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Google slowing hiring to “technical and critical roles” only
- jameshskelton 4y agoIt's easy to forget that these systems have so many players in place outside of the technical roles, but they're the ones that keep the ship moving. I will be curious if this has an at all stagnating affect, but this is Google, so it is doubtful.
- papito 4y agoSo the companies that actively sucked up all the new graduates because of the glut of cash now have to learn frugality. Poetic, don't you think? It's not even a sign of bad times - the times are totally normal. What was happening was abnormal. A software engineer who does't care about gaming the FAANG Leetcode interview process is still valuable - even more valuable.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- rootsudo 4y agoGoogle and Amazon keep sending me emails, so I guess not so much slowing! GCP site of the house for the latest role, Engineer, SRE type.
- metadat 4y agoI am still getting the mails too, but as a hirer myself, I can tell you the mails and LinkedIn job postings are the last thing to get turned off. Right now probably isn't a great time to negotiate an impressive comp package with Big-G, Facebook, Oracle, SAP, or Netflix.
- daveidol 4y agoBut what about stock prices? May be a good time to reach a particular equity package that is likely to go way up in the future vs fewer shares at a time when prices are high.
- xvector 4y agoRight now is the PERFECT time to negotiate an impressive comp package at FAANG! Comp bands themselves aren't changing, only the numbers of hires are being reduced. If you are good enough to get and pass the interview loop at FAANG during a recession, the company really wants you - so you can probably negotiate the maximum comp package - which is doubly beneficial as stock prices are low right now. Source: I and some of my friends have recently received offers from FAANG
- l33t2328 4y agoSRE is software reverse engineer, correct?
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoSite Reliability Engineer. Basically an extremely high-level sysadmin.
- shadowgovt 4y agoSite Reliability Engineer. Broadly speaking, Google divides software engineering into two categories: - software engineers, who create, initially maintain, and develop long term maintenance plans for software - site reliability engineers, who keep existing products healthy, deal with unexpected complications in realtime, and continuously engineer improvements on how to do their jobs so they can carry more and more active software per SRE.
- myself248 4y ago> keep existing products healthy Are we talking about the same Google?
- saagarjha 4y agoSomeone needs to keep things running for search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, …
- shadowgovt 4y agoWe are. Because of Google's sheer size, it does have user-visible outages, but the ratio of outages to (uptime X services supported) is pretty much best-of-industry. ... it has to be, because at their size, outages are catastrophic for people.
- savant_penguin 4y agohttps://www.redhat.com/en/topics/devops/what-is-sre https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/devops/what-is-sre
- deleted 4y ago
- ls15 4y agoThat seems technical to me
- mdm12 4y ago> In Q2 alone, we added approximately 10,000 Googlers... Maybe it is okay to slow hiring if 'normal' is ten thousand new hires in three months
- metadat 4y agoThey must have a lot of churn, that's a significant percentage of their entire workforce.
- ceras 4y agoMost of that is growth, not churn. Alphabet has hovered around 20% net headcount growth per year for awhile, per their earnings reports.
- compiler-guy 4y agoI don't think churn is particularly high as a percentage of total workers. The company really is growing that fast. There have been over ten-thousand positions open via careers.google.com in the last several months (although I expect that to shrink in the coming days). And 10K isn't that unusual of a quarterly number. No inside info here, just noting that that kind of hiring is par for the course.
- metadat 4y agoI know for a fact GCP is a shit show, so I'm sure they've been manscaling it.
- altdataseller 4y agoEvery engineer says that about their own products. My Amazon buddies all say AWS is a huge shitshow and my Microsoft buddies say Azure is huge mess. Technology is chaotic by nature
- metadat 4y agoIt isn't my own product :) Thomas Kurian is a special kind of chaos. But yeah, no clouds run themselves. Only GCP is a spectacular kind of mismanaged, since 2018 or so. Anyhow, who cares! :D cheers @altdataseller
- erganemic 4y agoOof, I've got an L3 interview with Google in a little over a week. Hearing about hiring slowdowns like this is making me wish I'd been more aggressive with my interview timeline, but I'm not sure I've prepared enough as-is. If I'd gone any faster I /definitely/ wouldn't have had enough time to refresh on DS&A and grind out Leetcode. I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special (and not that hard to get into!), but for a recent grad with mediocre internships from the pandemic and minimal opportunities for development in the role I'm currently in, getting clout like that on my resume early in my career would be awesome. Here's hoping the slowdowns really don't end up hitting technical roles as hard.
- metadat 4y agoGood luck buddy, wish all the best for you.
- titanomachy 4y agoHN has plenty of people who say that, but I don’t think I would call it a consensus.
- yegle 4y agoAFAIKT Google's recruitment for SWE and SRE (system engineer ladder) are separate. If you did not pass the SWE interview, ask the recruiter if you can do an SRE interview. Hope this helps! Source: I went the process of failing the SWE interview but got an offer as an SRE.
- ignoramous 4y agoIt isn't to mean that SRE is any easier...
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThere are two separate tracks for SRE, SRE-SWE (same bar as SRE) and SRE-SE (Systems Engineering). While SE has a lower coding bar, it's arguably the harder of the two since they make up for it with Linux internals etc.
- AnotherGoodName 4y agoEvery single large company is expecting a long economic winter. I'm just stating this in case people fool themselves in any way at the moment. Things are bleak and those who aren't lay people have pessimistic outlooks.
- skippyboxedhero 4y agoFor advertising companies, yes...rates went up a huge amount last year, earlier this year I started hearing about companies moving ad spend to TV, flyers, anything but online because the ROI is so poor (and a lot of consumer-facing companies are facing a slowdown in demand after the boom last year left them with too much inventory now, this will impact advertising too). For companies connected to these trends or the capital cycle, yes...it is going to be bad, most companies that failed to IPO won't survive, a lot of the late stage flippers have already lost everything (they just aren't marking down yet). But this is a small part of tech, and a small part of the world. US tech had the fun on the way up...well, this is the next part. But the general economics of demand for tech are still good. The problem with large tech companies is that they took profitable businesses and then started hiring like mad and setting fire to cash (this isn't only unprofitable companies, Google is a tech company with a bureaucracy attached, the way that company is run is just comical). Tomorrow has come.
- the_watcher 4y ago> moving ad spend to TV, flyers, anything but online because the ROI is so poor So… deciding to move to channels where ROI is unknowable?
- UncleEntity 4y agoI feel for the kids these days, last couple years under lockdowns and now they probably won’t have too many entry level tech jobs out there since everyone seems to be tightening their belts.
- saagarjha 4y agoI can't speak much for those graduating this year, but anecdotally those who graduated e.g. last year had a very competitive market ahead of them. I'm hearing things from this year like not providing offers to interns, which is definitely going to suck for them, but the market overall isn't what I'd call "cool" yet though it's definitely moving in that direction.
- leoqa 4y agoAs a new parent, I was planning on leaving my current stressful startup for Google, as I hear it’s must more intentional and slower paced. Not sure what my options are now but I’m running out of steam during a recession that is projected to last for 1-2 years. I’m the sole provider for a young family and also my aging mother whom didn’t plan for retirement. Hopefully this all blows over quickly or I can harness resolve to keep grinding it out.
- blindfolded_go 4y agoIn a similar situation myself. No option but to keep going..
- poulsbohemian 4y ago>a recession that is projected to last for 1-2 years What leads you to believe this will be the case?
- arvinsim 4y agoDo you believe it will last longer?
- poulsbohemian 4y agoNo, I don’t think it will be more than a few months at most, which is why I was curious to understand why someone would think in terms of several years.
- aiisjustanif 4y agoWhat makes you believe it’ll be a few months?
- poulsbohemian 4y agoI'm not an economist, I'm just a guy, but when I look at the big picture, I see nothing but opportunity. We need more houses, which means construction and jobs. We don't have enough skilled labor, yet we have loads of people who say they want better paying jobs, IE: it's a training / skills problem and it's a pay problem, it's not entirely a bodies problem. We're at the start of a mass switchover to renewable energy in the world economy, and that's only going to mean jobs, revenue, innovation, etc. It's easier and cheaper than ever to innovate with software, meaning entrepreneurial opportunities. While college is expensive, access to education and information is borderline free, meaning more people can be more knowledgeable than at any time in history. Point is - all of these things should be economic catalysts and any recession is bound to be short-lived, especially since in the big picture the past few have all been relatively brief and there were clearer reasons for those to have occurred. Someone will probably talk about cost of capital and that kind of thing, but there's always money sitting on the sidelines somewhere and the market has a way of adapting to these things too.
- paganel 4y agoI know it's partially out of context, but to read about the CEO of a trillion+ company talk about "more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days", with focus on the word "hunger", is kind of neo-capitalist dystopian. Especially right now, as more and more people around the world are actually experiencing real hunger, not the made-up "hunger" meant to bring in even more profits for said trillion+ company. Completely tone-deaf.
- entangledqubit 4y agoThis looks like a more nuanced pullback than back in 2008 when it seemed like they stopped hiring almost completely. Back then it was more out of fear than logic. Due to the literal hoard of cash sitting around, any meaningful then existential threat would have required a large rapid change of the world economic order and demanded a large scale reorg and mass firings anyway - so they may as well have assumed the world wasn't ending and just kept hiring. That decision then really ended up mucking things up internally.
- bleue1 4y agoI am working as a Security Engineer(SE) for a (well-known; not FB) social media platform, and got an offer for a similar SE role at Google. Career wise, making the change will not necessarily make me happier; however Google's financial situation and stock perspectives feel better in this troublesome period, and makes me think that it will be better for my young family. What would you do?
- saagarjha 4y agoI worked at a well known, non-Facebook social media platform during a turbulent time where my grant went down 50% and the company went through a botched acquisition offer. Thankfully I was still compensated well afterwards and it didn't affect me too much, but I do know colleagues who had to reconsider home purchasing decisions. Google's not impervious to market forces, and I obviously have no information as to how it will perform in the future, but in general it's probably safer than smaller companies. If you don't have much of a safety net, or have specific goals you'd like to meet in terms of compensation, picking Google may not be a bad idea. On the flip side, if you like the culture of working for a smaller company, are confident in your ability to switch jobs on your own terms, or are compensated primarily in cash it may be less attractive to join. It's really up to you, but the only general advice I can give you is that it never hurts to explore your options and make a decision once you have more information, such as actual offer letters. I work as a security engineer and as far as I am aware there are still plans to hire additional headcount in our team and many others, so you might as well give it a try.
- Tade0 4y agoInteresting because I was approached by two different recruiters from Google in the past few months. I don't know if it's impostor syndrome or just sheer brand strength, but my first reaction was "why would Google be interested in me?". Judging by the tone of those emails it might be that Google turned up the heat in HR already and people are racing to meet KPIs.
- saagarjha 4y agoGoogle hires a lot of people for a variety of roles. I'm sure you're very good at what you do :) but also they're a large company like any other that has a desire to recruit new talent.
- kleinsch 4y agoGoogle recruiters will get in touch regardless of whether you have a chance of passing the interview or there’s actually a role open that makes sense. Just went through 6+ weeks after passing their interview where they couldn’t find me a team, so took a job at another company.