineer we can get for the projects that we want to accomplish. And in the time when we may need to slow down our growth, it may mean that we will need to slow, or shut down some projects. That may suck, especially if it's a project that we had invested a lot of passion into. But it's certainly no reason to panic. Slowing down growth is not the same as layoffs, and there is no shortage of work for us to do.
You also wrote major parts of Linux, so it's possible your contact with Googlers might be biased towards the more functional parts of the organization. Your bar for "talented engineer" may be higher than average parts of Google.
> As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day.
And yet these people exist and get hired, even at Google. Perhaps not on your team, but they’re definitely there.
SV talks the big talk about hiring the best of the best of the best, then hires 30 thousand people in three months. There probably aren't that many 10x programmers in the world.
Interview process gatekeeping notwithstanding, the idea that you can hire 30,000 people (admittedly a decent proportion is probably backfilling/growing administrative, etc. positions) who are all "the best and the brightest" doesn't pass the sniff test.
As so many people learned over the years in storage org, essential modus operandi was “just do your current shit, this new shit you are proposing is too hard and we don’t want to do it”. I lost count of improvement proposals that ultimately were not getting supported (there was a funny one with (first) hosted NFS prototype, when they tried to turn it off, turned out there were pissed-off customers running business workloads already). Instead we tried to fit square pegs into the round holes “by using existing technology”.
Oh, you can certainly do big projects. My project[1] spanned 3 departments, and involved dozens of engineers, and required that we work with multiple hard drive vendors (our first two partners for Hybrid SMR were Seagate and WDC) on an entirely new type of HDD, as well as the T10/T13 standards committees so we could standardize the commands that we need to send to these HDD's. So this was all a huge amount of "new shit" that was not only new to Google, it was new to the HDD industry. You just have to have a really strong business case that shows how you can save Google a large amount of money.
On the production kernel team, colleagues of mine worked on some really cool and new shit: ghOSt, which delegates scheduling decisions to userspace in a highly efficient manner[3]. It was published in SOSP 2021/SIGOPS [4][5], so peer reviewers thought it was a pretty big deal. I wasn't involved in it, but I'm in awe this cool new work that my peers in the prodkernel team created, all of which was not only described in detail in peer-reviewed papers, but also published as Open Source.
I'm not saying storage didn't do big projects. I'm saying that over time it got calcified and instead of doing proper stack refactoring and delivering features beneficial for customers, it continued to sadly chug along team boundaries.
For example:
RePD is at just wrong level at all. It should have been at CFS/chunk level and thus benefit other teams as well.
BigStore stack is beyond bizarre. For years there were no object-level SLOs (not sure if there are now), which meant that sometimes your object disappeared and BigStore SREs were "la-la-la, we are fully within SLO for your project". Or you would delete something and your quota would not get back, and they would "or, Flume job got stuck in this cell, for a week...".
Not a single cloud (or internal, for that matter) customer asked for a "block device", they all want just to store files. Which means that cloud posix/nfs/smb should have been worked on from the day 1 (of cloud), we all know how it went.
No one asked for a "block device"? Um, that's table stakes because every single OS in the world needs to be able to boot their system, and that requires a block device. Every single cloud system provides a block device because if it wasn't there, customers wouldn't be able to use their VM, and you can sure they would be asking for it. Every single cloud system has also provided from day one something like AWS S3 or GCE's GCS so users can store files. So I'm pretty sure you don't know what you are talking about.
As far as "proper stack refactoring" is concerned, again, the key is to make a business case for why that work is necessary. Tech debt can be a good reason, but doing massive refactoring just because it _could_ help other teams requires much more justification than "it could be beneficial". Google has plenty of storage solutions which work across multiple datacenters / GCE zones, including Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable. These solutions or their equivalent were available and used internally by teams long befoe they were available as public offerings for Cloud customers. So "we could have done it a different way because it mgiht benefit other teams" is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. Speaking as someone who has worked in storage infrastructure for over a decade, I don't see the calcification you refer to, and there are good reasons why things are done the way that are which go far beyond the current org chart. There have been a huge amount of innovative work done in the storage infrastructure teams.
I will say that the posix/nfs/smb way of doing things is not necessarily the best way to provide lowest possible storage TCO. It may be the most convenient way if you need to lift and shift enterprise workloads into the cloud, sure. But if you are writing software from scratch, or if you are internal Google product team which is using internal storage solutions such as Colossus, BigTable, Spanner, etc., it is much cheaper, especially if you are writing software that must be highly scalable, to use these technologies as opposed to posix/nfs/smb. All cloud providers, Google Cloud included, will provide multiple storage solutions to meet the customer where they are at. But would I recommend that a greenfield application start by relying on NFS or SMB today? Hell, no! There are much better 21st century technologies that are available today. Why start a new project by tying yourself to such legacy systems with all of their attendant limitations and costs?
> So I'm pretty sure you don't know what you are talking about.
Trust me, I intimately know what I’m talking about.
Without personal jabs, let me explain in a bit more detail:
App in VM (kinda posix) -> ext4 (repackaging of data to fit into “blocks”) -> NVMe driver -> (Google’s virtualization/block device stack, aka Vanadium/PD) -> CFS. The moment data got into ext4, it goes through legacy stack that only exists because many years ago there were hardware devices that had 512 byte sectors (as illustration, upgrade to 4K took forever). All repackaging, IO scheduling to work with 4kb block abstraction is wasted performance and cycles.
From customer perspective, all they want is VM with scalable file system. With Kubernetes, etc. they don’t want to ever think about volume size, which is major hurdle to size correctly and provision. BTW, both small and large customers run into volume sizing issues all the time.
There are also internal customers that need posix-compliant storage “on borg” because they run oss lib/software.
Anyway, optimal stack in this case is to plug in into VM on a file system level. Now, is it hard problem to solve? Yes. Would it eliminate PD? No, still required for legacy cases. Would it be enormously beneficial for modern conteinerized cloud workloads? Absolutely.
As I said, there are apps that need a Posix interface although my contention is the vast majority of them are "lift and shift" from customer data centers into the cloud. Sure, they exist. But from a cost, efficiency, and easy of supporting cross-data center reliability and robustness, the Posix file system interface was designed in the 1970's, and it shows.
If you have an app which needs a NoSQL interface, then you can do much better by using a cloud-native NoSQL service, as opposed to using Cassandra on your VM and then hoping you can get cross-zone reliability by using something like a Regional Persistent Disk. And sure, you could use Cassandra on top of cifs/smbfs or nfs, but the results will be disappointing. These are 20th century tools, and it shows.
If customers want Posix because they don't want to update their application to use Spanner, or Big Table, or GCS, they certainly have every right to make that choice. But they will get worse price/performance/reliability as a result. You keep talking about ossification and people refusing to refactor the storage stack. Well, I'd like to submit to you that being wedded to a "posix file system" as the one true storage interface is another form of ossification. Storage stacks that feature NoSQL, relational database, and object storage WITHOUT an underlying Posix file systems might be a much more radical, and ultimately, the "proper stack refactoring". A "modern containerized cloud workload" is better off using Cloud Spanner, Cloud BigTable, or Cloud Storage, depending on the application and use case. Why stick with a 1970's posix file system with all of its limitations? (And I say this as an ext4 maintainer who knows about all of the warts and limitations of the Posix file interface.)
Of course, for customers who insist on a Posix file system, they can use GCE PD or Amazon EBS for local file systems, or they can use GCE Cloud Filestore or Amazon EFS if they want an NFS solution. But it will not be as cost effective, or performant as other cloud native alternatives.
Finally, just because you are using "oss lib/software" does not mean that you need "Posix-complaint storage". Especially inside Google, while those internal customers do exist, they are a super-tiny minority. Most internal teams use a much smarter approach, even if that means that an adaption layer is needed between some particular piece of OSS software and a more modern, scalable storage infrastructure. (And for many OSS libraries, they don't need a Posix-complaint interface at all!)
Posix-complaint means sticking with an interface invented 50 years ago, with technological assumptions which may not be true today. Sometimes you might need to fall back to Posix for legacy software --- but we're talking about "modern containerized cloud workloads", remember?
Don't get me started on how many times Google Cloud started and then killed cloud NFS (I see now they have an EFS-like product). Or how hard it was to buy a spindle.
Here are the latest development statistics from the just-released 5.19 kernel. (Please consider supporting Linux Weekly News by subscribing if you find content like this useful; one of the benefits is you can help share subscriber-only content to friends and colleagues via Subscriber Links):
If you scroll down to the Most active employers in 5.19 by commits you'll see:
1. Intel 10.9%
2. (Unknown) 7.5%
3. Linaro 5.7%
4. AMD 5.5%
5. Red Hat 5.2%
6. (None) 4.3%
7. Google 4.1%
8. Meta 3.5%
9. SUSE 3.1%
10. Huawei 2.9%
The statistics are slightly different if you count by lines of codes changed, but either way, it's not all FANNG companies, not by a long shot. There are plenty of people who get started coding via kernelnewbies.org and other resources.
If you're only talking about salaries, I feel like even pre-2008 most big software companies always paid better than startups. It was stuff like RSUs and cash bonuses; which came AFTER the IPOs, that REALLY tipped the scales and made it difficult for startups to compete. Startups themselves never responded with more generous stock options; in fact, compared to the 90s, some became stingier.
I think a lot of candidates (speaking for myself here) just don’t care too much to negotiate equity at privately held companies. Given the highly unlikely probability that a company I work for will have a successful exit at all, let alone while I am either employed or hold exercised stock options, it’s all Monopoly money to me. Benefits, salary, and bonuses is the only compensation I negotiate and judge a company on. All the other stuff is just lottery tickets.
Meaning, startup or no, I’m expecting to be paid what I ask. levels.fyi shows that my pay+bonus at my startup for my role matches FAANG compensation so I’m happy with it.
I have worked for places that offered equity a few times. It did turn into something once (Google bought my employer). But the actual equity conversion was minor in quantity compared to the rest of my Google TC.
There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company. I don't think this is healthy. The incentives are not there for engineers in startups to really put themselves out there.
You can just save your way out too. I started on the path to FIRE (check out /r/financialindependence on Reddit) about 10 years into my career, and it was a huge quality of life improver
Now I'm always sitting on an enormous pile of savings and I have short- and long-term plans to move my career and life forward. It spares me a lot of stress.
This is likely a more "reasonable" path unless you "go into business for yourself" as a plumber or a consultant, neither of which actually makes a salable business.
Especially since you only need to keep your expenses 10% lower (or so) than your after-tax income to hit a reasonable target.
Yeah, I looked into it on my own early in my career, and I thought "Damn, I'd have to save two million dollars to live in retirement off 50k a year for forty years"
Turns out the numbers are a lot more favorable, though. You can count on some level of compounding investment growth even after inflation, you can slash your living expenses after you retire, etc. Suddenly early retirement is a possibility even at a pretty modest income level, without compromising your quality of life too much in the mean time
Are you counting the equity at a large public company to be lottery tickets? Because it's absolutely not. Every quarter a bunch of real money appears in an account with my name on it, that's not a lottery ticket.
That's the plan for all industries and competition. It's a little weird to see it for employment pricing, but that makes sense too.
Years ago my town had a bunch of lumber yards where you can get market rate lumber. Home Depot moved in and provided way lower than market rate lumber until all of the independent lumber yards went out of business in the area.
Then they raised the price above market rate and that's that. Everyone hates them for that but we all shop there.
Absolutely. I've come to believe that this is the nature of money i.e. an abstraction for power.
Power is meaningless unless you're hurting somebody: otherwise, what even is the point? Money is abstracted power. For this reason, ANYWHERE you are seeing accumulations of vast amounts of money, somebody or something is being hurt.
In this case it appears to be that the whole 'make 500k as a dev' thing, which has always seemed weird to me, turns out to be 'FAANG is trying to control all access to devs worth having, after which they can starve the market and do whatever they want'. It comes down to power, always.
You'll note that the open source devs upon which their internet relies, upon which so much rests, are NOT making 500k as devs. If you're doing something worth doing and it's not harming but helping, you are not getting paid. If you're getting paid in a big way, you're doing something that enables harming somebody, whether it's people or a more abstracted thing like a market. The wealthy FAANG folks are part of a situation where an employment market is being harmed, and that's why the money is there for them.
I don't think it's that simple. Google needs devs, it's a competitive market. Controlling or limiting the dev supply is definitely a benefit for big tech, but it's a separate benefit. I think competitive pressure on salaries is the top forcing function.
Google & friends have a business where they can turn a $500k engineer into $2M+ in revenue
I think that's really the bottom line here. They aren't overpaying to starve out the industry, although I'm sure they're perfectly happy to benefit from that indirectly
Yeah, I find it really weird that people are seriously entertaining this conspiracy theory, when the more mundane explanation is that, on average, tech workers generate insane profit.
Start-ups don’t have to pay Google or FB size comp to attract people who like to work in start-ups but my feeling is that if they want to compete for the senior end of the talent pool they are going to have a hard time. Most start-ups are offering what I call below-mortgage compensation. Simply put to not be house poor your mortgage is supposed to be 30% of your pre-tax income. You can calculate what a typical mortgage on a property looks like and extrapolate the payment but $90,000 USD is pretty reasonable in the Bay Area. That takes $300,000 USD/year to not be house poor. As long as start-ups continue to treat unsellable equity as sellable RSUs and offer similar base to google they get almost no one who needs to pay a mortgage. And I’m willing to bet a fair number of start-ups have failed from being too junior in engineering.
I can't help but feel that this is by design by VCs. Rip through younger talent and see what shakes out. You can polish the turd later. You're not looking for beautiful gemstones in most startups. You're just mostly throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, and it's later generations of devs who come in and deal with the tech debt.
Jokes on them, though, my mortgage is almost paid off, so I can work for less than I was. I'm the old guy working with all the young people at the startup. I can almost feel their eyes rolling into the back of their heads when I start going on about "back in the 90s"...
It's not just startups. If someone wants to and can get an offer from one of the richer big tech companies (FAANG isn't really the right acronym as Microsoft at least is also in the mix) and is just going to go with the best offer, just about no one is going to be able to compete--at least in the US. I've heard plenty of stories of companies not even trying to match offers.
Yes in my job hunt over the last 6 months basically the first thing I have had to say to potential employers is: "No, I'm not expecting to match what I was getting at Google."
Pretty sure that a lot of places I simply didn't hear back from was because they didn't expect to be able to even come close on comp. And I've had other Xoogler friends who applied for places, got promising initial results, and then insanely low offers (like 1/3rd or less of Google comp).
I'll do 2/3rds or even 1/2 for the right job, but not 1/4 or 1/3rd.
Now, part of that is the domestic market (Ontario Canada) has been underpaying SWEs for years and getting away with it, since most of the good talent flees south after graduation anyways.
But part of it is that FAANG compensation is just far more than anybody else could ever afford.
> But part of it is that FAANG compensation is just far more than anybody else could ever afford.
I don't think this is true. I've had friends getting comparable comp offers at HBO and NatGeo, for example. And of course it's been known for some time that successful startups like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc. were doing comparable offers.
Once a company decides to really compete digitally, and that they can leverage economies of scale properly there, it suddenly makes sense to compete for the same class of engineer that can work at Google, Meta, etc.
> As time has moved on the gap in pay between startup and FAANG and now startup and any company offering RSUs is just too large for startups to compete for talent.
My reading is that founders and VCs got greedier (or they were always this greedy, but the reality distortion field has since failed). Back in the day, working at a startup appeared to offer a plausible path to life-altering wealth to employees with stock options - these days, the cat is out of the bag: dilution by endless funding rounds, no route to IPO, preferred stock fuckery, and a countless other ways of being screwed over by information and/or power asymmetry.
Way back in the day my Borland friends told me about Microsoft doing this to Borland. Supposedly parked a limo across the street from the building at lunch and hired people whether Microsoft had work for them or not.
This is a very prescient idea, if so it would be a way to control the job market in a way that was not blatantly illegal - ala Steve Jobs and Google and a few others refusing to hire from each other to keep wages down. One issue I have with this is that google in particular pays alot less than it used to compared to industry(fangish companies), a friend of mine left to go there and his pay has somewhat stagnated where mine has gone up, up, up.
An alternate explanation is that managers in tech crave headcount, they want to feel important and to have their projects and teams very well staffed. During the past year they may have gotten excessive with hiring and now you see the end results which are hiring freezes, rescinded offers and small layoffs across the industry.
So the argument I see proposed again, again, and again here on HN, is that companies are paying programmers too much money and they should all agree to offer <$100k or something.
> Once Google and Facebook started growing it's clear they realized that every talented engineer on the market is a potential threat.
You could count on one hand the number of startups that are serious threats to either. And when one arises, they can pretty much just buy the company, as Facebook has done repeatedly. They hardly need to be concerned with individual engineers, and even if they were, the idea that they could hire them all is pretty far-fetched
You don't have to hire all of them, You just have to raise the market rate and raise everyone's expectations. That's all.
The more money you got, the more you can manipulate the market.
Its the inefficiencies of the first price auction.
I _might_ be able to find comparable salary, but I sure won't find the other benefits of working for my employer. The 401k match, the on site clinic with a doctor that I really like, etc... those things do add up.
If that’s the case why have they always had such astronomically high hiring bars? I’d they wanted to deny anyone else talented engineers why would they reject so many?
They need to start at the top. The current phase of complacency, organizational lethargy, repeated pr disasters, people wondering wtf people are doing at Google, and general tone deafness started with the current CEO. Time for him to go. His vision is speaking in corporate cliches almost exclusively and just looking after things. If there is a grander plan other than "get people clicking ads", I have yet to learn of it. The current CEO is just riding the success of his predecessors, who for all their failings actually built a great few products and company.
The organization is a reflection of its leadership and their vision. Or lack there off. MS and Google are almost polar opposites. Google is MS under Balmer. Just failing, tone deaf, never quite doing anything right. Enter Satya Nadella and suddenly MS is re-engaging with developers, doing all the things that were simply unmentionable before, and generally delivering great share holder value. Google needs somebody like that. The current CEO is not it. He's a caretaker. Not a leader.
I'm not a shareholder; so no stake in this game other than observing what is obvious to me.
I might be unusual but I actually wouldnt mind things to continue like this. I'd rather see FAANG crumble than have tech end up consolidating on three dominant, vertically integrated players like the auto market.
More corporate shooting-self-in-the-foot means more space for a vibrant built-in-a-garage startup ecosystem to compete - the kind the auto industry hasnt had since, like, 1955.
I mean, Google+, the end of their do no evil reputation, the start of the killed by Google era, all date back to the previous CEO. Not saying Sundar shouldn't be considered responsible for not fixing it by now given how long he's been in the job, but the people who decide if he stays or goes seem happy with "share price go up" as a result
But maybe you mean a hypothetical "you" of other people still working there. Obviously it's a mix, but I suspect on the whole most people are smart enough to see that these kinds of things are unlikely to accomplish much.
But they're also likely happy that upper management is finally acknowledging these dysfunctions.
When I was just a coder at a fortune 500 company, I was voluntold to be on a "Morale Committee". Not much came of it (one meeting with about 20 of us, they had an ice cream social, because people like ice cream and the work environment was very siloed people weren't interacting). It didn't do much, but employees took notice that management realized morale was low. The round of layoffs that came soon after overshadowed that however.
A friend did some high-end contract work for Google, and was hired many months before the project started. This person was paid a very high contractor rate to "review documents and onboarding" and was told by a director this is a common tactic that Google uses to ensure availability of high end engineers, and to prevent their competitors from hiring.
> As several of these statements blatantly contradict one another, I went back to the data and ran the same sanity check that I did with Facebook above. In other words, what if Google is using the hiring freeze as a smoke screen and only continuing with the strongest candidates, while keeping the rest on the bench?
An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. To investors it says "technical or not, we've hit a recession." Brace yourselves for impact. Google and Facebook are both advertising companies, so they are tightly coupled to the business cycle. When business spending starts to falter, they'll feel it first. And they have.
So it's not surprising that the companies themselves are far from clear about this, sending mixed messages. I expect them to continue to do so for as long as they possibly can.
The bubble has inflated so far for so long, I get the sense that even among cynical young employees and "investors" there's a sense of permanence in the positions of both companies. The thing is, those with fewer than 10 years experience have never seen the ferocity of the other side of the business cycle. When it turns, that mofo turns. Those in top management positions have seen it, and they're going to do everything in their ability to deny and evade it.
> The thing is, those with fewer than 10 years experience have never seen the ferocity of the other side of the business cycle. When it turns, that mofo turns.
I was working as a programmer during both the dotcom crash and the 2007-2008 real estate crash. I would describe these downturns as "bumpy".
But neither was catastrophic for most of the programmers I knew. Some of us moved, others found new jobs. Some of the least-skilled, including the "webmasters" who didn't know JavaScript or CSS, did wind up leaving the industry in 2001.
If you had a 1-year emergency fund, you would probably have been fine in either crash. The people who were the hardest hit were actually the people living in major tech cities, because they had the biggest concentrations of layoffs. The longest I was on the job market was about 3 months in fall 2001, but I had to move out of Boston. I got a slightly underpaid but really awesome job.
Right now, there are tens of thousands of organizations that would be revolutionized by some simple custom software. These organizations can't compete with FAANG salaries. But they'll be happy to absorb quite a few programmers. Some of the jobs will be valuable and interesting work.
So like I said, a hard crash can be bumpy. But for most professional programmers, it probably won't be catastrophic.
I don't know about the big boys. But at least in Europe, in 2008, the crash wasn't "bumpy". It was survival of the fittest, and most up and coming companies straight up died.
It's a matter of perspective, for sure. But I would be careful myself. FAANGs won't vanish, and it won't be catastrophic for the privileged few. But, for the rest of the world, which follows the status quo? This spells doom in various levels.
> It was survival of the fittest, and most up and coming companies straight up died.
Oh, during the dotcom crash, Internet companies failed by the thousands in the US. But many of them were absolute garbage companies, far worse than the average modern startup. Frankly, scam companies were coming out of the woodwork. It was even worse than the later mobile/social/local/GroupOn era.
But just because many companies folded, it didn't necessarily mean that competent programmers were out of work indefinitely. There was a period of about 6 months when getting hired was nearly impossible, but after that, things started to turn slowly upward.
Honestly, if you're a programmer, I really recommend an emergency fund. Especially if you're being paid ridiculously well, keep your living expenses lower, and put some money aside.
Oh man I worked briefly with someone who was one of those webmaster/VBS jockeys. It was 10-12 years after the dotcom bust and the guy was doing Tier 2 desktop support at a non-technical megacorp. The people who got hit in that bust really got hit, but you have to wonder how much of that was due to not continuously learning and evolving skills.
>An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale.
I don't agree with this analysis. I'd be shocked if Google did any layoffs (though it's always possible) instead of just freezing hiring and letting natural attrition happen for a while. As for the signal to employees, there are so many employees already that I imagine many would be agree that the company is too big. It doesn't mean that the ship is sinking, just that they don't need an infinite number of employees. And Google's products are so dominant that you can't really believe the business is failing.
Now, FB on the other hand... I'd feel a lot more antsy, yeah. Their business doesn't feel nearly so stable.
It's certainly stable for now but it doesn't feel as stable as Google's, at least to me. The main FB product is in a slow decline and IG, though doing well, is under constant threat from the latest social media app du jour. The whole VR push could work out but right now it feels like a long shot and if I were working there I wouldn't be happy betting the farm on it. I mean the very fact that they are anticipating such a drastic pivot to their core business in the future should surely be a cause for some concern.
That's one of the things, though. If you are in a dire situation, like companies nationalized during wartime, you can't work or function. Certain things like advertising your services are clearly out the window.
In WWII, some companies who were turned to serving the war machine continued to advertise the things they couldn't make or sell, anyway. When things came back those folks were on top of the world. If the big FAANG companies can ride out business cycles without acting like they've become vulnerable, they're likely to further cement their positions.
It definitely is a long term bet that could end up costing a lot to Meta, but on the other hand if that bet materializes... At the very least we're getting really cool VR development!
> To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. To investors it says "technical or not, we've hit a recession." Brace yourselves for impact
While it’s possibly true in this case, that’s definitely not always true. I’ve been in two companies that had to implement a hiring freeze because growth was too fast. Everyone understood, because nobody new each other, because half the company was just hired.
Layoffs can be positively received by the market if it cuts the fat to increase profit. No one expects Google or any other company to grow unboundedly.
Two things that I can say with certainty I've heard literally every single one of the ~25 years I've been in this game:
1. "We're in a bubble!, it's only a matter of time before it all comes down"
2. "The market is hot for developers right now!"
I've been through hiring sprees and layoffs, I've had startups succeed and fail, and I don't think my experiences are exceptional in any way. Things wax and wane, trends come and go. Keep a bit of savings, live within your means, and do good work and things will most likely work out well for you in the long run.
Just an aside, that this rebranding of Marx's theory of crisis never fails to get a chuckle out of me.
In mainstream economics is presented as some magical property of the way economies work, where Marx specifically predicts cyclically economic crisis created by contradictions inherent in the structure of capitalism, the periodically build to a tipping point leading to crisis and ultimately the resolution of these contradictions.
For Marx, these crises ultimately culminate in the unavoidable collapse of capitalism. Which is where the fundamental drive to find alternatives to capitalism comes from for Marx, not because it is an ethically questionable system, but because it is one fundamentally headed towards its own destruction.
But "business cycle" sounds much better, and leaves off all that spooky "systemic problem" stuff.
> For Marx, these crises ultimately culminate in the unavoidable collapse of capitalism.
But I mean that's exactly the whole difference, right? Both Marx and others identified this pattern, Marx believes this ultimately will explode, others don't, so it makes sense that others would want to label it in a way that indicates their view that the pattern is "normal" and sustainable.
I'm not even saying Marx is wrong, but just because Marx thought something about something he noticed doesn't mean he's right. Others that came after him are allowed to come to different conclusions about the things he noticed.
One thing worth remembering, and that even a lot of socialists forget, is that Marx predicted this not out of some deep hate for capitalism.
The first half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is Marx being a total fanboy for capitalism and it's capacity for transforming the world.
Marx predicted that capitalist competition, which he expressed admiration for, would be too successful, and that people would just fail to reign it in and deal with the result.
There's a conceptually very simple fix to the crises Marx predicted if he's otherwise right:
Share more of the value, and spread labour around if automation comes to reduce the need for labour to the extent he predicted, where, to paraphrase, both overproduction and lack of work becomes common.
It doesn't take equality to prevent it, just enough adjustment to smooth out the crises enough to prevent escalation.
Marx took capitalists own predictions about the efficiency of capitalist competition at face value, and simply asked what will happen if capitalism eventually runs out of new markets to expand into (temporarily or permanently) and responds by driving down margins, and his prediction of eventual revolution is predicated on the assumption that society will fail to apply those very simple fixes.
Ironically, then, if capitalism survives, it might be because the competitive pressures are not as strong as Marx believed.
This is where I think people try to pull 'gotchas' on Marx because Capitalism hasn't reached the point of bursting yet. I don't necessarily think he was wrong, nor right. The reality, the persistence of capitalism will happen so long as people/systems are willing to be flexible enough to "resolve the current set of contradictions." Now, those resolution's sometimes don't remain resolved because many of us have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to economics. But as long as people who have the powers to make the calls are willing to bend over backwards enough (even temporarily), capitalism won't cease.
FWIW i first learned of it from a libertarian angle, which equated business cycle with economy wide (mal) investment which was, in practice, usually driven by the fed or some comparable government program. Whether consistent or not it holds at least some truth and was an interesting angle to start learning about economics.
Libertarianism and Austrian economics has a perception of outright rejecting empiricism and other rational thought, so I'd like to add a clarification. Libertarian theory doesn't deny naturally occurring downturns in economies, but that the severity and length of them are lessened without state mismanagement. Potentially, to the point that nation-spanning busts would be a thing of the past.
Google has always recruited and interviewed independently of whether they actually have roles open that make sense for you. Earlier this year, I passed the interview and spent six weeks in "team match" before I gave up and took a role with another company. Had a friend who did the same for months for a PM role.
Just bc you're getting contacted by Google recruiters this week or interviewing doesn't mean you'll ever find a team or get a real offer.
After completing ~9 interviews (2 video interviews, 5 on-site interviews, and then was asked to complete 2 additional video interviews after mediocre on-site results), I passed Google's "hiring committee" and then was put in their team match process. Over the next 4 months I had ~4 calls with hiring managers, none of them fruitful (and not for lack of my own enthusiasm or willingness to leave my comfort zone). After this the recruiter basically said they'd be in touch if any other opportunities came up.
The process is absolutely insane and an obvious symptom of Google knowing people really, really want to work there. They do not respect the candidate at all, and then will cold email you again a year later as if you've forgotten how painful it was the first time. I'll probably end up interviewing again.
Yeah, it's insane. When I turned down a Google offer because they did such a bad job of the post-interview process, my recruiter was _surprised_. All I could say was: why? what did you think would happen if you didn't find a team I actually could get excited about?
(It was worse than that: I told the recruiter I was interested in roles in any location except the South Bay and Seattle's Eastside, and they came back and said those were the two places they found matches, so I took a different job. And they were surprised. As far as I can tell Google can't figure out how to not assume that they're everybody's dream job choice like I guess they might have been in the 2000s.)
I didn't want to go this far into detail because it's embarrassing how much I put up with, but I actually let Google alter the direction of my life.
When I was interviewing, my significant other was looking to go to grad school in either NYC or Cambridge. NYC was her preference, so I told the recruiter I preferred NYC or Boston and I did my on-site in NYC.
After all my interviews, the recruiter told me that the NYC office was doing "renovations", and so some teams were holding off hiring until they had the physical space (in retrospect this excuse makes no sense). He asked if I was still open to Boston and I said yes. But at this point, my SO had to accept one of her grad school offers, and based solely on the fact that I thought I would have a Google job lined up in Cambridge, she committed to the Cambridge school.
At one point during the pointless team match process (after we were committed to Cambridge and after I had several unfruitful Cambridge team match calls), my recruiter actually asked me if I wanted to go back to looking for NYC teams. I couldn't believe it- what a slap in the face! (I had told him our priorities and timeline)
We live in Boston right now, 4 years later, solely because I thought Google would have a role for me here after having passed 9 interviews. Thankfully, everything worked out. I found a different job, my SO got a great degree and is using it here in Boston, etc. Of course I'm the lone idiot in this story, but it's incredible how flexible I was just because I thought big G was making my dreams come true.
Similar story here. My wife and I were living in NYC together and she was searching for PhD fellowships and I was searching for my next job. Our intersections were NYC, London, and Amsterdam, but between her fellowships and my offers we didn't find any great match. The google recruiter kept stringing me along and warning about a lack of space and offers with NYC based roles but I had tons of match offers in MTV. It was not reassuring at all to hear "well, you may find something in 6 months in NYC, but you may not, idk lol".
I ended up taking an offer in MTV and my wife went to Amsterdam. 1 year down, 1 more year to go. We're again going through the process of trying to find something that works for both of us between NYC, London, and Amsterdam.
Can I ask what exactly were your Google dreams? What about Google made you scramble your life like this? I'm really curious why people go Gaga for Google
It wasn't really just about Google. I was applying to lots of companies but wasn't interviewing at anywhere at the level of Google at the time. More of a "Big Tech" dream
> And they were surprised. As far as I can tell Google can't figure out how to not assume that they're everybody's dream job choice like I guess they might have been in the 2000s.
I think this is a symptom.
Their experience getting hired is likely the same as yours: all your family and friends and even significant others sometimes think its the dream job and the most important accolade in your life.
You know thats its not. They're not in big tech, they're not in medium tech either. You know there's plenty of organizations you can get paid in lottery ticket securities from, you know there's publicly traded organizations with faster vesting schedules and higher stock market upside. But they don't know that.
Many of the people that go into Google was surrounded by that same pressure by their friends and family of getting accepted, and then they also are beneficiaries of Google's infrastructure and financial weight off their shoulders. It distorts their view whether they realize they can get paid more elsewhere or not.
So it selects for that distortion field where people forget that Google is just a choice.
I told Google and Facebook to please stop contacting me, as after three attempts, either you know I suck or you'd accept me. It takes way too much effort to brush up on my algorithms/data structures each time I interview.
Does it feel worth it to go through it at least once though? I'm a junior engineer and I remember studying really hard for this one "hiring platform" (once you're in they find you contracts, sorta. One of the few non-scammy ones out there). The interview was pretty intense but I got a TON of good study material and really in-depth feedback
I guess a key difference though is that it's not very "data structures and algorithms"-y and much more "optimizing React performance"-y
I ended up actually passing but, being the only junior there, no company was interested in a contract with me. However, I don't really consider it a waste of time because I really learned a lot from that interview and I think it played into how I interviewed later
At the current company I work for they're really surprised at certain skills I have. Skills that I can trace back to having to study for that one interview
I can remember some pretty intense plane trips home trying to figure out why my answers were insufficient or why they failed to understand that my answers did actually work. The problems made me think a lot more about architecture than I would have otherwise, but really the main experience is that I'm really not good at programming on a whiteboard and changing pace quickly.
Yeah, I'd say definitely try it at LEAST once just to see what's out there. You might just get an offer of life-changing money.
One time all of my interviews involved reinforcement learning. I didn't know much about it, so I tried to answer all of the questions the best I could using CS concepts and programming. Years later, when learning about Reinforcement Learning, I face-palmed pretty hard when it became extremely obvious that they were testing my knowledge of policies.
Serious question: why do people "really, really want to work at Google"? Google seems to be cranking out increasingly mediocre products, canning existing products, making engineers chase their own tails, and just being a bad player. Is it really about having a name brand on a resume so you can work somewhere else? Is it the free food? I guess high salary? What is it?
A friend of mine spent ended up spending 9 months in the Google pipeline for a PM role. During the early phases of the cycle (1 month in) he received and accepted an offer at Capital One and joined as a PM. Spent 7 months at Capital One while still interviewing for Google, and then managed to get an offer and team placement.
Surprised it took that long, but he's happy he stuck w the Google process.
I'm sorry, someone must have spiked my coffee this morning.
Am I reading this right? Your friend spent 9 months interviewing for a single job?
And then he decided that the company that had been trying to hire him for a pregnancy's worth of time was somewhere that he wanted to work after already having a job that hired him in a month?
Is this 'normal' for the Goog? If so, why am I not shorting this company?
No really, what did they put in my java today?
EDIT: Actually, yeah, someone put in some sort of super caffeinated beans today. Sorry for the somewhat manic posting here.
Basically it takes ~2 weeks of initial phone screening and scheduling, then another ~4 weeks that will involve setting up the full day of interviews and collecting feedback and making a decision on whether or not to hire.
So basically after ~6 weeks from first being contacted by a recruiter, you know whether or not Google wants you. This is not unreasonable for a large company.
BUT -- this is just as "generic PM". Because then there needs to be a match made between you and a specific PM position.
And so this is where you basically wait around for a PM position to be open that is in a geographic location where you're willing to work and the team thinks you're a good fit. If you're willing to relocate anywhere in the world (or especially Mountain View) it's not going to take anywhere close to 9 months. But if you're only willing to work in Boston, for example, it may very well take that long. Over those 9 months, you might wind up having ~3-hour interviews with 5 different teams seeing if you're a good fit. Also remember that even if a team wants you, you might decide you don't like the team (e.g. you want to be a PM on something closer to Waymo than to Ads).
Also remember that PM jobs aren't nearly as fungible as software engineering jobs -- if it's an enterprise product they might want a PM with an enterprise background, if a consumer hardware product then a PM with consumer hardware experience.
But it's not like you're having a new interview every week for 9 months or anything. It simply can take 9 months to match up the right person for the right role when there are geographic constraints.
In my part of Google, we use TPM for "Technical Program Managers" instead of PgM.
In general a TPM at Level N will have the technical skills of a Level N-1 SWE. So many TPM's have a CS background, and a good TPM is an amazing partner/resource for a TL to have, especially for a large, complex project which spans multiple teams and multiple departments.
For my Hybrid SMR project, my TPM came out of a HDD vendor, and was very well versed in the technologies of HDD internals. At the same time, he could navigate all of the bureaucracy and process to get test racks ordered, populated with servers, and installed in data centers. He could also create the capital budget plan and get it submitted and approved through finance so I could concentrate on the technology. A good TPM is critical for the success of a large projects; I couldn't have done it without him.
1. validate that you pass the minimum bar to work at Google as a PM. Whichever team ends up talking to you, they know you're at least minimally competent.
2. understand if you are a fit for the specific team and product. That might take a long time cause openings come and go, sometimes they get filled by internal candidates which are always a favorite cause learning how to function inside Google takes time.
It's annoying from the perspective of an external candidate but now that I work at Google I understand why it's done this way, especially considering that Google has a very weak internal training system and the chaos is so prevalent it takes at least 6 months to get the hang of things.
Turned down Google receuiters way too early to know if that's typical, but Facebook recruiters told me from the outset the process was 6 months and that they'd provide me with a reading list, and was then surprised when I told then I'd let them know if I was willing to consider that if they provided me with a compensation range. Days after, once they'd figured out the comp range, I told them I wasn't interested. This is London, and while their total comp was good, it was not SV good and not a big enough step up to be worth 6 months of interviews and a reading list.
> Facebook recruiters told me from the outset the process was 6 months
That's crazy. When I joined FB a few years ago the total time was under a month.
The reading list thing makes sense for some people who have never done a FAANG-like interview before. I remember moving from London to the USA early in my career and I had no idea how the process worked and so I got my first phone screeen with Amazon, thinking I'd explain a bit about my background and we'd have a bit of a chat and instead I got "Okay. Give me code to perform an in-order traversal of a binary tree." which was NOT something I was remotely prepared to do at the time :)
If you know the format and basic types of questions (and have access to leetcode etc.) it's not too bad, but a lot of these resources weren't around 15 years ago, especially to people from another country with no context.
A second Amazon interview aside: in an in-person interview I did, things had been going very well and I was on my fifth interview of the day. Again, I was recently from London and hadn't fully understood that words mean different things in the USA than they do in the UK. I was asked to design a GPS system. This seems simple enough if you know that "GPS" in the USA is the same thing as a "SatNav" or "Satellite Navigation" system in the UK and that the goal would be to build a system that could compute an efficient route between two points.
The problem was that I assumed the person wanted, well, a GPS system. i.e. he wanted a design for a set of satellites in geosynchronous orbit that would, using very precise timing, allow a person almost anywhere on earth to get a latitude and longitude like "12.345, -2.345" and so we spent almost the whole of the conversation talking about two different things and even when I was given the hint that maybe I could use some kind of graph algorithm, I had no idea how to use Dijkstra's to solve clock drift on a satellite :)
The thing is, at my level of experience (27 years) I can get jobs plenty of other places without having to prove entry level skills, so being given a reading list is a hard no unless they offer a very substantial increase. And at least Facebook couldn't.
For some I guess it'll be worth it, but this insistence on that approach then means they're causing the candidates with enough experience to get competitive offers elsewhere to self-select away.
In my experience the reading list thing (seen at other companies) is either DEI lipservice or a trap for the tryhards, or possibly both depending on how cynical you're feeling.
There's a ton of people on the internet who claim that they just haven't done enough leetcode to get into FAANG but they're sure it's The Way, and anyone who is in FAANG cannot possibly dissuade them from this belief. I imagine they're reading the interview prep books too and still not getting in.
Maybe, but to me the whole reading list thing just added to a feeling that I didn't want to work at a company that approached hiring that way, whether or not it was actually necessary to read them.
I'm senior enough that I don't need to deal with that bullshit to get a well paying job, so in not trying to sell me on why I should want to work for them but instead giving me junior level "homework" they made me mentally raise the bar for how much money it'd take to make it worthwhile quite substantially.
Maybe they don't want people like me, and that's fine if that's an intentional choice on their behalf and not an effect of failing to realise that it's pushing away the most experienced candidates who have other options first.
Add to the fact that I was hesitant to even consider Facebook to start with and it was easy to pass on it.
Data structures and algorithms and other stuff intended to help you answer stuff you'd look up in a book if you can't remember in a real world situation. They're maybe useful if hiring for junior positions, but not much past that.
if you know the history of Google's product launches (virtually all of them have failed/were killed, only successful products are search/ads and acquired products like youtube, maps, etc) - you will understand why they hire 9 mo for simple PM role
You are not missing much, Broken Hiring process & broken incentives to launch whatever in order to get promoted == status quo at Google with its products
If a company had a 9-month-long hiring pipeline for me, I would worry their internal decision-making processes would make achieving anything of interest a Sisyphean task.
Had a multi-month team matching phase followed by a 4-day exploding offer for ~50% below market and got blacklisted for a year or more when I didn't sign it. Great.
Not saying an exploding offer didn’t happen, but it is very uncommon.
The blacklisted for a year thing sounds like the normal Google, “Try again in a year” messaging that happens whenever someone doesn’t get an offer for failing interviews. Again, don’t know if that is what happened, but it hardly constitutes anything nefarious.
> The blacklisted for a year thing sounds like the normal Google, “Try again in a year” messaging that happens whenever someone doesn’t get an offer for failing interviews. Again, don’t know if that is what happened, but it hardly constitutes anything nefarious.
To be clear, this is the "You are not permitted to apply for any positions at this company" messaging for people who pass interviews and fail to sign offers within 4 days.
That is crazy; I had the exact opposite experience I just mentioned in another comment. When I turned Google down I was told I could come back and skip the interviews any time in the next year. (Presumably no longer valid with the freeze, but still.) And this is the second time I've turned them down after getting a concrete offer! Personally I did not expect "aw shucks, hope you change your mind" when I did that and yet that's precisely what I got.
Not quite. If you pass the hiring committee, you have one year to find a team. So it's more like your interview result is good for a year. After you match with a team you get the actual offer and it has the usual deadlines.
Hiring processed has changed though, so I'm not sure if this is still true.
I stole this advice from a Blind post -- If one has trouble matching, one possibility is that they didn't impress the matching interviewers enough (no offense) for them to want the candidate to join. It can be helpful to treat those matching calls as interviews. Of course, it's also possible you don't see a team you like, but you gotta keep looking.
In many ways, I prefer the Meta approach where they hire you and then you spend 6-10 weeks in bootcamp and working on different teams for a week each time and then the engineer gets to decide which team they want to join (rather than the hiring manager - if the position is open, they have to take you).
It kind of makes sense to keep people in the pipeline as it were. If you shut down the whole apparatus, you have to spin it back up when hiring is unfrozen. But if you keep the machine running, you're ready to hire the instant you can.
At Google, upon entering the process, recruiters explain that an offer within engineering (including PM, T/PgM etc.) is valid for 12 months from the date of approval from the hiring committee. So while it can take a long time for someone to find a team match, that flexibility is also available for the candidate, so they get to keep declining teams that are not interesting until a real match for both sides is available.
At Facebook, it's possible to match before starting, but candidates usually try to do the matching in the 2 weeks (or so) of training they do in Menlo Park. It's up to them to cold call and find time with hiring managers to sell themselves (and vice-versa). But time-wise, the process is much more constrained than Google's.
> At Google, upon entering the process, recruiters explain that an offer within engineering (including PM, T/PgM etc.) is valid for 12 months from the date of approval from the hiring committee. So while it can take a long time for someone to find a team match, that flexibility is also available for the candidate, so they get to keep declining teams that are not interesting until a real match for both sides is available.
This is inaccurate. In 2019 a Google recruiter decided on my behalf which team I would match, extended a 4-day exploding offer, and blacklisted me when I said that other processes would take more than 4 days. This was within a couple months of passing hc.
>At Facebook, it's possible to match before starting, but candidates usually try to do the matching in the 2 weeks (or so) of training they do in Menlo Park. It's up to them to cold call and find time with hiring managers to sell themselves (and vice-versa). But time-wise, the process is much more constrained than Google's.
This may differ on which office you are at. In Seattle, we started working with teams during the tail end of bootcamp, with some people finding a team in 1-2 weeks and others in 6-8 weeks.
One thing I liked was that if a team had an open position and you said "I want that position", the hiring manager basically had to take you, whereas at Google, each hiring manager could reject you for their team, so you can spend a long time trying and failing to match.
The other thing I liked about FB's process was that you actually got to work directly with the team and do real work, rather than having the position filtered through a hiring manager. Spending a week actually writing code helped a lot with understanding which team would be the best fit and isn't something you can really do with a non-employee.
I've noticed that many of the most "prestigious" places to work do a wildly fake process aligned with academia to recruit employees. It creates the illusion that jobs are coveted... They present you with challenges and questions over a long period of time which are actually directly tied to their own internal problem solving if you are a senior level hire as well (free work), and they catalogue personal info and data from you interview to build an internal profile on you that is used in God knows how many ways...
They also subject you to high-school level team picking, which is deeply rooted in internal/company politics and an additional dynamic of company bias and it all enables the company orphan you easily if they find you don't submit to being overworked easily and complying with the deep team culture that each company evangelizes.
People are pressured now more than ever to adopt rules of conduct that encroach upon and threaten their individuality now more than ever by large companies.. Even when you log on to apps like TikTok and Instagram. Your individuality and experience are often thrown out in working environments so that you become a cog in the wheel, and more easily replaceable for these companies, not so that you can one day grow to be a CEO or Exec, and even still, those types of positions are often reserved for others who can fail multiple times and not get fired, while if you fail on the months long hiring process, you'll never survive.
On the inverse, I have been hired by smaller and medium sized contracting companies for much better salaries, and they often hire within days or weeks. I have very little patience for dragged out hiring and onboarding processes now. I work efficiently, do a good job, respect everyone's individuality and culture, and then go home to enjoy my life. I only work at companies there that is the culture. Luckily, if the market is screwed up or too hostile, I just work on my own ventures, it took 20 years of suffering through hostile corporate cultures and attempted indoctrination to get to this point where I have the choice.
None of the large corporations I've worker for called to check on me since our breakups, but most of them would likely rehire me if I re-applied... Not being arrogant, but emphasizing that the internal rules are frequently bent to serve the needs of delivery...
The people that get chewed up worst by the machine often have the lowest technical skills and ability, experience, and self esteem. I don't put any company on a pedestal; I just work efficiently and effectively with integrity, constantly learn (well aligned) stuff that works to get the job done, rely heavily on my prior experience, fight to keep solutions simple, and adapt constantly to efficiently meet goals... Company "culture workshops" and even colleges will never teach you that.
You're focused on a different angle than on what I posted.
There are so many factors that affect compensation for each individual employee, comparison of pay is useless. Geographical region also has big bearing on the discussion, and it really makes no sense to compare compensation online with a public audience in that manner. I won't discuss specific details and employers online for obvious reasons.
I reside on the East Coast, West Coast is a completely different labor market, and the cost of living in silicon valley is higher, another reason why comparison is futile. Jobs also rely on skill and experience, to which each person ranks differently, so individual salary comparison online is ultimately not accurate, why even try?
That being said, 6 months of work at $200k or 1 year of work at $100k is the same amount of money, but one job costs the employee a lot more time out of their life. Work is meant to supplement our lives, not the other way around. We're either marketable as employees or not, small companies that want to compete and grow within a workspace often pay more for highly skilled employees for shorter work terms overall, because they have vital work to do in order to be competitive...
Sure small and medium (non-public) companies don't offer RSUs and other things that large (FAANG) companies do, but if you really take a look at how long it takes to be vested in those huge companies, and how most people don't last long enough to vest, and how much big company culture changes employees to the point that when they're laid off or quit after bad experiences they suffer in readjusting to the regular working world... The compensation can be a lot better in small/medium sized companies.
I think you have some misunderstanding, because it takes approximately one month to start vesting at Google (and Facebook) and at Google your equity is frontloaded.
I'll happily tell you what the approximate compensation is by Google in Atlanta or NYC, because there's really no reason not to discuss those things.
Idk, the rest of your post isn't any truer. The (major) companies don't use potential hires for free labor, they give them toy problems, and nobody reputable "catalogue[s] personal info and data from you interview to build an internal profile on you".
There was a TGIF Q&A session in 2016 or 2017 and someone asked Sergei what his worst business decision at Google was, and he replied that it was slowing down and stopping hiring during 2008-2009.
I passed the interview (for the second time) last year and eventually turned Google down in no uncertain terms. But the last thing I was told is that the offer is good for a year — presumably not for the team I was looking at (I was being hired to a specific team which was a bit strange, perhaps?), but to go in the team match system.
Of course I'm sure it's no longer good with the hiring freeze, but the point is that Google is so heavy on the "no role needed" train that even when you're recruited for a role, you're apparently still able to turn it down and still join Google later on a whim.
True. And people can submit your resume internally. I've been rejected by Google three times (I have the letters) and I've never applied for a job there. Thanks, geniuses.
Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland.
I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim.
He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was... very close to the current market rate.
This is a major shift in policy comparing to just three years ago and with Poland being a popular outsourcing destination I suspect that this is what's happening, especially that due to the Russian invasion there's additional talent from Ukraine in Warsaw.
We are indeed still conducting interviews (I had one just on Friday). Whether that transfers to actual offers extended during this time, I have no idea.
What I can say we are absolutely not doing at this time is rescinding offers, even for new grads.
There certainly have been some shifts over the past year or two to prioritize growth in cheaper markets (for lack of a better term) -- one manager I talked to mentioned that the headcount tradeoff was basically "one engineer in Mountain View, or 3-4 in Warsaw" (which is an accurate reflection of the salary disparity).
> contributions are worth 1/4 as much if they live in Warsaw?
Under the "free market", compensation isn't some objective number etched into a tablet somewhere in the universe. Instead, it is the result of market forces.
Yes, usually rationalizing it as "but it's cheaper to live in Warsaw", which is true. That being said it is a reflection of market reality, where some (many) people are definitely unwilling to move for 4x the salary. This doesn't of course mean that SV is "4x worse", but rather is a pricing of their other activities/personal relationships.
There are definitely issues with Google's comp system, but the fact that pay depends on location is IMO not unreasonable.
Especially so given that there's often a lot of flexibility with regards to location.
For example, I chose to relocate from London to Zürich (without changing teams/project). I did it for quality-of-life reasons but the comp also increased quite significantly, even adjusted for cost of living.
And I am not some special snowflake: everybody around me who wanted to be based somewhere else had their relocation requests approved.
If they’re not they can apply for a transfer after 2 years to Mountain View and they’ll get it, unless US Immigration vetoes it. I hear the Zürich office pays pretty well too and if you’re Polish I believe immigration is very easy as they’re EU citizens.
Judging from my perspective as a manager of a large department, I never ever experienced such a thing as an hiring stop. It always translates into tighter processes for approval, that's all.
For example Finance laid off thousands of workers years ago - however they were hiring IT stuff.
After all, great staff is still the most important factor aka resource.
Interviews are very different than hiring. They still cost the company money but not as much as headcount. Some companies still interview when they figure out the long term strategy. This is consistent with the article describing Google’s behavior.
When companies lay off recruiters you know the cuts are longer term.
When you say the compensation was very close to the current market rate, I assume you mean the market rate in Poland, correct? No fancy Silicon Valley salaries for devs in Poland, that is.
Your bog-standard senior role clocks in at $65k, but that's something you can get around here without going through many hoops. From a company with such an infamously convoluted hiring process I would expect no less than $90k - apparently that's not the case here.
Fancy Silicon Valley salaries are naturally out of the question. Highest number to date in my social circle was $150k/yr - a brief, beautiful moment for one senior front-end developer working remotely as a contractor.
I'm contracting remotely out of Poland and $150k-$170k is definitely doable, especially if you're willing to work for an US company (and adjust to their timezone a bit).
Yeah, I have a few friends who reached this level of compensation working remotely. It's a nice life - I can't say I'm not envious. I had to travel to Switzerland and deal with the costs of living there to have such a rate and the project was timeboxed.
Interestingly nowadays you don't need to work for a US client. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland(out of all places) offer similar salaries without the zombifying difference in time zones.
> Interestingly nowadays you don't need to work for a US client. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland(out of all places) offer similar salaries without the zombifying difference in time zones.
Yep, that's my experience as well. I've quit the $170k US West Coast job (because of time zone differences, plus it sucked in other ways) in favor of slighly less paying German job (it used to pay the same, but EUR has shit the bed and now the money is way less when expressed in USD). I'm way happier now - they money in my accounts still keeps accumulating at a great rate, but now I'm not angry and tired every day.
I have 15+ years of experience, some in recognizable Tier 2 tech company, some in tech lead and architect position. I'm also working with a niche and hot tech stack that companies have troubles hiring for. This translates into good jobs, good money and good working conditions, even in a tech backwater such as Poland. Took a lot of time and effort to get here though.
If you don't mind me asking, what's your legal setup and way of landing US contracts? Most I've seen require a US-based legal entity (which is the tricky bit I can't figure out, as to the best of my knowledge there's no way to set one up without having existing ties/citizenship in the US).
I just have a company in Poland, sign a contract with US company and send them invoices every month (which, to my knowledge, they don't really always even need?). I don't know how it's set up on their end. No one yet has asked for a US-based entity.
As to finding them, I've found some here on HN in Who's Hiring thread. One of them (I'm a notorious job hopper, so there were many) found me on LinkedIn.
The "employee" creates a single-person company in Poland (or any other EU country, I guess) and sends invoices monthly. Honestly, it's trivial to set up. I'd say it's even easier than the standard employment process in the EU.
Not sure about France, but in Poland, if you’re sending invoices to an entity that has no presence in Poland, is not incorporated there, has no offices etc, it can hardly be legally seen to be a legal “employment” relationship.
But, assuming the situation above, even if it is illegal (which I strongly doubt), so what? What can the system do here to you? Will it jail you or fine you, or otherwise stop you, the worker, for “illegally” working on a wrong type of contract? After all, it cannot do anything to the company, as it has no jurisdiction over it.
In France (and Germany too apparently), if you are found out - usually by a random tax audit - they will ask you to back-pay employee and employer contributions on the money that you received (so about 60% total)
the issue isn't really the company, as you pointed out, they are not in France, they're not subject to French law. The issue is that as a French tax resident, if you are meeting the criteria for employment (single company representing more than 80% of your revenue, everyday work relationship that is based on subordination etc etc), then you have to pay employment contributions
Why? For the same reason as every other mandatory insurance. If everyone who has a stable, well-paying job is skipping out of employment contributions, it makes the contributions for the others even higher, pushing more people out of the system etc until you have no-one left with employee protections
It sounds like if the single member company invoices the foreign company and then pays you as an employee, with all the payroll deductions, that's fine?
That seems reasonable, the only thing is that you have to compare the foreign company invoice rate as a gross payment to salaries offered by domestic companies which are generally quoted as net payments? As I understand it, European salaries are usually quoted fully net --- you get exactly that amount, in contrast to US salaries which are mostly gross, there are a lot of deductions that start from the quoted amount, but some that are employer side and not usually quoted.
european salaries are usually quoted "semi-gross" (or semi-net, according to your optimism). there is an arbitrary distinction between employer contributions and employee contributions, the figure you will be given is after the former, before the latter. and always before income tax of course (because that isn't solely based on your salary)
What could happen to the company: is that the Polish government or courts could deem the foreign company to be illegally operating in Poland (by virtue of employing you through a hidden contract), and require the company to set up a local legal entity, make corporate filings, pay taxes, etc. Or else pay fines. Or else get banned from operating in your country. You may also be entitled to rights under local employment laws regardless of what it says in your contract, which could also lead to the company being fined or banned.
What could happen to you: you get billed for the unpaid taxes and payroll contributions you should have been making. And possibly charged penalties or even fined for tax evasion.
Depends on the country’s specific laws and their government’s willingness to pursue things like this.
> require the company to set up a local legal entity, make corporate filings, pay taxes. Or else pay fines.
They can require it all they want, but if the company has no presence in Poland, they cannot actually make them do so.
> Or else get banned from operating in your country
Which is fine with many companies.
> You may also be entitled to rights under local employment laws regardless of what it says in your contract, which could also lead to the company being fined or banned.
Sure, but entitlement under local employment law is worthless against company in a different jurisdiction.
Sorry, I’m not really sure what you’re trying to add here?
Yes, the foreign company can obviously decide to ignore the Polish government. As a consequence they will have to stop employing all their “contractor” employees in Poland. If they’re happy with that situation then… congrats to them?
They will not have to do anything of the sort. The can continue to buy services of the Polish resident, and pay their invoices. The Polish government cannot and will not do anything to the company.
What it can do, however, is that it can go after the worker. Is the government of Poland so vindictive to actually go after individuals who commit a crime of working for a foreign company?
Based on many of my friends having this exact arrangement for years, I think the answer is, in fact, no: they happily send invoices every month, get paid, and (less happily) pay taxes and ZUS contributions. It all works out just fine.
> What can the system do here to you? Will it jail you or fine you, or otherwise stop you, the worker, for “illegally” working on a wrong type of contract?
It can charge additional taxes and pension/healthcare contributions (which is how it works in Croatia).
How is it solved in France then? I dont' think it's possible to have an trans-national employment contract (which labor laws would the contract observe? The French ones or the US ones?). So, how do French people work remotely for US companies? I don't think most countries' laws are set up for a situation where a company employs a worker that does not live in the same country.
I wouldn't take namday's comment at face value without some kind of citation.
It could be that it works similarly to Croatia - it's not illegal, but if you are found to be "a hidden employee" you simply owe taxes and retirement/healthcare contributions as if entire income of your single-employee company was your salary.
It could be that it's actually illegal in France. But many people are confused about how it works here in Croatia, so it wouldn't surprise me if it were the case in France too.
I completely agree with what you say, it depends on the specific setup (specifically, whether a judge will consider that it was an employment relationship). My statement was in response to someone who was clearly describing an employment relationship:
> The "employee" creates a single-person company in Poland
Yes, I was also referring to a scenario where you create a single-person company and have a single source of revenue from a de-facto employer.
Is it really illegal in France or do you just owe more taxes/contributions than if you had multiple clients (which would allow you to take part of the revenue as company profits, instead of having to channel it all as a salary)?
Looking at your comment [0] it sounds like it might not be illegal (provided you pay the required taxes/contributions)?
It would be illegal in France to do it without declaring yourself as an employee, and therefore paying contributions . “Illegal” as in if you get caught you’ll get a fin and back-taxes, not jail or anything
OK, so it sounds like it’s possible in France too, you just need to employ yourself (and then pay employment-related contributions). In Poland, this is a little simplified, as there’s a company structure called “single-person company” (I’m sorry, this is my own translation of the term, it’s probably not the best) which combines these two things (i.e. after creating this type of company you pay social security for yourself, without any extra employment contract).
1) The company opens a branch in France, with as director and sole employee the person in question. Employment contributions are collected on the money that the French branch pays to its (sole) employee. Very simple to set up, does require a bit of work from an accountant for the yearly accounts (I'd say to budget about 1kE/year)
2) The employee joins an IT contracting company that already has a commercial presence in both countries, they will take 10% of the take (known as "portage salarial")
> I dont' think it's possible to have an trans-national employment contract (which labor laws would the contract observe? The French ones or the US ones?)
Those contracts are of course possible and exist - although rare due to paperwork hell you need to go through. The labor law of the employee's country is observed and they usually need to handle pension/health contributions on their side. In most of EU at least.
It is true though that most EU countries also demand that you open a local subsidiary once you have a certain amount of employees there (~5-10).
As a datapoint, in Germany it is not considered "hidden employment contract" unless it is more than 80% of your income. I could imagine some similar rules in France, but I do not know.
An alternative way that probably works in France too is to have a limited company and invoice from that.
ah yes of course, if it really "one of many" jobs it's fine in France too. What I understood from the conversation was people trying to do this for a "100% job"
I've contracted remotely for 10 years with US companies while living in different countries. I've never had a US based legal entity and it hasn't been a problem. It does make things slightly more complicated for them though and I'm sure that I lost some potential contracts due to this. In some cases (HK company while living in Asia), not having a US legal entity is a huge plus tax-wise.
To my knowledge you pay for invoices, you are not actually hiring. It's quite similar to buying other goods from abroad (like cheese, or printer ink). There are plenty US companies 'hiring' in Poland, where in reality they don't really hire- they come to agreement to buy your time with no tights.
Yeah can’t comment for local employees of local companies. Just have knowledge of UK & US companies hiring/outsourcing to Poland. It was cheap, not so much anymore.
If PLN depreciates against USD (as it has this year) and the contract is USD denominated (which is simpler for Google so likely the case) then you'll have actually received a gradual payrise!
I left G in Ireland about 4 months ago for a fully remote position at a startup. Up until then, G's Polish salaries were low even by Western European standards (which is ~ >= 1/2 of SV pay).
If you're struggling to find talent anywhere, why not hire in Poland?
As a Polish engineer, we all know that companies are struggling to hire anyone. If you think you can hire a local instead of me for the same money, good luck. From my perspective, if I'm delivering the same value as someone from another country I should not be paid less. My cost of living is my own business, whether it's the lease on a car, the number of kids I have or, in this case, the country I choose to live in.
Part of the hiring in cheaper countries is the possibility to exploit the wealth disparity and cut costs, sure. But in case of remote IT jobs, IME it's more of a fact that companies can't find anyone so they'll hire from anywhere, including cheaper countries. Doesn't mean that the employees should let themselves be played though, it's a seller's market after all (for now).
I’ve worked with a Polish dev team (in Wrocław). They were really great. However, for the same price I’d much rather work with local people. The Polish people we worked with came to California for months at a time. Being in the same time zone and room was really helpful.
Their English was generally good, and what they lacked in spoken English was usually made up for in good written documentation. But the time zone means remote work not as valuable (same goes for our English colleagues).
I'm no expert and try to judge based on what I personally experienced, and I get your point. But I also know this is not how businesses operate. Having seen it from the inside, hearing those conversations, I know business decision makers would rather hire somebody locally than from abroad (from different jurisdiction) - if overal cost of hire was the same. But if you can get the same work done and pay less, then this is objectively worthy thing to be done. I have seen huge corporation pivoting towards outsourcing everything to India (software development, accounting, customer support, everything) because it was way cheaper than run those centers locally. This is becoming less and less fruitful since India had seen their wages going up in the past years, so at some point this trend may reverse.
I bet there are others who have different and maybe more grounded opinions, I only share what I experienced myself.
Oh, I absolutely agree – there is an overhead to hiring remotely (especially if you need to operate another business there, like Google does in Warsaw), so if you have to pay someone the same and cover that overhead then it's a bad business decision to do this at all. Timezone/cultural issues also come into this.
So yeah, I'm not surprised that businesses (try to) do this – but in the current situation it's worthwhile (and possible) for the hires (especially contractors) to try to go against that and argue for higher pay. Even if the actual SV salary is not within reach, you can at least try to stay within the same order of magnitude – and more often than not, especially at the end of the interview process, it'd be cheaper for the company to hire you anyway than to start over with someone else.
That's all in my narrow experience of working with smaller companies – in megacorps with strict levels/salary rules like Google it's probably another story. And that's also why Google is not (any longer?) the holy grail for Polish workers.
Lol. No they dont for l6-l7 ull get 200k TC a bit more if u negotiate well. For ny Ill get 500k. Trust me nyc is not twice as expensive as dublin paris or london. Also in usa they will give me 401k and free healthcare. In france or dublin ull get almost 50% tax and u will put money into a public pension that you will likely never see and that is shit
Market rates? Oof, I thought they were still more competitive. They flat out refused to discuss comp with me before passing the interviews.
Fascinating that now VC-funded companies are suddenly getting more and more competitive by not discriminating by region. Everyone tries to beat the market and they're more flexible regarding the employment contract, so eg. you can be self-employed and save 20% of your income from taxes.
One detail I haven't mentioned is that remote roles were also on the table. I don't know how remote, but it's telling that Google is ready to make such concessions.
As others have commented, this seems like a smokescreen rather than a real freeze. But as someone who wants to see every monopolistic company broken up or fail spectacularly, I think a hiring freeze at FAANGs is a great opportunity for talented people to consider growing a spine and working somewhere less big and lucrative. To people facing that choice, I would say this: The world is in a weird place right now, and you have probably in some aspect of your life realized that the status quo you have come to expect is unsustainable at best (and a death cult careening off a cliff in many cases). Being able to adapt and handle crises is rapidly becoming the most important skillset to have. Finding opportunities to cultivate it while still making a decent living is a lot less instability than people who aren't still sought-after technical talent have to deal with, and will likely serve you better than grasping at an illusory sense of stability.
For someone who seems to agree that this is a smokescreen it’s odd to continue on to admonish FAANG engineers for sticking with something that’s only illusory stable?
If it’s a smokescreen that would imply that no stability has been lost for existing employees there.
I am not claiming the hiring freeze makes the stability illusory, I am claiming that the entire concept of stability is fictional
EDIT: Actually, you've also missed my point in another respect: Even if there's a real hiring freeze the immediate impact would be on people seeking FAANG jobs, not those who already have them. Honestly I don't even know what you think you're responding to. Maybe you're at a FAANG and think I'm admonishing you? There's no need to be defensive. I am trying to offer advice, not to moralize at people
You don't really have a point, or if you do you're referencing it so obliquely and mysteriously it's almost completely impossible to tell what it is.
As far as I can tell you hate big tech. You think the programming job market will collapse. And it'll be good for us, as we'll learn to deal with uncertainty!
Dope, you want strategies for dealing with uncertainty? That's what we like to hear. There's a wealth of standard advice out there, but I can tell you the biggest three disparities between what I have gleaned from personal experience and what I see many others do:
1. Accept that nothing you care about in the future is truly certain. This may seem obvious, and it's good to plan ahead, but it seems like a lot of people get wrapped up in guarantees they think they have and panic when those guarantees don't pan out
2. Consider failsafes, contingencies, and alternatives an essential part of your planning. For example, even if you think your job is pretty stable, do you know what to do if you lose your job? Do you know where to look for jobs? Do you have a network of contacts in your industry? Do you have savings or investments that you can fall back on for your needs? Do you have friends who can help you? How much are you investing in skills, opportunities, assets that are unlikely to be valuable in other scenarios than the one you consider most likely?
3. Think in degrees and probabilities. When you're weighing the risk-reward of a plan that involves contingencies, you don't have infinite cognitive, financial, or temporal resources to devote to all of them, so you need to know what to care about. Even though failure to optimize a best case is often not as bad as failure to survive a worst case, sinking everything into worst-case planning for an unlikely scenario can still be worse than sinking everything into best-case planning for a likely one. Ask yourself: How bad is the worst outcome? How does it compare to the next-worst? The best? A different one that's equally good or bad? How likely do you think it is? How much do you have to prepare differently for it? What is the cost of that preparation?
My point is that the world will not give you guarantees. Yes I dislike big tech monopolies. I think it's apparent that concentration of power in tech as well as other sectors is a massive net harm to a lot of outcomes I care about, including the autonomy and privacy of individuals, the robustness of the economy to shocks, the capture of governments to privilege the needs of their industries over those of their citizens, and numerous more subtle latent effects it has on the social fabric of communities. That doesn't matter on the scale of individual choices though, and the point I have made was that if one is worried that the fortunes of these monstrosities will affect one's own career prospects, one should pursue strategies that do not rely on that not happening
I'm a pretty avid believer of Murphy's principles.
Your points above are definitely true, and I've been thinking hard about this myself for the past couple years.
My conclusion? I'm probably gonna keep my $300k+ FAANG job until the recession is over. That gives me more savings to fall back on in case something bad happens. It's ridiculous to suggest that it's a good idea to quit your job (or reject a high paying job) at the time when industry-wide layoffs are happening.
If your point is just about broader social responsibility and not fueling monopolies, you might have a point. But dealing with uncertainties on a personal level? Your advice about being prepared to lose your job and make sure to have enough savings and investments to fall back onto sounds a lot more reasonable than your initial toxic advice for people to reject a high paying stable-ish job at large corp right when the future is becoming uncertain.
When one makes two points that contradict each other, do they have two points or none?
As I have already explicitly clarified once in this reply chain, I am not talking about people who already have a job at one of these companies, or even people who already have gone through the interviewing process and have an offer in hand. I don't think it would even make sense for me to be talking about those situations in a thread that's talking about a possible hiring freeze, IE a decision within these companies to stop making new hires. I think it would be pretty foolish for an individual who already has a way to shore up their savings to give it up, and while sometimes making a foolish decision to take a principled stand on something can be admirable, I am not in the habit of demanding this of people
My hunch is that these companies are cargo-culting their strategies. The hiring freeze is as essentially a gut reaction. If one starts with layoffs, others will follow. The real problem is that companies of the Google scale will always need new engineers for particular projects and have a surplus for others. A global freeze or even layoffs simply don't fit.
The other side to this is that businesses tend to follow the leaders of the industry. So if engineer salaries were getting too high, they start a "freeze" which then cascades down to medium then small companies. However, the goal wasn't actually a freeze, it was to lower salaries, increase the pool of candidates and they can then find talent better. In a sense it is manipulation of the labor market and businesses that just follow the trends.
On the labor side, if talent is looking for work right now, they might accept less or even stay around longer during change in fear.
For VCs, this allows some time again for lowering investments, letting others play out and decreasing valuations.
While there is a slowdown and some macro market conditions, those are always exploited for companies looking to contain labor costs and increase availability.
There are some geopolitical elements going into it as well currently but in that case really it would make sense to hire more as the pools have shrunk due to division.
It is just another game really, there is no slow down or "freeze" there is a tightening, and the goal is constraining costs and increasing the pool of talent.
If I was in charge of hiring right now, I'd look at this current market as a huge time to increase hiring if you are set for multiple years. If a round is up soon, you might have to pull back. The "freeze" is a buy low moment of the market.
The best businesses I've seen work counter-cyclically.
When there are hiring freezes and layoffs, it's easy to find good cheap engineers and you hire. When job markets are hot, you put a pause on hiring.
The same goes for many other things. A recession is an ideal time for deep R&D. There's little competition, and it's possible to do long-term thinking. When the recession ends, and the bubble begins, you hit jackpot.
All of this requires deep enough pockets to weather a few years, though, and patient investors. That's rare.
Cargo culting for Google and Facebook make little sense organization-wide, since they do have deep pockets. They make complete sense employee-wise. No one got fired for following industry best practices, conventions, or cycles.
I couldn't agree with you more.
A FAANG-tier company with which I'm closely familiar pretty much did the worst thing every time during the past 2 years - they tried to tighten the belt when COVID first hit (missing a ton of great talent when the initial uncertainly killed off some of the smaller companies), then they tried growing and chasing talent really hard, right when the bubble was at its peak, and now that the economic outlook is negative, they've halted / significantly slowed down hiring.
My personal opinion is that Warren Buffett's old quote to be "fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful" rings really true.
The problem is when things are going well you have the sales and thus money to hire and pay more staff, when things are bad you don't have the sales and thus don't have the income.
You are absolutely correct. This is one of the best measures of how good/bad management is: how many people they keep around in bad times, and ideally hire. Any idiot can manage a company when there is a ton of money coming in, it takes real talent to manage well in hard times.
You need a counter-cyclical business to really make that work however. And given how interconnected things are these days, what out there is counter-cyclical?
Having a counter-cyclical business is helpful but not strictly necessary and actually not sufficient.
What is actually most important are a long-term outlook, backing from shareholders to pursue anti-fragility at the cost of short-term growth, and well-managed and well-protected cash reserves.
Few well-known, public or VC-funded companies operate this way, because collective greed is a far more powerful force than the desire to build an anti-fragile, long-lasting company.
And in a world where it's fairly easy to close a company's book and move on to start the next thing, and where the economy hasn't experienced real stagnation in over a generation, this arrangement of incentives makes sense.
Berkshire Hathaway has historically worked this way, as an example. One of Buffet's basic playbooks was to combine the books of cyclical and counter-cyclical businesses, and harvest temporarily high prices of the former to plow into the latter, and vice versa.
You don't need a counter cyclical business, what you need is somewhat counter cyclical funding.
You develop during recession when it is easy to hire people, and when the economy is on the up side of the business cycle you have a product that's ready to sell.
> My hunch is that these companies are cargo-culting their strategies
Yes most of these tech companies are the same. Their strategy is based off what other successful companies are doing. Also they want shareholders / investors to be on board. @paulg himself started this run with an email telling investors and companies to turtle up and stop hiring.
The whole thing has become a self perpetuating loop.
Companies also use this type of thing as an excuse. You'll be seeing companies blaming their poor performance on this downturn for the next few years long after it's all over.
Or they both over-hired and are taking similar steps to lean into natural attrition.
As for new engineers and surplus of others, I'm sure they'll be moving people around. A backend dev on one project can move to another backend project. Same for frontend, mobile, etc. So little of the work being done at these companies is massively specialised as they all have mature systems you're weaving together to deliver solutions.
> The real problem is that companies of the Google scale will always need new engineers for particular projects and have a surplus for others. A global freeze or even layoffs simply don't fit.
Markets are trying to communicate the exact opposite: tighten the belt and focus on core profitability.
Just because Google can continue to throw money at idea after idea doesn’t mean that investors want them to.
Is it just doing what markets expect? They currently expect the companies to signal hiring freezes, thinking it will lower costs and increase profitability... Probably started by some that needed to do something and now rest just follow.
We're not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now.
It does show that the billionaires are kind of enthusiastic though about the coming recession and economic pain being inflicted on the lower classes, and getting those uppity workers a bit more under control. They're not so worried about asset prices / stock prices / sales / etc and probably correctly assume that everything will rebound just fine for them.
Very often advertising is the fist thing companies cut when they run into problems. Google and Facebook are both advertising companies and they control very large section of that market. It's possible the data they are seeing is showing them problems ahead for the whole economy.
We are by the most common definition: two quarters of negative GDP growth.
Some folks in the US are weirdly insistent that recessions are defined by the NBER -- a self-appointed group of wonks at a private and secretive non-profit. But they're just one measure, and an arbitrary one at that.
> We are by the most common definition: two quarters of negative GDP growth.
That’s a common rule of thumb, but not the definition.
> Some folks in the US are weirdly insistent that recessions are defined by the NBER
These people include the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics [0] and the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis [1], among others. The US has used a tripartite definition where a recession has three required dimensions, “duration, depth, and diffusion”, for a long time; the 2-quarter-decline thing has long been cited as a guideline for the duration component, with separate rules of thumb sometimes cited for the other two. [2]
[1] https://www.bea.gov/help/glossary/recession – stating “The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private non-profit research organization that focuses on understanding the U.S. economy.”
No, recessions are by definition “significant, widespread, prolonged” declines in economic activity [0]
[0] from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/recession.asp but the three dimensions are, with various terms, common (BLS and NBER use “duration, depth, and diffusion”, CD Howe Institute in Canada uses “pronounced, persistent, and pervasive decline in economic activity” [1].) The two-quarter-GDP-decline rule is a rule focussed on the prolonged/persistent/duration dimension, but which does not capture the other two dimensions.
> "decline in economic activity" is a decline in GDP.
No, GDP is one of many measures of activity in the economy.
Also, “significant, widespread, and prolonged” are important qualifiers, and quarterly GDP is relevant to at most two (significant and prolonged) of them.
> Nobody defines a recession as a decline in employment
Not employment alone, no. But income has long been recognized as part of the multidimensional set of indicators that determines recession.
The Congressional Research Service in a 2008 report wrote:
A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion. Expansion is the normal state of the economy; most recessions are brief and they have been rare in recent decades.
This is the generally accepted view among economists of what constitutes an economic recession. There is also a commonly cited "rule of thumb" that is referred to in the press. That rule is that a recession is two consecutive quarterly declines in real gross domestic product (GDP). But this rule does not always apply.
In 1974, the BLS Commissioner provided this set of rules of thumb for the depth (“significant”), duration (“prolonged”), and diffusion (“widespread”) elements of recession; note that employment is a factor in two of the three elements, just like output (at the time, GDP had not yet replaced GNP as the preferred output measure):
In terms of duration—declines in real G.N.P. for 2 consecutive quarters; a decline in industrial production over a six‐month period.
In terms of depth—A 1.5 per cent decline in real G.N.P.; a 15 per cent decline nonagricultural employment; a two point rise in unemployment to a level of at least 6 per cent.
In terms of diffusion—A decline in nonagricultural employment in more than 75 per cent of industries, as measured over six‐month spans, for 6 months or longer.
That's simply not true. Policymakers may speak about NBER's findings, but there is no formal recognition of them in U.S. law.
They are private organization, they do not release their decision criteria publicly, and they were formed by random collection of academics that decided to start a club. They are entirely self-appointed.
> > The governments formal definition is that the NBER decides.
> That's simply not true
Yes, it is.
> Policymakers may speak about NBER's findings, but there is no formal recognition of them in U.S. law.
Not all official government actions are done by Congress as law.
US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis says “The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research” [0]
US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics describes NBER as “the official arbiter of U.S. recessions” [1]
In case you're not aware, your response is heavily implying that FB's stock falling is proof of a recession. That's why they responded by clarifying that the drop is due to future outlook of investors and not the economy at large.
Stock markets are investor sentiment, they aren't the real economy. They're connected, but they're not the same. Black Monday 1987 didn't correspond to any recession.
Perhaps we can discard the classic "two quarters of negative GDP growth". But if we do, then from whose perspective does a 3% drop in real wages in six months [1] (and a 4.4% YoY drop in real weekly earnings [2]) not count as a recession?
First, is there any precedent for that restriction?
And second, why not? If everyone still has a job but their wages have decreased, that's still an economic contraction, at least from the worker's perspective.
Everyone is lower class than the billionaires. A millionaire footballer can be screwed over by the billionaire owner of the club. I really think it helps to see that the power dynamics exist even at that kind of level.
I thought the original comment was referring to all tech workers, ie not independently wealthy as the lower classes. But it's also true that below principal level at companies there is different treatment. Just like a cto gets treated better than the senior principal.
The billionaire class is currently worried about the whole of the working class, it goes well beyond SWEs at Facebook and Google.
But Amazon being worried about organizing in their warehouses and Google and Facebook freezing hiring of SWEs and Musk's comments about how workers have become soft and overpaid (or whatever it was, I can't find the quote right now) are all different body parts of the same elephant.
And SWEs actually are "lower classes" (plural) compared to billionaires.
There might be a hierarchy of value, but that to me doesn't imply lower classes in the normal sense. We're talking about people being paid some of the best salaries in the history of the world, and with very little personal risk.
It's kind of odd that people are this shocked about this. Google and FB have frozen various roles for various periods of time over the last 2-3 years. I'm guessing they have on and off for most of their existence. I just want clued into their hiring process then.
The freezes almost always are for lower level roles only (l3 or l4) and dont REALLY impact anything since these companies are pretty slow to begin with. The people impacted by this are early career folks who are likely interviewing for general swe roles at these companies and a slew of others.
FB and Alphabet will almost always still be moving folks with specialized skills sets through their pipeline and even if "no offers are going out" a L7 machine learning engineer or security engineer or android engineer who is already matched with a team is still getting an offer.
I'm not sure I buy that they're actually on a hiring freeze, but I may be wrong. The day before it was announced I got a text from a google recruiter literally saying feel free to contact me on 8/8 (after the freeze is supposedly finished). I feel like this was definitely a show for the shareholders, and a way to drop your dead weight. Everyone seems worried about employee productivity and profitably all of a sudden, or at least they're pretending to.
My advice is only if you know what you're doing, there's always a job for you.
In big companies, I've seen hundreds of applicants interviewed to start work on a project, when the project had already been cancelled months ago, and none of those interviewed were hired.
They'd already made it into the interview pipeline, and management hadn't let recruitment know that this position was no longer needed, so all the interviews went ahead as scheduled.
Hundreds of person-days wasted! The reputation of the firm damaged, good people missed (would you re-apply soon after being rejected?)... And I don't think this is a rare story.
If you're a recruiter and your entire job is to find and interview candidates and there's a hiring freeze but you (the recruiter) haven't been laid off... what are you going to spend your time doing? Finding and interviewing candidates.
> Moreover, these freezes materially affect our business.
Related and slightly OT, but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company. Which, in retrospect, of course that it makes a lot of sense and I get it, from an economic pov, but I still find it kind of strange.
I had recently become quite bearish on these companies (especially Google and FB), this type of info only reinforces that opinion, you cannot truly innovate while you're employing people who see working there has an end in itself. Hope that monopoly-like thingie will continue to work for them (again, I'm thinking mainly about FB and Google), otherwise I see dark days ahead for these two companies.
> but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company
I've made xxk of side income every year over the last few years working for companies that help people land at faang companies. It's a huge business.
If you're an average swe making 100K-150K and you could spend 6 months and xk-xxk to be making 200K+ for the rest of your career, its a pretty easy decision.
Inevitable. Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. Most of the Googlers I know have been spending 20% of their time on Google and 80% on side projects for the past year now.
Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable.
That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic.
Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.
Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.
I just don’t get how this is possible. Every single company I’ve ever worked at (large and small) has had at least 10x more work in the backlog than could possibly be done with the staff they have. Everyone’s JIRA queue is stuffed full, and since there is so much work, things have to be brutally prioritized and even high-value stuff has to be cut, since there are just not enough people-hours to get it all done.
Where are these companies/teams who have nothing to do, or so little to do they have time for side projects??
Just because you have a full JIRA queue doesn't mean any of the work is worth doing. Management tends to want to build empires, and that can mean taking on projects that don't contribute at all to the company's bottom line, or are so high-effort/low-impact that any sane company wouldn't even bother with the project. See also Google's new chat app every year, or how companies decide to rewrite their UI every six months, refactoring legacy code that works just fine, chasing the latest framework du jour, etc etc etc. Teams tend to take on work on a whim, and there's rarely anyone at the top keeping tabs on which of the projects are actually useful vs just spinning your wheels.
> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job
Sure, but Google and other big tech have a completely different problem. Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail. This lets them take moonshots, but also makes it easy to slip into making bad investment decisions. For example, green-lighting a team to build another chat app.
> Their one product makes so much money, that there is not a natural forcing function for other ventures to succeed or fail.
This is what appalled me about Pichai’s productivity comment. Google may not have high productivity, but that’s not its problem. The company has just drifted since Schmidt stopped running it, reminiscent of Microsoft in the second half (and before?) of the Ballmer period. The ladder-climbing PMs are running the show and there is no overall strategy.
Before I left Google, and in the BeforeTimes(tm) Schmidt came to our Google office in Waterloo and did a little all-hands thing and spoke. Not in a capacity as Google mgmt or decision maker but as himself. It was interesting.
One of the things he said that stuck out to me was basically "I am baffled how these really large teams you have can work I can't imagine software development working well beyond a handful of engineers before the telephone game problem kicks in" [paraphrased].
at the beginning of the 2007 real estate debacle, right after the markets had shut down, Eric got up in front of TGIF and told people it was going to be OK, that Google was in a better situation than most, and since things would eventually recover, it made sense for the company to continue being aggressive at a time when others were not. This helped position Google for tremendous growth in the years after. I think that's also the TGIF where he announced a company-wide 10% raise.
I met Eric later and we chatted about my project and how Google should be more aggressive at getting into Cloud. He and I thought on pretty much the same wavelength and I realized- he was a far better leader of Google than either Page or Pichai.
He's a smart guy but honestly, I think he also lost touch just like Page etc.
When he came to Waterloo to visit it was because he happened to be in Toronto pitching the Sidewalk Labs "spy^H^H^Hsmart" city thing. Remember that? Look it up. Fiasco IMHO. To me, being deeply involved in that debacle is indicative of a kind of business and intellectual arrogance that seems out of touch with reality.
He used to bring Henry Kissinger in for "fireside chats" at Google. He seemed/seems very fascinating by this kind of ... technocratic realpolitik. Google playing around in that area is a really not good look and did not in general get good reaction from the staff and looks really dubious in the current era.
There's enough ungrounded conspiracy theories about Google, they don't need, y'know, actual conspiracies.
But as a manager he definitely seemed to have a better sense of how the day to day operation of a large engineering firm can work.
Not knowing anything about how Google works internally, this is very much how it looks from the outside.
They just don't seem to be able to make products that anyone wants. And the products they made before which people did want just drift in a generally worse direction as they fiddle with them randomly over time.
They have no coherent vision. As a consumer I have no idea what I'm getting with a Google product, or what their ethos is. Their products and features are always randomly baked together, without any coherent story. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I can't rely on any of it. This is why I moved to Apple eco system last year. Google as a company seems analogous to the Linux eco system; TON of duplicated work across different teams, none providing an actual complete solution for day to day use. Such a waste of talent.
The more likely scenario for most is that there are other people or mechanisms making the money, or that they're living off the success of previous efforts. It's not necessarily their fault at a company that large, sometimes people are just grossly under-utilized or misallocated. People can just vanish in a manner of speaking, by getting forgotten about or by having your responsibilities taken from you but not replaced.
If you have some producers that aren't "pulling their weight" then that just means you have others that are pulling 2x+ and still only making a fraction of the actual value they provide.
I'll be the first to agree that FAANG and friends have ridiculous overhead and way more engineers than I think is necessary but these companies are making money hand over fist. If we are looking for fat to cut I'd start with management/execs in most cases.
Respectfully I have two qualms with your thoughts here, first is that lack of effort from one person must mean extra effort from another to balance out in some way, you could easily have people not pulling their weight but still be producing based on some leverage or multiplying factor in your business. More effort doesn't always equate to more value. Some businesses are just spinning their wheels, keeping themselves busy, while the core value generator keeps ticking over. I worked at a 10 man company that was turning over millions a month from automated lead generation, we could have all walked away for 6 months and it would have kept making money.
The other is just that it's not a realistic way to look at a workforce, especially in software, hours and effort don't equate to an "output" neatly. Most software companies are in the business of making value producing automations, not producing the raw value themselves. You can have one production engineer in a factory completely eliminate someone's job with a nifty insight that took him an hour to spot, now that person isn't pulling their weight (because their job doesn't exist anymore) but the business is more profitable, for one example.
> If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day
This is irrational. You're only able to generate $50m in revenue because a giant multi-billion dollar apparatus exists and is maintained around you and that is not free. In almost all circumstances you were not the sole driver of that revenue.
That doesn't matter. If your two hours are a key component in the work needed to make that $50m then nothing changes - you're still brilliant and asking you to work longer is still silly.
If you're only providing a component of the work you are not contributing the full $50m. Thats why the statement is still irrational. This argument waves "look at all this value I bring" is hyperinflated and thus dishonest to pull out every time this gets discussed.
I'm not saying good engineers can't bring disproportionate value and should work/be compensated commensurately. I'm saying stop gaming the numbers like a Goldman Sachs accountant.
>That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic.
That's not the argument for layoffs. The argument is that that role shouldn't exist at all and should be swallowed up by another FTE instead.
> you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant
Or you're working at a useless user hostile company that's coasting on tools and ideas from a decade ago while failing hard at everything it does today.
> And some people are holding multiple full-time jobs doing that sort of "work" glares at /r/overemployed
I would be highly surprised if there are any meaningful number of people who each hold multiple $300k jobs simultaneously. I just don't see how that would pass the hiring process.
Maybe not 300k but /r/overemployed has a private paid discord that I checked out for one month out of curiosity, there are some extremely legit appearing people in there showing their setups and I fully believe the $$$ figures they are throwing around on the discord, not so much the sub itself but definitely on the paid discord there are some people with multiple lower 6-figure salaries laughing all the way to the bank while more upstanding people are carrying the bulk of their work load.
Googlers responded to a questionnaire back in March and complained about bureaucracy. I'm not sure how you avoid moving slow in a company with 170k people though.
Big tech went on a crazy hiring spree the last few years, and it's time to take breath and figure out how to best handle all the new people (the productivity demand). Typically this also means new hires need an increased level of justification, and they'll let natural attrition take down the headcount.
Apple has a ton of engineers and they are able to pump out high quality products with really cool features. Its possible, but it requires focus (look at how limited Apple's product line is compared to Google) and it does require people in leadership positions with very clear visions, which Apple definitely has.
Perhaps the productivity should come from fixing whatever level is deciding to make another chat product, again. Fix the bonuses and you'll get better productivity.
My process with Google just stopped. No further update form the recruiter. It just went on silence. Sometimes it feels like I made the right choice not changing to Klarna early this year and staying at my current work.
In our industry, the interview process is completely divorced from the skillset required for the actual job.
Fittingly, this is because Google developed an interviewing process that was scalable, required minimal training, human-interactive or soft skills, and was objectively measurable (leetcode), while non-obviously biasing the interview process towards cheaper, younger interviewees. It is also an interview process that is utterly incapable of differentiating low skill from high skill engineers. For Google, which needed a way to choose between the very best resumes in its pile, this made sense. For the rest of the industry, it does not.
But apparently our industry just does whatever the "big players" do, blindly, so here we are.
Our industry is big enough that there are plenty of people not aping Google, and conducting different kinds of interviews. As someone who has been doing this for a while, I'm pretty appreciative of people who 'think differently'.
Ads market may be peaking as would inevitably happen. I’m increasingly seeing google and Facebook make idiotic decisions that clearly improve ad revenue at the cost of user retention.
I recently started searching cpp documentation and the only thing that comes up is copy pasta sites. I need a new search engine, and I just deleted instagram last week. YouTube now runs multiple back to back video ads.
Maybe this is just a pause, or a momentary restructuring- but all markets peak eventually.
What's going on is there is a giant recession half-cycle heading our way and Google (don't know about FB) have teams of folks whose sole job is to forecast these cycles.
My bet is they are seeing which way the wind is turning and battening down the hatches.
I think they're trying to push down salaries, there's still plenty of hiring for technical roles. Recruiters, marketers, sales reps on the other hand..
I tried getting an interview for one of those LinkedIn posts and even though I had a really good starting point (successful internship within the last few months plus an internal referral from someone working in the group I applied for plus being a good fit based on my skills and education) I wasn't even invited for a first interview, only got a generic rejection by email.
So I don't think these postings are all real.
I don't understand how they could have Google's true job posting numbers. Many of our postings are for general SWE roles, and that posting could hide any number of actual openings.
Do not confusing job posting with openings. Companies have often posted advertisements for jobs they had no intent of hiring anyone for. The purpose is investors see those ads and think the company must be growing, even though management knows more people in that role would not translate it more profits in the future.
It’s a way to filter out more experienced candidates because they want cheap and young. Even a Meta recruiter admits to me that Leetcode has nothing to do with the job, it’s just a company requirement that no one questions.
Sure, these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance and indeed they shifted more and more from general intelligence assessment to algorithm coding assessment. Solving the algorithm is only part of the equation though. Writing readable code, explaining your thought process and decisions and communicating well with the interviewer are also vital points of the assessment. Is it a perfect or even good proxy for job performance? I dunno. Do we have a better one within a 40 minute interview? Not really. Past experience is unfortunately also a weak indicator, starting with the question if what's in the CV is an accurate reflection of the truth. There is also an interesting cultural aspect to lying on your CV.
Every approach comes with its own unique set of problems and as long as the position is sought after people will prepare and try to game the system.
The opinion of a recruiter on the matter isn't really the most relevant either. Especially Google should have quite some data on their various approaches and correlation to job performance and seems to use it. E.g. the trick questions were abandoned as they didn't show a correlation to job performance.
> these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance
> Past experience is unfortunately also a weak indicator
If past experience of doing the actual job is bad indicator and these test are not a good proxy, then according to your logic, experience is worthless and we should all optimize for these tests.
And this is exactly what is happening in the industry. Younger professionals spent hours memorizing Leetcode because they just graduate to pass the test. Older professionals having years of experience and family obligations don't.
> Writing readable code, explaining your thought process and decisions and communicating well with the interviewer are also vital points of the assessment.
Maybe to you, but I have seen many candidates get an automatic fail if they can't solve 2 questions in 50 minutes. The key metric being 2.
> Especially Google should have quite some data on their various approaches and correlation to job performance and seems to use it.
Source?
> Every approach comes with its own unique set of problems and as long as the position is sought after people will prepare and try to game the system.
The questions I see don’t use any tricky DS/algo that needs memorising. They are all solved by some loops and a simple data structure like an array or dictionary. If you can’t use those comfortably then you probably aren’t actually going to do well at the job. I don’t practice at all for interviews and have had no problem passing, I get an offer maybe 70% of the time.
If anything companies are desperate for experienced hires and give them really softball interviews. If you are a new grad you get grilled hard but if you are going for staff+ then you get asked some generic soft questions and a fizz buzz
> The questions I see don’t use any tricky DS/algo that needs memorising.
That's kind of anecdotal. If it was that easy, everyone would pass. My experience has been entirely on the interviewer. The younger the interviewer, the more they have to prove by giving dynamic programming or direct acyclic graph questions. I am not denying your experience, but it just isn't universally true.
The implication is not that the questions are easy for the average person, but the questions are relatively easy to programmers talented in solving these kinds of questions (even if they don't actively grind problems on leetcode).
I personally think it's true that there might not be a high correlation between being good at solving leetcode style problems and being good at software development in general, and there's definitely a valid point to be made that some FAANG companies are essentially off feeding unconscionable ad money to a class of "smart" people who can leetcode without a bitter grind.
But when people complain about mandatory leetcode grinding, I just can't help but find it kind of ironic that they're simultaneously feeling bitter about not being able to get that $300k+ job, yet also feeling self-entitled because they have some so-called industry experience (which may or may not be relevant), and also proud of forgetting what they were taught in their CS curriculum... I suspect the Dunning–Kruger effect is strong in those cases.
At the end of the day, it's a job. If the employer wants you to grind LeetCode to get the job, then yes, you are going to have to do it. It still doesn't make it right though. I have no problem having to jump through hoops, but it does grind my gear when programmers use LeetCode as a badge of honour to show they are superior than others. Elitism within the LeetCode community is very strong.
> If past experience of doing the actual job is bad indicator and these test are not a good proxy, then according to your logic, experience is worthless and we should all optimize for these tests.
How do you assess and verify past experience of doing the actual job? That's the tough nut to crack and that's why they ask questions to assess your ability on the actual job. There are a lot of decent engineers out there with tons of experience and there is an equal number of below average engineers with tons of experience out there. How do you hire just the top 10%? As most work is done in teams how do you verify the candidate isn't selling his teammates accomplishments for his own while he contributed little of value?
> why they ask questions to assess your ability on the actual job
You already said LC isn't an ideal proxy to the job. So I am not sure what point you are making.
If I work at Stripe for 5 years as a software engineer, are you saying I am lying about my experience? How about Google? How about Coinbase? How did these people survive for so long?
It seems like you default to the candidate being liers. Maybe you are young, but it will happen to you one day, once you learn the full-stack and then realize no-one cares because you need to pass LC to even get a job. Something you don't need because software engineering encompasses much muchmore than some DSA algorithm.
Unless the previous employer is known to fire underperforming employees quickly, and willing to explicitly say so during reference checks, how does a prospective employer know whether a candidate's $n years in $company is a productive one or not?
So you haven't seen underperforming people survive at large famous companies for multiple years? Are you sure you have that much experience in $bigco? How old are you really, since you say the GP is "young"? I wouldn't be so patronizing to others if I were you.
> I wouldn't be so patronizing to others if I were you.
Perhaps you are seeing it through the wrong lens. I am simply stating that coding is much more just DSA.
> How old are you really
If you don't know how rude you are, then I don't think we should continue this conversation. It seems like you do not know how to respond to someone you disagree with using manners. You are entitled to your own opinion as I am. Being confrontational and asking someone's age outright doesn't make your case and tells me you lack basic social skills.
Well obviously it's not working well, I've meet better engineers in the defense and automotive industries than I have at google -- which to be honest is better for everyone when you think about it
If they are paying 30% less then they will be competing against late stage startups. They have a cash cow to help tilt the lever to their advantage. However that 30% is unlikely to make older workers works more because they have other family obligations. Priorities change in your 30s.
How can large companies with high turnover like Google and Facebook afford to stop hiring engineers? Do they downsize teams, shut down projects, or something else?
My recruiter told me Google's attrition rate this year has been one of the lowest in recent memory. Fears of recession could have to do with that. People don't want to take the risk of leaving a "stable" job.
A legit Google recruiter emailed me about multiple roles this week. But then, that’s just the kind of quality (none) and attention to detail (nil) I already have learned to expect from Google.
That’s actually a fair theory but I doubt they really know when the hiring freeze will be over. On the other hand, when can any business really predict the future flawlessly? Never. But they could include a line addressing the risk.
Even if the recruiters are wrong about the freeze it’s the candidates (not the recruiters) who get negatively impacted, so the incentive is there to keep recruiting
For what it's worth, Meta offered me slightly after the hiring freeze was announced for a security engineer position (L4 IIRC). I'm interviewing with Google for Security Engineering as well and still they haven't told me anything about a hiring freeze yet.
How does this jive with their very recent purchase of the Thomson Center in Chicago?? They also announced they'd be hiring over 4000 people to fill it (making it the second largest google hub in the world)
If I was an exec at either company and hiring was all of a sudden a bit less competitive and/or I had better access to top tier employees at other companies who were now more amenable to being recruited... I would certainly hit the "freeze" button for a few hiring cycles to recalibrate around this new reality. I would not need to look at my business plan or P&L to do that.
Very simple, an economic downturn leads to any public company looking at their cost structure and polishing up the numbers. Big companies accumulate a lot of organizational debt where teams, departments, and individuals under perform for whatever reason and often not even because of their own fault. Corporate stupidity, and mismanagement, are also things that plague big corporations. Just look at Google lately.
Regularly pruning the org tree is both something that needs some level of excuse as it would otherwise upset the rest of the org tree; and needs to happen once in a while. The people least likely to leave by themselves are usually the once targeted explicitly. So, any kind of economic down turn is usually a good moment for that. Doing it wrong means your best people leave first, which is usually counter productive. So, you have these trillion dollar companies shedding a few crocodile tears over having to say goodbye to a few not-so-valued employees and using all the usual euphemisms, cliches, and woke language for that.
So, classic targets for layoffs are HR (ironically), supporting functions like IT, middle management, people promoted to their level of incompetence (Peter principle), etc.
Someone needs to tell Meta's recruiters that there's a hiring freeze because they keep contacting me about open positions. While they're specialist positions, they're not extremely niche so it seems if there's a freeze, it's not a very cold one.
I don't know why anyone still needs to ask, but we're still in the early stages of a globl economic meltdown, despite what you might hear (or even not-hear) from politicians.
This may also be a big mistake by Google. I fully expect other companies such as Apple will take advantage of this mistake to hire even more in specific areas.
They aren't. There is plenty of hiring if you are in one the priority areas (AR/VR, AI/ML, short form video, ads, privacy) or if you have specific skillsets (ML mostly). Other teams will have trouble getting headcount
Both companies derive nearly 100% of their revenue from digital advertising. Digital advertising can be lucrative. It can also go away in a second. If there is a recession the first thing every company cuts is their ad budget. Facebook and Google are preparing for a recession. They probably have indications that one is coming. They can't wait for it because it is going to hit them first.
I literally saw a new job posting from Google yesterday.
Either way, hiring freezes usually happen before layoffs. The freeze allows the numbers to naturally reduce as people leave and they aren't replaced. Then they can move on to laying off the remaining number of people they need to reduce by.
I think companies have had to lower expectations for new hires over the last several years. These companies now see an opportunity with a slight market correction to freeze hiring to deal with the lower performers and possibly replace.
Estimates put the workforce for AWS at ~100k-200k right now. AWS income is ~80b right now according to their Q2 earnings release. Based on these numbers, a person working for AWS is making Amazon ~$400k in revenue. The profit for AWS at the moment is 30% according to the Q2 filings and nets out to ~$24b. So, assuming 200k employees for AWS which is very software-developer heavy says they are making at least $120k per developer in AWS. If they think they can continue that trend, they should be hiring every last engineer they can get for less than $280k a year. If they think they can grow their margin, they should be hiring up to an even higher number.
Those precious margins will be their competitor's opportunity. Right now the cloud cartel is happy to all grow quickly and pretend compete with each other, but once that stops the margins will thin out.
These are mostly warehouse jobs because they had to ramp up drastically during the pandemic, but don't need as much capacity now. They are still hiring SWEs.
My money is on Amazon being more fine with "aggressively pruning their workforce" on a regular basis. The point of a hiring freeze is so that you can move employees around internally to prune unprofitable parts of the business without pruning workers.
Does anybody know what's going on with Walmart Global Tech? A couple of weeks ago I was told I got great feedback and was moving on to the final step which was a call with a VP. Then silence for two or three weeks and no response when I email. Will they come back?
Walmart’s tech hiring is a complete and total shit show regardless of the economy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they never get back to you.
In fact (and you didn’t hear this from me), I’ve never witnessed a higher density of incompetence than when [SWIM] worked as a coder at their home office. Don’t work there if you want to maintain your sanity.
Interesting and well written article supported by factual data. I wonder if this is a temp thing, or if it is another early warning that regression is coming. Is a major regression coming?
The Google internal propaganda game must be crazy strong if the actual employees are believing random management explanations designed to keep people from panicking. The US just formally entered a recession, in within a week of the economic turmoil multiple companies freeze hiring...
We entered a technical recession by the "two quarters of contracting GDP" rule of thumb, but labor numbers are still strong and that second quarter contracted less than the first [1], which is not what we've usually seen when entering a recession. [2]
I've never understood how strong labor numbers negate a recession. Like sure your money is worth less because of all the inflation, and your COL keeps increasing but your wages remain the same, but hey we have lots of people working.
Maybe somebody smarter than me can explain how these two correlate lol.
When asset prices increase quickly, everything is fine, as the wealthy are benefitting. When wages increase though, that's inflation and we must tamp down hard on it!
Given the obviousness of the consequences, it's hard to imagine the Greatest Minds In Monetary Policy haven't foreseen the fact that labor is hurt and corporations are effectively subsidized when enacting such policies. So it must be intentional.
At this point it's just an argument of what constitutes a recession. The NBER definition requires a "significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months."
There is lots of leeway in there for defining a recession to be whatever you want to be. However, I think a GDP contraction of 1% (and decreasing) combined with robust job growth and increased spending would not classically qualify as a recession.
It's clear that the Fed is attempting to slow down the labor market and kill demand. Combine that with ongoing supply chain issues and it's not clear to me whether we are entering a recession or that there is transitory pain from war in Europe and sudden bumps in borrowing rates.
I don't know. Are we still adding 370,000 jobs per month? What kind of GDP contraction are we talking about? 1%, 3%, 5%? Is the GDP contraction increasing or slowing from the prior quarters? If we went from -1.8% to -1.5% to -0.9% and we still had robust job growth I would probably say it's not a recession.
But again, what does it even matter? Seems like people are only arguing about this to score political points. If you think we're in a recession, you might be right. If you think this is transitory, you might be right. If it weren't an election year we might not be having this conversation at all.
Maybe not even then? GDP dropping while employment, spending, and demand increase indicates an economic expansion coinciding with a decrease in labor productivity, which is extremely weird and not at all like a conventional recession where the economy contracts. Different terminology might be required.
Additionally, with inflation at such a high level (9% or so), the last two quarter's real GDP growth estimates (-1.6% and -0.9%) are small percentages compared to the size of the error bars on the required inflation adjustment to compute the real GDP. Computing inflation is tricky and requires a lot of hand waving and boiling down different price changes across different sectors of the economy to get a single number, and if the calculation is off by even 1% (i.e. inflation is actually 8%), then the real GDP growth for last quarter would be positive at 0.1%.
This is also happening at the same time that the US dollar is getting increasingly valuable vs most foreign currencies, so measured in terms of foreign currency value the US real GDP is still increasing, which just compounds the weirdness.
Putting all of this together, I don't think the term "recession" is a good fit.
Strong labor numbers means wages would be increasing. Perhaps not for all income deciles, but at least the bottom ones (which is a good thing in my opinion since it helps close the income/wealth gap).
What would be an issue is the labor participation rate decreasing, which it is, but it may be unavoidable due to things like aging demographics. That means fewer workers supporting non workers, and hence less supply of labor to be distributed amongst everyone (assuming it is not offset by gains in automation).
I think this will be the government’s real problem, as there is no quick fix other than opening the immigration doors.
> Strong labor numbers means wages would be increasing.
Wages are increasing, that's one of the inflation drivers people are complaining about.
> What would be an issue is the labor participation rate decreasing, which it is
Not per FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART It's quite clearly still rebounding from the covid shock. I think you're trying to say that the long term trend is clearly downward. But the subject at hand is the immediate economic environment ("strong labor numbers", "hiring freeze", etc...).
And clearly there's nothing wrong instantaneously with either participation rate nor wages. Those numbers are in fact good, not bad.
Real wages are not increasing. The ‘Real’ part of real wages means after adjustment for inflation. See link, we’ve been going straight down in real wages. We are already back below pre-COVID wages. That means we are back to wage levels around 3 years ago. In any job if you got no raise in 3 years then you should not look at that as a good thing - and that’s what has happened to everyone, on average after accounting for inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
That's arguing about leading/lagging indicators, though. Wages go up with inflation, more or less by definition. Wage increases due to inflation can't be measured until after the fact, though.
Short version: "inflation" is not remotely the same thing as "recession", which seems to be the point you're trying to make. If your only evidence for an economic slowdown is prices and not production or consumption, you're likely confusing factors.
Clearly the truth is that the labor market remains strong. Most people are working. Most people have multiple choices in jobs. Most people are making more money (yes, in nominal dollars) than they were last year. Those are all signs of a healthy economy. They are not the only signs of a healthy economy, and there can be other aspects (like inflation) which are less desirable[1]
[1] Though probably 80% of the people who like to yell about it don't really understand it well. Inflation, by reducing the size of existing investments and debts (i.e. "stuff wealthier people have") relative to the economy as a whole (i.e. "wage levels for everyone"), acts naturally to reduce income and asset inequality. It's not entirely a bad thing.
You are intentionally conflating nominal and real wages, most people are not making more money. In real wages they are declining as per the link in my previous comment. If you make $100K per year and your expenses are $100K you make zero. If you make $150K but your expenses are now $150K then you have not made any increase in wages in real dollars. Wages are not flat or going up with inflation as per my link, they are actually declining significantly since COVID.
And my point, which you missed, is that this is a confounded argument. "Real wages" are an after-the-fact metric, you can't measure it in immediate data because wage growth and inflation are highly correlated.
And the other point, which you skipped, was that this was a digression anyway from the upthread discussion about whether or not the labor market indicators are "strong" or not. And they are: wages are tracking labor demand and growing at the same time participation is growing. That means the market is operating well (and, FWIW, that typical models would expect wage growth to continue to match inflation, as it generally does in functioning markets).
Both inflation and wages are lagging indicators and thus can be used together to get real wages historically. Correlation to inflation does not mean anything other than inflation and wages both increased, you can be highly correlated but not exactly correlated. Real wages demonstrate both wages and inflation in a single metric and they are not increasing at the same rate, real wages have been declining continuously since 2020. The strength of a labor market (low unemployment) just means people that are looking for jobs can find them but doesn’t measure the wages or inflation, that is determined by real wages. You can pay anyone more but if it doesn’t buy more it is still a pay decline.
If you zoom in on the FRED graph, you can see the recent rebound participation rate peaked in March, and has started a (slight) decline in the last quarter.
Don't do that. You're literally interpreting noise as signal. Look at the random wiggles elsewhere in the graph, they're the same size as the thing you're trying to interpret meaning from. Economics data just doesn't work on the timescale you want it to.
> Strong labor numbers means wages would be increasing
How can you equate these two? Couldn't strong labor numbers also be indicative of an economy in turmoil, forcing many people who no longer had to work back into a job to get by? I guess what I'm trying to say is, shouldn't we be taking a look at the data holistically instead of nabbing one good data point and using that to promote a narrative? Inflation, COL, real wages, unemployment, and many other factors all contribute to the overall picture. Why aren't we using all this data instead of focusing on unemployment only?
That’s exactly right. Real wages are not keeping up with inflation. Inflation is confusing everyone who isn’t used to seeing it. It’s ludicrous to think we are not in a recession just because more people retired in the last few years due to COVID and exited the workforce to artificially keep the unemployment rate low. Participation in the workforce declined something like 10% - I don’t have the time find the exact number. But we still have a lower overall workforce than pre-COVID. The 100K per year jobs are declining in availability but there’s millions of jobs at fast food and retail available. It’s obvious that it is purely political as to what makes a “recession.” Meanwhile lots of tech companies have lost 70-80% of their value. But the largest companies, apple, google, and Microsoft are holding up, we all know the small businesses go first.
Nope? For most people Year/Year and also over the last quarter, real wages have gone up. It is only for the most highly compensated workers (top 10% or so) that wages have not kept up with pricing. [0]
Real wages have gone significantly since 2020 when COVID hit per the below link. This inequality index website includes both labor and capital - meaning not just wages but income from stocks. Yes the stock market has gone down, the rich own more stocks, and so rich made less money. Wages, the payment for only labor has been declining in real terms due to inflation outpacing wage growth. See this link and the sharp decline.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> the stock market has gone down, the rich own more stocks, and so rich made less money
My link shows that real factor income for all but the top 10% of earners is up which includes wages and capital income.
Your FRED link will have to contend with the fact that those most likely to be unemployed at the start of the pandemic are lower earners which is going to shift up the wages for 2020.
The website you linked as I said includes capital and pretax income which is an absurd way to measure “income.” That includes stocks, 401K, houses, etc. if someone owned a house, the value went up, but if someone didn’t own a house their actual wages are still worth only about the same as 3 years ago.
Strong labor numbers are often correlated with increasing wages (if labor is in short support, wages usually go up) but there's no direct connection; labor numbers could be increasing because people are being "forced" (or deciding to go back) into the labor force because the covid subsidies have dried up; those who took time during covid to homeschool, etc.
All of this all of it is just an attempt to measure if people "feel good" about how things are going, or feel bad; and the general consensus seems to be "things aren't great but they're not horrible ... yet".
The other thing to remember is that lots of economic reporting is 'standard spherical cow' type - inflation may be skyrocketing in the exact things that do not affect you - if you work from home in a house you own on a fixed mortgage, then perhaps the gas prices aren't directly affecting you.
If you're a independent trucker renting, then they hit much harder.
> How can you equate these two? Couldn't strong labor numbers also be indicative of an economy in turmoil, forcing many people who no longer had to work back into a job to get by?
Because the other side of that is that there exists sufficient and growing demand for labor to accept the people wanting to sell their labor.
It is an economic principle that very low unemployment leads to competition for wworkers via increased wages, which help drive inflation up (as the increased labor costs lead to a more expensive output). The inverse is also true. So, central banks prefer inflation to not be zero, but not be high either (often, central banks have inflation as one of their target numbers that drives their policy).
“Real average hourly earnings decreased 3.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, from June 2021 to June 2022. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.9 percent in the average workweek resulted in a 4.4-percent decrease in real average weekly earnings over this period” [1].
I don't think looking at mean wages is the best to get an answer. Real median income is up Y/Y and the past quarter, driven by the still largely tight labor market. [0]
In fact, you are incorrect. Real wages have decreased YoY. Anything can be classified by “strong labor numbers” by people who are trying to deceive you. Remember this next time you turn the TV on or open a newspaper.
I am getting my information from experience from people who are hiring in the bottom 3 income deciles or so.
Certainly not academic, but I also do not think national statistics captures the entire picture. The nominal wage is also not the entire wage, as quality of life at work can be going up which is also a type of wage.
People can be earning $40k per year, but having to do less work in prior years, for example. Or no longer having to work weekends or evenings or nights.
Either way, the desirable changes for labor sellers would be a reflection of the change in labor supply v labor demand.
Economists have always kind of applied an "I know it when I see it, typically after the fact" sort of test for recessions (the two-quarter thing is a rule of thumb, but isn't taken that seriously). But just "there's highish inflation" wouldn't normally be considered a recession, and it is unusual to have a recession with very high employment; historically nearly all periods that ultimately get called major recessions have significant joblessness as a feature.
Demand-driven recession means there is insufficient demand which leads to decreased production and a level of slack in economy (real GDP lower than potential GDP), while unemployment is a manifestation of such slack.
If you have decline in GDP, but no unemployment, it may be due to supply issues, increase in friction and other factors (i.e. decline also of potential GDP).
Hopefully I'm not being snarky here, but if you looked at another country with a smaller economy, and then saw that they employee fewer people, would you be equally confused?
Only if you then proceeded to tell me that because less people are employed the country has a lower standard of living and is more economically unstable. As a direct example of this, Sweden's unemployment rate is 7.6% right now[0], and it's historically been quite a bit higher than the US's. But people say that it ranks #1 in terms of quality of life[1]. Additionally, their unemployment rate is not negatively effecting their growth[2].
So in answer to your question, yes it continues to confuse me when people try to equate employment numbers with the overall economic status of a country. You don't take any number in isolation, you look at the data holistically, and sometimes you have numbers that seem to be at odds with one another. When that happens, it requires a deeper investigation to see what's truly happening instead of taking the number you like better and using that to promote your narrative.
I suspect that if gas prices had started coming down earlier it would've brought inflation down enough that real GDP for Q2 would've been slightly positive.
I think a lot of people took covid as an opportunity to retire and will not come back which is reflected by low labor participation numbers. Unemployment is basically the same as it was pre-pandemic.
We are in a strong labor market in the sense that demand continues to outstrip supply (although this is weakening for higher paid workers in the top ~10-20%) but there has been a negative shock to supply from covid.
Sure, but if you consider what is causing these layoffs: anticipated weaker aggregate demand -> less demand for ads but also less demand for workers -> weakening labor market.
I mean, the Fed's goal right now is basically to slow wage growth so that average people are no longer bidding up the price of our limited supply.
Put yourself in place of a 30 year old who has only known a world where you're a highly in-demand whatever "in tech". You've never seen a day since you graduated where you're not flooded by recruiter emails. You've never worked a job that isn't 30 minutes of work and then the rest of the day is posting "day in the life of a FAANG employee" Tiktoks or being a paid activist.
What's coming is nearly unimaginable. At some level you know it's theoretically possible, but before your eyes even accept that reality you're going to go through some painful stages, beginning with denial.
I don't fault anyone, especially anyone who graduated in '10 or later for this. I just hope they are preparing for this.
This comment is setting off all of my "culture war" alarm bells that typically I do not find on HN. References to TikTok and "paid activists", "never working a job that isn't 30 minutes of work."
I'm not sure if I am supposed to take these claims seriously or whether they are exaggerations to paint a picture. Obviously this caricature doesn't describe the vast majority of engineers at Google or other "FAANG" companies.
> I don't fault anyone, especially anyone who graduated in '10 or later for this. I just hope they are preparing for this.
The '20 post-covid labor market was weaker for graduates than in '08 [0] and hiring in tech is more challenging.
Anyone from the US who graduated in '10 had 9/11 as the formative event of their childhood, followed by the Great Recession just as they reached workforce age. For almost their entire lives, the US was at war, and for every day of their lives, they watched the climate get worse. They know in their bones that they're growing up in a world worse than the one their parents grew up in, and that it's largely the fault of institutions that were morally reponsible for protecting them and failed to do so.
They've been preparing for doom since they were weaned.
Spot on. There is a huge sense of entitlement from SWEs in FAANGs right now, and from the various folks I know at FAANGs, Google is worst since mediocrity and unproductiveness are not confronted because folks are scared of being 'ungoogley'. Every company has its dead weight that others have to carry, I think Google has much more and has been getting away with it because of all its profits coming in.
Google's definition of productivity is different than yours.
In general: Code reviews are strict and long. Style and structure matters more than anywhere else I ever worked. Everything requires extensive testing. You better have a design doc / PRD, some tickets, good commenting, and unit tests.
People will happily point out and roast you for any potential bugs, race conditions, deadlocks, bad style, and sloppy work.
Mediocrity in this regard is not generally tolerated. The standard of development is much higher.
But yes, it's slow. If that's your measure of productivity, they'll fail.
Except it doesn't matter because the goal of a SWE at Google is mostly to keep the ship sailing.
Aside from the debate about 'formally*' entering a recession - if you do abide by the strict two quarters of real GDP decline rule, the economy still added ~2 million jobs during those same two quarters and the economy grew at a nominal ~6%. I don't think we're quite to the "economic turmoil" phase of things.
Decision makers are now starting to openly push for moves to increase unemployment to get wage "inflation" down.
I feel we're about to enter into a situation very similar to the early 90s, and we'll see a wave of pro-austerity politics and a lot of talk about "tightening our belts" -- slashing employee rights and social programs and cutting all kinds of social spending -- which is really about re-instilling labour discipline.
I suspect here in Canada the temporary foreign worker program is about to have the floodgates opened. Employers, especially small businesses, are really not happy about having to pay more than minimum wage, and they're very unhappy about having their authority in the workplace undermined by workers with seemingly excessive bargaining power.
The situation in the US is obviously more complicated by their messed up immigration system.
I have no idea what will happen myself, but it all feels a bit different. I think a lot of what's going on are still shocks from the pandemic, supply chains, and geopolitical stuff.
Not to mention the middle boomers are entering retirement age right now. This exact scenario of boomers leaving their jobs and creating an employment vacuum in their wake is something I've been hearing about for 30 years.
Why is it any different if the government takes out a loan to pay for work instead of someone like GE doing the same? If someone takes out a loan, and then spends the money building a plant or hiring employees, the economic activity is real..
It's the age old problem of once you choose the system of measurement, it's going to get manipulated by the people who get measured by it. GE is not going to rack up a bunch of debt for the explicit purpose of making sure the GDP number goes up. When the government creates a bunch of money just to make sure the GDP number goes up, GDP stops being as useful at telling you how things are going.
The confusion in the public stems from the fact that the news media selectively reports on recession in different ways depending on which party is in power. They ignore your fact when one party is in power and they highlight the "2 quarters of no growth" rule of thumb instead. Then when their guy is in power they go out of their way to say "Akshually a recession isn't defined by that it is defined by a committee."
Well, its just 1 example because BBC and Reuters were only in your Imgur link with a timestamp saying in 2020 that it was a recession.
And in your only example the person (Ben White -- CNBC) explicitly call out a double digit decrease in their claim of recession. The current situation is not a double digit decrease so it's not hypocritical. Certainly somebody is going to be hypocritical in when they call a recession but Ben White's two comments you've quoted aren't.
The U.S. has been suffering from incredibly divisive politics for the last several years. It's not exactly shocking that a company would lock down internal discussion forums.
Eventually they’ll come out ahead because it will be less divisiveness and more cooperation. There is no positive that comes from political activism at work
Yeah, I'm not too sure that either Basecamp or Coinbase's systemic business issues are going to be resolved simply by an absence of political discussion.
Yes look at how well Trump supporters and non-Trump supporters get along and work together. Do you think that’s productive for a workplace? Some things are just obvious as hell
Don't think the Apple thing was as impactful to Google as it is to other players. I think the primary problem is that attribution becomes difficult, not that impressions plummet.
From my perspective: They've got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.