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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

> Employees whose projects will not continue were told they’ll need to find a new job within Google by the end of January 2023, or they’ll be terminated.

It seems sensible to cut very experimental stuff first.

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And it's good that they're giving them time to transition internally instead of just laying them off. Now the hiring freeze makes more sense, if a team elsewhere is desperate to find an engineer, this is their chance.

It doesn't work like this. If there is a hiring freeze in place, it means that internal headcounts are also limited. The "desperate team elsewhere" must have money to pay for the new engineer.

I've also seen people who had to transfer in a month and couldn't find a team and were simply terminated- because no other team wanted them.

They’ve also been given a very reasonable amount of time to find a replacement job internally - and I imagine there are a bunch of teams who want more people but can’t recruit due to some degree of new hiring freeze.

As noted earlier, the other team would need an open headcount, whether they are hiring from outside or doing an internal transfer. If Google management waived this requirement (unexpected in a time of belt-tightening), the article didn’t mention it.

Is it sensible that Google went on a hiring spree in 2022 while all other tech companies had already started to freeze hiring? added an enormous-for-them 30,000 new employees in a quarter, then asked all employees how to fix "productivity", and finally decided to cut down on research teams (~100-200 people?) that represent less than 1% of the new employees they added in the previous months.

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