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Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
- code4tee 6y agoA lot of companies are cutting back big time on advertising spend and that’s Google’s sacred cow of revenue so this isn’t a surprise.
- kenhwang 6y agoI work in digital advertising. Spend* is up. Companies are diverting their traditional advertising budgets into digital. I'd be surprised if Google is unable to capitalize on this. edit: I want to clarify it's strictly ad spend/booking. It's companies committing budgets. They know they will want to run ads and will run more ads. The ads haven't actually run yet, so ad payouts will tank.
- janesvilleseo 6y agoIt depends on market segment. We have seen a contraction for the vertical I work in. BUT the big players are spending more. It’s the little companies that are pulling out.
- testfoobar 6y agoCan you give an example segment of big players that are spending more? Insurance? Automobiles? Clothing? Entertainment?
- janesvilleseo 6y agoThe vertical I work in is Legal. It is probably one of the least elastic when it comes to demand. Courts are closed, but that’s temporary. I have spoken to a lot of firms across the nation. The firms who are in better financial shape see this as a time to acquire market share. Some practice areas will see a bigger demand in the coming months.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoThat is totally not true across the board. I know for a fact that at one point the big online travel sites (booking.com, expedia.com) were some of the largest buyers of adwords among any companies. Can guarantee that is not happening now. I would guess spend is up only among companies that still have robust revenue. Tons of sectors have essentially been frozen for the time being.
- kenhwang 6y agoAh, yeah, can confirm the travel segment cratered into the ground. I can see adwords being an unpopular product overall at the moment. It's just an awful format for rebranding/storytelling/marketing.
- aabhay 6y agoThis is super interesting. I never thought of search ads from the lens of storytelling, only from the lens of click through. Interesting that a lot of SEO-built brands have no way to even reach customers to repair brand now, since search volume is so down.
- eitally 6y agoI suspect this is one of the reasons advertising on Instagram is going gangbusters. The combo of better targeting + a format that naturally lends itself to storytelling makes for a much more compelling advertising platform.
- sytelus 6y agoIf I was running travel business, I would be selling 20-50% off coupons set to expire in December, 2022. This does reduce future revenue but will at least normalize the hole today a little bit. I know many people would jump on deals like this.
- pishpash 6y agoI like the idea of futures on everything.
- code4tee 6y agoHow does that pair off against the reports that YouTube channels are seeing their ad earnings cut in half as digital ad spend drops? Don’t doubt there are companies going against the tide but seems clear as spend has declined. Clearly an opportunity to get good rates for those looking to spend.
- kenhwang 6y agoGoogle's advertising focuses heavily on ROI/CTR metrics min-maxing and for the most part, well timed and targeted ads. That's not what companies seem to care about right now. Everyone is running feel-good awareness campaigns. If I had to guess, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat will come out of this better than Google would.
- lainga 6y agoOn all types of ad units?
- tootie 6y agoJust had a conversation on this in another thread and the consensus was that spend is drying up and ad-based businesses are struggling mightily. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873272
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- streptomycin 6y agohttps://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/ https://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/ down like 30-40% year over year. Which matches what I've seen at my sites.
- chrisfrantz 6y agoThis is a cool resource, thanks for sharing.
- dehrmann 6y agoNBC is cutting back on ad slots[1]. > The ad reductions will occur in news programming, late-night NBC and Bravo shows, reality programming, competition shows like America’s Got Talent and other cable originals. The only reason they're doing this is they don't have enough buyers to fill the slots. Traditional media is great for brand advertising, but it's so hard to show ROI, I can see the wisdom to shifting budget to Facebook and Google. 1: https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/nbcuniversal-will-permanently-reduce-linear-ads-amid-covid-19-crisis/ https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/nbcuniversal-will-permanentl...
- pcurve 6y agoI think... there will still be work. I think it means they will be going heavier on contractors, so they have more 'cushion' to preserve FTE when things unexpectedly go south. At this point, companies simply don't know how the rest of the year will pan out.
- dchyrdvh 6y agoI feel so much optimism in your "the rest of the year".
- cardiffspaceman 6y agoI have been asking my friends to speculate how us pandemic survivors will be different from other people in the future? How we will be characterized in novels? How would Sherlock Holmes distinguish us from the privileged ones who by luck of birth were not involved in the pandemic? Dr. Watson would say, after Holmes spotted the survivor, "If you worked from home for two years, you'd behave that way too." I always pose this a little more colorfully, but the part that gets the response is the two years.
- topspin 6y agoYou hope. The consequences of this lockdown frenzy were never going to remain limited to just service workers and shop keeps. I predict a sudden increase of interest in more flexible policies as professional workers start getting pinched.
- the_watcher 6y agoIt's briefly mentioned in the article, but Google actually shed jobs during the financial crisis. Facebook is the company that ramped up hiring newly available talent.
- xxpor 6y agoThrough layoffs or attrition though?
- topher200 6y agoAttrition
- magicalist 6y ago> Facebook is the company that ramped up hiring newly available talent. Yeah but they were like 500 employees back then, so only really significant as relative growth.
- nostrademons 6y agoEric Schmidt says that's the worst mistake he made as CEO of Google, though. They were well-positioned to clean up all the good engineers in Silicon Valley (lots of cash, solid business) and instead Facebook catalyzed their growth. I think they haven't forgotten, and that's why this isn't a blanket hiring freeze, it's them getting more selective. (Technically, '09 wasn't a hiring freeze either: I was hired in Jan 2009. My Noogler class had 13 people hired across all of Google for the 3 weeks it covered, and half of them had received their offers in July '08 - so effectively it was a hiring freeze.)
- gbronner 6y agoMakes sense if they can't onboard the talent, and can't manage a 100% distributed workforce. Nevertheless, seems like a great time to acquire talent on the cheap, so long as you can effectively use it.
- tootie 6y agoAnecdotally, I've been told they require you to come onsite to get onboarded and receive Google hardware and their offices are locked up. Some recent hires are not able to work and now being paid to do nothing.
- prophetjohn 6y agoThey are mailing out the required hardware and doing remote onboarding for the time being. But hardware shipments are getting delayed leading to some new hires being paid to do nothing for a week or two.
- nostrademons 6y agoI've heard on-boarding is totally remote now - they mail you a badge and a laptop and the laptop has the requisite forms and software pre-loaded.
- hamandcheese 6y agoAren't most Google employees paid to do nothing?
- sytelus 6y agoActually it doesn't. Everyone is working from home. We have little idea when this may end and if there would be next waves. Fully functioning without need to be in-person is absolutely essential for every tech company. If your stack is so undocumented that someone must sit down with you and give every single new hire 1:1 hand holding in repetitive manner, something is very broken.
- tehlike 6y agoThis is the outcome of crazy hiring, more than you can actually make use of in the past few years.
- denormalfloat 6y agoWith the number of people who go through Google's interview process, this might actually change the industry to think more carefully about the interview process. If Google isn't making whiteboard interviews the norm, who will keep it going?
- a1pulley 6y agoI’ve been stuck in the final SVP approval part of their hiring process for a week. At this point I think I’m just going to keep my current job. Too bad — seemed like a good time to get equity at a good “strike” price
- jdm2212 6y agoFWIW Google hiring is just generally really slow. Give it a few more days.
- Analemma_ 6y agoI think everybody who interviews at Google gets “stuck in the final process for a week”. That’s kinda how they do things. I interviewed there and they rejected me at the final stage after many days of no-communication; but they told me I almost made it, which made me feel good until I talked to other people and found out they say that to everyone. Still: best of luck to you :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoIf you made it to the full slate of interviews, you're already in the 1% of top applicants. If you made it through to hiring committee submission as well, you were very close to getting hired (they don't even try otherwise) and they're serious if they suggest you try again later.
- o10449366 6y agoGoogle has a notoriously slow hiring process. For new grads and internships, the time between initial coding assessment to final hiring confirmation is often several months.
- drdeadringer 6y agoThey've been slow on "poaching" experienced folks as well. One person I know was offered a king's ransom to switch to Google, refused a "please stay" premium from the home company, and it still took half a year to walk through the door.
- codingslave 6y agoGoogle is a one trick pony that just took a baseball bat to the knee. I hope covid knocks them from their heights and forces them to create better products. Years of easy advertising money from their search monopoly has led to internal rot and fat, a thinning of the heard could force them to use their employees productively. Or alternatively, nothing will change, they will experience no pain, and the world will go on in six months.
- Antoninus 6y agoThis guys got it figured out. Do you have a blog?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- defectbydesign 6y agoHow many jobs will go to India?
- 0xFFC 6y agoAs third party observer, why this gets downvoted? I’m genuinely asking.
- _IsThisRealLife 6y agoProbably because it is perceived to be a fairly uninformed question. It's sort of like talking about the USPS potential insolvency and someone asking how many postmen will be replaced with gig economy workers. As far as I'm aware, major leading American tech companies have never really exported jobs to India, it has been almost entirely companies that need mediocre quality work contracting out to companies that fill those contracts with workers from India or elsewhere. Without carefully developing an office, culture, and employee pipelines over 3-5+ years you carry extremely large risk outsourcing important work.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- defectbydesign 6y agoIs it a joke? In many industries it's not uncommon to subcontract a service by a subcontractor which himself subcontract the same service to another subcontractor (usually cheaper). In the end it is only a question of money! Actually top american tech companies don't have to go directly to India to get cheaper workers but instead they call american subcontractor to get cheaper workers anywhere in the world. Even more with restricted green cards thanks to Donald TRUMP. :-)
- eitally 6y agoi don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right.
- kediz 6y agoI recently posted a Ask HN asking about the effect of how drop in ads money would affect Google/FB and someone did a quick and dirty analysis for their runway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042
- xenihn 6y agoPeople on Blind are posting that it's more than just slowing.
- whoisjuan 6y agoIt can't be more than a simple slow. This crisis decimated their revenues while increasing their huge subsidized operational costs like bandwidth. Take for instance YouTube. Just imagine the cost to operate the site increasing exponentially overnight (because of all the quarantined people) while their ad business goes down. You're in the worst possible situation for a business with a model that is heavily dependent on that particular ad revenue. That's like a supermarket having three times more foot traffic but people only buying gum.
- xenihn 6y agoI mean it's worse than just slowing down hiring (according to Blind).
- pm90 6y agoOn the contrary they’re getting a lot more eyeballs so YT has never been in a better position. Advertisers can reach a large chunk of the populace through YT now. When things go south is when consumers stop purchasing. The unemployment and cut in disposable income will have a massive effect on purchasing power... but the federal government is deficit spending like crazy. So... it’s not clear what the consumer market will look like just yet.
- mywittyname 6y agoThe threat to YouTube has also never been higher. The spike in usage means that YT needs content creators to make more, but also earn less money. A forward-thinking startup could capitalize on this by paying content creators more to migrate to their own service, and work to get the attention of those eyeballs which are bored of YT content.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI don't think Blind is a trustworthy source for this kind of thing. I know some companies that are actively hiring - new employees still showing up every week - but have been reported to be on a freeze.
- paxys 6y agoI wonder if so many layoffs, freezes etc. happening at the moment are directly due to the crisis or something that was long overdue and can now be done without much negative PR.
- third_I 6y agoIf you must ask, it's probably because you think it's a little bit of both. Anecdotally, I wonder the same thing myself.
- babesh 6y agoThat was the case in the past several recessions. The only question is the relative mix in each company. And then if this recession persists then more and more knives come out as people fight each other for jobs within each company. Many people behave like shit when their livelihoods are on the line. Fun times. Also this bloodletting is happening at several levels. The VCs are performing the same decimation to their portfolio companies that companies are to their workers and vendors. Departments or groups in the company are drawing up lists.
- third_I 6y agoThat sounds like... exactly the reality of such times, indeed. Well worded. There is a question, each time, of concurrent or even deeper cycles coinciding. The last recession is often thought to have been a prime factor in the revolutions of 2011 (Arab Spring etc). Regardless of their eventual conclusion, the push is deemed to stem (as always in history) from the economic situation. European kings knew all too well that hunger is a pretty sure path to insurrection. I wonder, given the predictable magnitude of this (by predictable I mean "even if we low-ball it"), what will happen in the next few years worldwide, and in particular in the US. I reckon "Occupy Wall Street" didn't really go far itself (although it's very likely a major factor in Bernie's rise in the years after, among many other things ofc). I expect to see a much deeper, less superficial reaction this time. A real history-mover. Time will tell. The initial reaction from the private sector we're witnessing as we speak is unprecedented in magnitude already; hitting the middle-upper class super hard (when Occupy Wall Street was mostly a lower-middle class fight versus the lavish establishment, from one extreme to the other; this is by contrast very "core"). Biological knowledge points to the current perception largely underestimating the eventual situations we'll have to face for the next 12-18 months (at least, assuming we are extremely lucky with a vaccine on first try, essentially; which I've heard no expert claim as particularly easy let alone a done deal, they're all cautious and don't even claim to be "certain" a vaccine is even possible, although "confident" certainly). Could be 24, 36 months of living with this thing disrupting the economy left and right, two steps forward, one back, two forward, three back, and on and on. The bloodletting and free-for-all has only just begun. I'm extremely afraid it'll be worse than any of us has seen since before WWII.
- defectbydesign 6y agoOpen source foundations will go to bankruptcy without subsidies from Google and others. Are you ready for the dot com bubble 2.0? :-D
- zelly 6y agoDeath of open source? Don't get me excited
- defectbydesign 6y agoDeath of unfair competition from communist organizations living on private money from anticompetitive tech giants. Open source have to die to give back value to the software industry.
- SSchick 6y agoI guess I'm lucky I got my approval just today. My recruiter did mention things are slowing down drastically.
- wanderer2323 6y agoCongratulations! It's a great place to work with amazing people. Source: got hired not that long ago.
- lawrenceyan 6y agoIf even Google, which is pretty much the pinnacle of Silicon Valley tech, is slowing down, imagine what the Chinese tech scene must be like.
- kediz 6y agoComparing Chinese tech companies with Google here feels like comparing apples and oranges and also "Chinese tech companies" is too big a entity to be compared with a single company. But scenes at Yahoo/Reddit/Baidu and other smaller ads-driven companies aren't pretty
- dehrmann 6y agoByteDance is hiring 10,000. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/bytedance-launches-global-hiring-spree-in-middle-of-virus-tumult https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/bytedance...
- bogomipz 6y agoAs a counter point there was an article the Wall Street Journal two days ago that large tech companies(Apple, FB and Amazon) are all looking to hire: https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-still-hiring-11586712423 https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-s... Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.
- defectbydesign 6y agoThe tech sector as many other industries is always recruiting cheaper workers anywhere in the world to make more profits distributed in priority to the leaders. Nothing new in a capitalist world...
- edoo 6y agoThis is just getting started. Everything is so interconnected. Each chunk of the economy that falls away will have a cascade effect that takes weeks or months to knock the next piece out. Once everyone finally heads back to work it will take years to regrow everything to the point it was.
- tehjoker 6y agoFingers crossed for the end of surveillance capitalism.
- sytelus 6y agoBefore everyone starts painting bleak picture, reminder: Facebook's Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated hiring spree this year, opening massive 10,000 more positions! Google as well as Facebook both depend on ads so I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion.
- ronyeh 6y agoA lot of people are on Facebook and Instagram all day, stalking friends because there is not much else to do. There are only so many Google searches I can do in a day. Many of them end on Amazon where I may or may not purchase something.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hobofan 6y agoIt doesn't matter much if they spend much time on their platforms now if advertisers stop advertising everywhere.
- csallen 6y agoExactly right. For example, many media organizations right now are reporting record traffic numbers, but are struggling to make ends meet as advertisers pull out.
- Robelius 6y agoIs there actually any numbers people can point towards? I’ve read similar comments over different forum postings about advertisers tending to cut advertising during times like these to help their financials. And it makes sense to me. But now I’m sitting here, just wondering if anyone has actually looked at numbers during other financial downturns. Or is it just some catching conversation that’s been kicking off....maybe I need to go outside and smell some fresh air.
- amrx431 6y agoI just chickened out of Google interview last month. I dont know how I feel now.
- zelly 6y agoThe whole world is suffering. Why did you expect to be immune just because you're a...checks notes...codemonkey?
- zelly 6y agoGood. Shut down the bootcamps. Stop telling people to learn to code. Lower the salaries. Move companies out of SV and spread across the country. We are long overdue for a bloodbath like 1999. It's not over until Level 10s are laid off and the computer science departments are empty.
- Panini_Jones 6y agoWho hurt you?
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.md/SIXk8 https://archive.md/SIXk8
- gunnihinn 6y agoMaybe the travel, restaurant etc industries have stopped paying for clicks so Google gets less cash? My work cut down on PPC by a lot and we spent a lot of money on it.
- jhwang5 6y agoOne color I would add - hearing the tax season deadline moving to July drastically reduced the ad spend from tax filing software services companies. Of course, ad spend is also just down overall.
- DeathArrow 6y agoSo what? They have enough money to last trough years of economic depression. Long term plans might be as important as short term plans, or more important. They don't send a good signal to investors. Micromanaging makes sense when you are in deep trouble - see LA Times. Is Google in trouble? I believe not. Yet they send the message they are in trouble.
- varjag 6y agoAs this crisis has illustrated, early inaction can get you into later trouble.
- Ballu 6y agoSeems like some layoffs too, https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/1228108429505351680?s=21 https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168...
- cletus 6y agoSo years ago this came up with Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google through the GFC. After 2007, Google had selective layoffs (probably not in engineering) and slowed hiring. They also paused construction projects in Mountain View and probably elsewhere. Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused significant growing pains later. Is the situation the same now? I'm not so sure. I think this economic shock is potentially far more serious and could last much longer. But also, I don't think Google really knows what Google is anymore. We're long passed the mission statement of making the world's information accessible and useful. And certainly my impression from working there (now >3 years ago) was that even then there were a ton of teams and orgs that didn't really have a reason to exist. Have people sitting around and they will find things that "need" doing. I saw many a project that was simply rewriting something where I at least had questions as to the real need for that. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy as they say. And there was (and I imagine still is) too many layers of middle management. The ideal is (IMHO) CEO -> SVP (PA level) -> VP -> Eng Director -> Manager (of managers) -> Manager (of ICs) -> IC. That's 7 levels. I don't know what Google's mean org depth is in engineering but my guess is it's closer to 11, maybe even 12. In fact this would be a good metric: Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees) where Mean org depth = Mean of how many layers each IC has above them
- DeathArrow 6y agoIn times of economic depression is best to build and acquire, if you have the money to do it. Acquire skilled people (it would be much harder to do it after crisis), buy land, buy companies, build buildings, build tech.
- izacus 6y agoI think it's also important to look at scale - in 2007/2008, Google had ~25.000 employees. Now it has over 100.000. If I'm looking at the graph correctly, Google hired 20.000+ of those in last year or two. The size of whole company in 2007! That's a whole different ballpark than what hiring was in 2008. A slowdown in this scale can easily mean "just" hiring more people than anyone else.
- xtasy 6y agoDamn, will be interning this summer. I guess conversion to FT will be even more unlikely now
- austincheney 6y agoIt will be interesting to track the frequency of Google walkouts while the economy has tanked, hiring has slowed to a crawl, and layoffs could be in the future.
- zabil 6y agoI've also seen slow hiring and hiring freezes used by orgs to reduce head count by letting natural attrition take over. IMHO it is better than layoffs.
- ipqk 6y agoOne thing is that people just aren't leaving their jobs in general. Most hiring rates take into account natural attrition, but if your attrition is close to zero, then you just have to scale back your hiring to even hit the rates had planned before the crises.
- throwawayc2020 6y agoOoof. I've been studying for months for my upcoming virtual onsite interview at Google. I wonder what this means for my interview. I was also recently laid off.
- wuunderbar 6y agoAsk your recruiter.
- mardanian 6y agoI was also preparing for an interview and received a call from my recruiter that the position has cancelled.