What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon: MAGA

"tldr options" @ https://equity.ltse.com/calculators/tldr-stock-options is an eye-opener to see just how meh the packages offered are.

And yet these people exist and get hired, even at Google. Perhaps not on your team, but they’re definitely there.

How is the world does one become a proficient kernel engineer? Without already being at a FANNG.

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.

It's a weapon. Otherwise it would not be there.

Its the inefficiencies of the first price auction.

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"...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hiring processed has changed though, so I'm not sure if this is still true.

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.

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

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.

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.

Of course this is all hearsay. I don't know how real that figure is, but it's not particularly inspiring so I don't see why would anyone lie about it.

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.

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.

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!

Woo hoo.

But you have no actual advice on how.

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 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.

The tech bubble is popping.

> 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.

which has nothing to do with investors

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it is dead & dying though. Nobody would start asking brainteasers if Google went back to doing it.

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.

Agree

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.

What do you think GDP actually measures?

A hurricane that kills 1000 people increases GDP for instance.

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).

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.

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.

My sense would be that Google has such high $ earned / employee compared to other major tech employers it perhaps has less dead-weight.

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.