Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020
bloomberg.comSo 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
I 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.
I think part of this it's easy to feel like you have multiple managers. Typically you only have one true manager but you probably have multiple ppl who tell you what to do and not all of them have direct reports.
On the topic of not having enough work to do, here's a couple questions to any Google employees:
1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company?
To be fair I can't think of any other search engine that returns better results. But I feel like Google's gotten very complacent with their search, which is not surprising given the fact that it's practically a monopoly.
2. Is there any initiative to rewrite gmail on the web? The damn thing takes like 30 seconds to load. For a company pioneering progressive web apps and web performance, it boggles my mind that they've put no effort into improving gmail's atrocious load times over the last decade.
The cynical view about search quality is that the metric being optimized for is not how satisfied people are with the results, but the amount of ads and therefore revenue earned. Search results only need to be good enough to get you to come back and not worse than the competition.
I wish Google had a subscription option (with actual support) that eliminated all ads across their products. Imagine Amazon's customer obsession with Google tech... I'm sure it would do well for the 4 years they would support it.
Google Contributor was their ad-free subscription option.
It was always a curious product, never really seemed to have management buy-in, and was pretty much a one-man product, which a 'subscription to get rid of ads across the whole web' shouldn't have been.
Controversial for google.com, unquestionable for YouTube.
I left Google a few months ago, but I can speak to (1). I never worked on search directly, and of course I'm speaking only for myself.
> 1. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within the company?
Search quality is kind of Google's secret sauce, so it doesn't get talked about a lot. But here's one public example of a huge engineering task that ultimately led to improved search results: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...
Using BERT in search is about much more than plugging an algorithm into the query pipeline. Google is one of the main contributors to the field of deep learning, and developed BERT. And Google also designed and built an entirely new chip (TPUs) to run this model in production.
I believe that you're not seeing improvements. And changing things without breaking other people is always hard, but particularly hard on software that billions of people use many times a day like Google search. That slows things down for sure. Honestly I was amazed they managed to roll out BERT on TPUs for search despite those obstacles. That should show a little bit of how committed they are to improving things.
On 2: any initiative to rewrite Gmail will get shut down or reworked again without notice. See, Google Inbox.
Highly recommend giving up on Gmail as an interface, and treat it as an IMAP/SMTP server only.
gmail was just recently rewritten. it was the rewrite that made it so slow. and i say rewrite from the perspective of the user. i have no idea what they did. it was just that there was a version that, while quite old in design and lack of features, wasn't disfunctional. then it changed and is now so slow to be disfunctional.
2. They released Inbox, which was amazing and had a cult following.
Then they killed Inbox. Presumably because they could not figure out how to capitalize on an extraordinarily useful, fast paradigm-shifting email client.
Just the insight we were longing for. How about very few users define "cult following" for you ?
My list:
1. How about an option to Maps to stop suggesting unprotected left turns at busy intersections?
2. Also, a Maps option to stop routing me through residential neighborhoods to save ten seconds.
3. Find existing, dormant Google accounts that obviously belong to the same human as another active Google account, and offer to restore access.
You can use the "basic HTML" version that's much better
I imagine the finishing in quality is due partly to choosing a more aggressive trade-off on monetization, and partly on typical "large scale enterprise" inefficiencies
I'd like to see an org-chart depth analysis for different organizations. It'd be interesting to map bureaucratic processes to the structure of an org chart and verify Conway's law.
The U.S. Army uses the concept of a span of control that dictates each level of hierarchy should have between 2 and 5 reports. There's about 10 levels between a private and the secretary of the army. The Active Duty Army is about 470k which works out to 3.7 reports per level from 470000^(1/10). There's about 1M total personnel which works out to 3.9 reports per level.
Google has 114k employees. With your ideal of 7, that works out to 5.3 reports per level given by 114000^(1/7). I'd be pretty surprised if there's a depth of 12 at Google. That's 2.6 reports per level.
A major way that things are different now is that it's much harder to get new people up to speed. My team is doing ok remotely, but we're not that good at it and I think the only reason it's going as well as it has been is because we had a lot of face to face time earlier. Bringing someone new on where we didn't previously have that time is a lot harder.
If we were going to be fully remote forever this would be different, but since this is (very likely!) temporary that's a reason to prefer to hire more later.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself) (Well, I guess I work at home, but Google is my employer)
In 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.
> Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake.
He had the benefit of hindsight. In 2008 noone could predict if the GFC would last for one year or three years and how deep it would be.
The problem with hiring freezes (or reduced hiring) is that it creates a bathtub curve in your company. You'll end up with a lot of senior people, a lot of junior people, and a gap in the middle. This is a problem (somewhat recovered by this last decade of hiring) in the US DoD, primarily on the civilian side but also the military side.
In the 90s through the 00s there was a massive reduction in hiring for civil servants. So you had a lot of people who were there from the 80s and early 90s, and then a massive drop. Around 2010 or so they started ramping up hiring again, because they finally acknowledged the need (they had a huge percentage of civil servants who could literally retire at any point). So you ended up with (in some orgs) 30-40% of the staff being able to retire, 30-40% under 28, and the rest spread randomly from the age of about 28-55.
As people retired (biggest loss of personnel before other kinds of attrition), teams were literally losing centuries of experience in a year. The mid-career people were moving into leadership roles, and leaving the junior people to learn the processes and technical work largely on their own.
I saw something similar in private industry as well, but that was due to a preference to hire junior people over experienced people (either the manager wanted people who could be molded or cost).
Sometimes hiring freezes/slowdowns are important. But if your business is healthy, it'll end up backfiring on you more often than not. Even a year or two of this can create problems, though not as dramatic as what the DoD experienced.
It also introduces cultural problems.
In a healthy organizational culture, the org grows steadily at a pace that's not too quickly, and more senior members acculturate new recruits into the organization. Acculturation can't be rushed; it's the process of transferring all the unconscious, tacit knowledge about how and why things are done the way they are, and because it's unconscious, it happens only through long exposure.
When you have a hiring freeze, the existing culture ossifies and becomes more insular without any new blood. And then when the hiring freeze lifts, you usually need to "catch up" on hiring, which means that you have a sudden rush of new recruits and relatively few senior people. The new people don't have enough old hands to acculturate them, which means that they end up forming their own culture that may be entirely divorced from the existing org culture. Because the new culture outnumbers the old, eventually the old hands leave (taking their institutional knowledge with them), and the dominant org culture reflects that which the newbies brought with them.
Google's culture changed dramatically from 2011-2013, driven by the combination of rapid hiring, a new CEO (this may've been deliberate: if you want to change the culture, one way to do it is bring on a lot of people who agree with you), and the departure of key early employees like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Marissa Mayer, et al.
Come to think of it, the U.S's culture wars are largely a result of the "birth dearth" of Gen X. Instead of a continuous shift in culture, you have two "big" generations of Boomers and Millenials and the latter developed a distinctive culture amongst themselves without regards to existing American culture.
> Is the situation the same now?
There is some difference in the current situation, however I am not sure how much it factors into this decision.
Hiring and onboarding people is logistically very difficult when travel has been affected worldwide and everyone is working from home.
> Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees)
Your model is in the right direction but misses more important aspects. When consulting I measure overhead of the orgs I'm working for in great detail.
Cultural aspects like fear, autonomy, transparency, etc have a much higher impact on management overhead than the org chart structure itself.
I’ve seen tiny organizations with massive management overhead. Friend of mine got a vacation denied by a 5 person all remote company because they didn’t file the correct paperwork asking for a day off!
I once worked at a nine person company where a three-minute fix to a piece of internal software ended up taking about two months of screwing around with revising a project proposal and, in the end, it was decided to drop the fix because what amounted to the #2 person in the company decided the tool would "eventually" be thrown away anyway.
Sad stories.
Just get it done. Don't ask.
A potential customer had been debating a problem for a couple of months with feasibility studies, lots of meetings, etc.
They asked me about it as an aside over a coffee. I implemented a quick prototype while they were describing their intended project structure to me. I gave it to them for free.
I did not continue with this customer. But I heard later on that a VP refused to accept the solution because he insisted it must be wrong since it was completely inconceivable that it could be solved that quickly.
> Just get it done. Don't ask.
Yeah, I didn't think it would go the way it did. That was the first time I noticed a problem.
What I really should have done is start searching for another job a week into this "process".
I'd rather give employers what they want, and -- if what they want is stupid or insane like that -- leave before I have to give the employer very much of what it wants, because I don't want to be a part of that.
> I heard later on that a VP refused to accept the solution because he insisted it must be wrong since it was completely inconceivable that it could be solved that quickly.
I loathe crap like that.
Autonomy and Agency.
Trust your people. Make sure they feel safe (not afraid) to make decisions and take action.
It drastically reduces the need for management. It makes people feel happier about their work, raises quality and reduces employee turnover rates. It makes it simpler to keep high skill people, which in turn makes it easier to recruit high skill people.
The counter argument I run across is that the mistake rate will increase. But that is simply not true. Through all my data I have never seen that happen. Generally the mistake rate goes down, and the cost of mistakes goes down a lot. And the cost of all actions goes down since fewer people are needed.
Couple this with transparency, asynchronous communication and decision making, and you have drastically reduced your company's management overhead, increased speed, increased well being, increased innovation, etc.
Management overhead is a self inflicted wound. But very common.
I often come in and ask people to stop doing meaningless tasks, just to be told that the previous, much more expensive, consultant had told them it's the bees knees.
There is also a common misunderstanding that if a bigger or cooler company is doing something it must be the right thing.
Cargo cult.
Management is also just a lot of hard work. A lot of people seemed to convinced that good management is all about issuing orders, which leads to disaster.
“ So 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.”
Was this covered by the media? Having a hard time finding anything about it.
Probably. I can't be bothered looking for a reference.
I was an engineering program manager and people manager at Google previously and around 2010-2012, there were opportunities for the company to really accelerate revenue, product development but they couldn't hire fast enough to take advantage. This stemmed from many orgs freezing hiring for a significant period (maybe 12-18 months).
At large companies, you have queues setup for most roles because you often growing the n count of that role by 5-10% per annum.
Also very few orgs plan for attrition (I don't get why because it's always been in the range of 4-20% in my opinion). Freezing hiring means a company's ability to execute reduces. Sometimes that is needed but often you must backfill to keep the lights on. Guess the messaging is easy ("no hiring. No exceptions").
> The ideal is ...
Nope. That was perhaps the case in the 50-80s, but today we can do much better, and it's dependent on the people, the culture, and the market/product structure and strategy.
I don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right. It's also the reason why there are plenty of directors at google with no team, and plenty of lower level managers with 20, 50 or more directs (often lots of TVCs).
An observation from my work experience is that, while things run efficiently with smaller teams overall, small teams also tend to make it easier for any given leader to have a reasonably good idea what's going on across their org (it's easier to grok a 50 person team's work when it's split into 10 mgr teams than if it were completely flat), but that also puts the lower level managers' jobs at risk because their director is more likely not to consider them essential -- ironically, because things are running smoothly.
Not just google. All large companies I've inspected have had similar issues. Appearance becomes important. People loose agency and autonomy. Communication stalls. Things take longer. More misunderstandings. More mistakes. No one takes responsibility. Redefinition of words like "success" and "failure". Endless meetings. Etc, etc.
Smaller companies tend to have stronger focus of just getting stuff done. It's clear who has responsibility. People can more easily make a decision on their own or in small groups and just get it done, without involving a clown car of middle managers.
When I build projects I only have two "levels". Management have final say on budgets, targets and priorities. Experts/devs/techs get the work done. They generally make decisions with full autonomy and self organise. If they need help with coordination, planning, followup, etc then management steps in. Management also monitor and track. Usually my management has very strong technical skills and tend to be part of the daily work in the trenches.
> The ideal is (IMHO) CEO -> SVP (PA level) -> VP -> Eng Director -> Manager (of managers) -> Manager (of ICs) -> IC.
That assumes a fanout of 7-8 at the current size of Google. I think that's too much at certain levels.
There can be no absolute correct number of layers. That is obviously too many layers for a 20 person company. And what if Google grew to one million employees. Would that still be the right number of layers?
I think it's possible that there is no correct number of layers for a 1 million person company, i.e. such a company should not exist and should split up into smaller, more focused companies.
It appears that the two US companies with > 1 million employees are Wal-Mart and McDonald's (counting franchisees).
Obviously a lot of people don't like them, but it's not obvious to me that they would naturally break up into more focused parts.
I think you're overestimating the mean org depth.
> In fact this would be a good metric:
On a slightly different note: this isn't a good metric. It's a metric of how "balanced" the company is, not the management overhead. If you imagine a company with 150000 engineers and one salesperson, with sales reporting directly to the CEO, hiring more people under the sales director will decrease this metric, while increasing the mean org depth. That probably doesn't measure what you want it to.
Advertising is taking a much bigger hit here than 2008.
your "ideal" of 7 seems invariant of size. surely the needs of the average ~x000 person company are completely different from Google.
Yeah, when I worked at thousand-person companies it was like this:
CEO -> SVP -> VP -> Eng manager -> IC
Or, alternatively,
CEO -> Director -> Manager of managers -> Manager -> IC
I didn't feel like either needed more middle management (each had about ~2k employees), but in the case of the latter some reorganization would have helped (some managers had 50+ reports).
Before 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.
One of the best offensive strategies you can have is to make sure all talented people work for you, rather than the competition.
If smaller companies and startups fade away due to coronavirus-induced instability, making sure that their talent winds up with you is a smart move. If you are big enough to afford it, that is, which both of these companies arguably are -- regardless of whether their Q1 and Q2(?) results are worse this year than last.
Even if startups don't fade away, uncertain times means people look for stability. Unless a startup is in one of the sectors benefiting from the lockdown, top talent is likely looking to leave for stability at one of the big players. Which will just accelerate the fall of marginal startups or those struggling.
Plus, I bet they are getting these engineers much cheaper right now and presumably, that cost savings will continue indefinitely.
A 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.
It doesn't matter much if they spend much time on their platforms now if advertisers stop advertising everywhere.
Exactly right. For example, many media organizations right now are reporting record traffic numbers, but are struggling to make ends meet as advertisers pull out.
Is 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.
There have been a couple of articles recently about this:
"L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22872711
"As YouTube traffic soars, YouTubers say pay is plummeting" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856324
WSJ: Facebook Usage Soars, But Online Advertising Plunges https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-warns-that-skyrocketin...
WSJ: Facebook Ad Rates Fall as Coronavirus Undermines Spending https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ad-rates-fall-as-coron...
Bloomberg: Facebook’s Ads Business Weakening Despite Surge in Usage https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/facebook-says-ads-...
Even apart from the advertisement coming from the platform, most creators (podcast/Youtube) that I follow report that their direct ad placements have basically dropped to 0 and the only ones they have running now were negotiated pre-pandemic.
People are not working, hence no money. (less money to spent) advertising doesn't make much sense except your target are the wealthy working (or not working class)
But YouTube traffic must have increased, and Android app usage as well.. Google is more than a search engine
Traffic yes, a lot
People advertising on youtube is the problem, that number is only going down
YouTube is maybe... <10% of Google?
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp... is >90% of Facebook.
> Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated hiring spree
That was a message to the stock market. In reality I haven't heard from a Facebook recruiter in a month now.
I've heard from at least 2 since the lockdown began, so anecdata all around :)
As an anecdote, I got an email from a Facebook recruiter yesterday. They're still hiring, though I'm not sure at what rate and for how long.
Not sure why RivieraKid was getting downvoted - there's no "just a message to the stock market". Lying in this context would be illegal, and would open FB up to shareholders suing the company IMO.
I'm not a securities lawyer, but I would assume that there is little deterrence for "sending a message to the stock market" with statements about hopes, plans, or predictions for the future. As long as there's nothing definitively false as of the moment you say it...
Lying would be illegal...
Heard from 2 recently so they're certainly still hiring and hiring fast
Besides New Hiring, I would be impressed if large companies honour their existing job offers; Which IT services firms which does bulk recruiting in India seem to be doing.
IT firms such as TCS (30,000 recruits this financial year), Wipro (12,000), Cognizant (20,000) and Capgemini (10,000 over January-June) say they are sticking by their offer letters[1].
I've personally witnessed jobs from these companies lift several out of poverty in India (Most of them being the first graduate in their family).
But, obviously those who pass out this year especially the Engineering freshers are going to be the worst hit.
[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
For bean counters looking to cut costs, outsourcing to India is going to look pretty attractive. Especially since the actual costs of doing this will only become apparent later...
I'm not sure if this will happen again so soon. Mostly because it seems like wages in technology flattened or even declined on the low-end due to the glut of college graduates capable of filling these roles. I see lots of applicants with non-CS/CE degrees applying for programming and analytics positions.
Part of Sundar's letter says Google is honoring existing job offers.
I don’t understand it either.
Facebook may well be the worlds most powerful sentiment capture and analysis engine ever built but Google tracks conversions and has pretty stellar sentiment capture/analysis capabilities.
Google appears to also have twice as much cash on hand as Facebook. Wonder what they’ll use it for if not to hire competent people to prevent them from starting the next big thing...
tik tok.... they have a real competitive threat, and probably want to make sure when the recession is over, they are still the #1 in social space
Also, back in 2008, Google didn't hire/freezed its hiring, but Facebook and Amazon were still hiring like mad, and it worked well for them. They are used to ride out recessions.
bingo. facebook needs to build the next Tik Tok or they’ll lose
its got me baffled. I wonder if this changed consumer behavior in such a way that it benefits facebook ads and detracts from google. I dont understand it, but it appears to be the message we are seeing
Facebook runs a lot more political ads than Google and it’s commercial ads that are halting.
Political ads make up a small fraction of overall ad spend though.
Content moderators for the election to make sure Uncle Joe wins?
> both depend on ads
True, but their value to advertisers depends on users. Facebook is likely seeing a massive spike in (ad-viewing) users, whereas Google a much more modest one. I'm sure Google Search and YouTube have gone up, but the former won't have gone up much, and the latter has not yet been profitable for Google in the first place.
> I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion
Neither needs to tighten belts. Both have enormous amounts of cash.
Should be easier for FB and Amazon to fill those positions now that Google is not sucking as much air from the atmosphere. I think Google may come to regret its decision for this reason. Part of the reason for these companies to hire is "area denial": the employee is not only hired to do great things, but also to prevent them from doing great things for a competitor. If you stop hiring, you allow a lower-paying competitor like Amazon or Microsoft to scoop up the engineers that would previously be inaccessible to them.
If I were to guess, Facebook's recruiting pipeline is centralized. Whether or not to hire is done at the executive level. When Facebook hires someone, they are first a "Facebook employee", go through the bootcamp, and decide on a team 1-2 months into the job.
Google on the other hand, the recruiting pipeline is more spread out. Whether or not to hire is done at the organizational level (i.e. Cloud, Ads, Search, Core, etc), and that depends on whether or not there are openings in any teams. You are matched with a team before you are even hired.
So, like, obviously, if you have the cash to burn, now is the right time to hire employees. You can get good talent pretty cheap right now. So it's in Google's best interest to ramp up hiring. Unfortunately Google's recruiting pipeline does not support hiring a bunch of people and figuring out what team to be on later.
So yeah, basically, Google has shitty hiring practices. It has nothing to do with them "losing money", they have so much cash in the bank which will easily last till this is over.
Going by your words, Google’s hiring process seems to be hurting them right now (which makes sense). But what are the benefits of hiring this way over Facebook’s style? (or rather where does centralized hiring fall short?)
I always thought it was just political/bureaucratic cruft nobody bothered to fix, because they're Google, and they can have the shittiest interview process in the world and it wouldn't really matter. It seems inferior in every way to Facebook's process. Even outside of this Coronavirus thing they lose out on a lot of good talent because of how long it takes
I 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.
Google depends on advertisers to make money, and the writing is on the wall for these advertisers.
Call me dumb, but are people not sitting around consuming advertising 10x nowadays? There's never been a better time to get someone's attention.
People might be consuming 10x advertising but 1) people can't go out to the store and buy what's being advertised or use it outside after it's been boughts and 2) a lot of people are freshly unemployed or terrified about being unemployed in the near future and are not going to buy anything nonessential. Therefore, their ad impressions are worth less and so companies are spending much, much less on advertising.
1. Demand has fallen off a cliff globally - this is far worse for companies than most realise, this has never happened before
2. All companies are facing a cash crunch, gov loans are slow to arrive and they have fixed costs like rent
3. Companies need to conserve cash, turning off ads is a click of a button, and given no demand, it's an obvious choice
This is going to be bad for google and Facebook if it lasts any significant amount of time.
On the other hand, Amazon is going gangbusters. I wonder if covid-19 will ironically prompt a longer term re-alignment away from virtual interaction in favour of real-world connections, as people realize how much they miss real things during lockdown.
I imagine Amazon will do well in some areas (consumers) initially, but overall will see a drop in demand as the crisis really bites - businesses have stopped ordering, and consumers will stop ordering soon to save money. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but I think US markets are far too optimistic at present, and this is going to have a very large impact economically, because it won't be over as soon as say Trump hopes, and premature attempts to reopen will be disastrous.
Strangely enough I think the disease and its impacts will have far less impact on our behaviour than the economic impact of mass layoffs and shuttering the world economy for months. I don't think we've ever seen a drop in consumption of this magnitude and the road back to normality will be slow.
There may be more page views ("supply") right now, especially on certain types of social media, but I suspect that advertising demand has taken a huge hit.
Lots of companies out there, especially retail, are taking huge hits and I would suspect that an advertising budget is one of the first things to be reduced.
Conversion cratered.
True, although every company depends on someone else. Google's fate is no different than the rest of the tech industry and the economy as a whole.
Maybe Google will start charging for their services. $5/mo for Gmail, $5/mo for Drive, etc.
Congratulations, you just invented G Suite.
Google charges when you hit your limit on these services, which may be being increased now (at least for Gmail) when everyone is staying home.
And maybe pigs will fly?
That's always possible. The version I heard from a company I may or may not work for: investors watch revenue vs expenses. If you expect a downturn in revenue, you cut expenses to avoid problems.
Which apparently becomes self fulfilling.
> Which apparently becomes self fulfilling.
If you must ask, it's probably because you think it's a little bit of both.
Anecdotally, I wonder the same thing myself.
That 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.
That 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.
>hitting the middle-upper class super hard
What are you talking about? White collars are working from home, by and large. None of my engineer friends have lost their jobs yet (one is getting furloughed for a week though)
> None of my engineer friends have lost their jobs yet
Most middle-upper class employees are not engineers.
> White collars are working from home
People can only work from home if they work for a company that has money to pay them - a company that hasn't shut down due to lack of business. A white collar employee working for an airline, hotel chain or car manufacturer (and all of these huge companies have huge ranks of middle/upper management in marketing, operations, HR, accounting, etc.) probably doesn't have a lot of job security right now.
Also, the key word in your sentence is "yet". I'm a software developer, and I'm sure that if my employer's revenues drop significantly during the upcoming recession, layoffs will be inevitable.
In contrast, in the Atlanta and Nashville focused tech slack teams I'm a part of almost every day I see more developers announcing they've been laid off. My last two employers have had massive layoffs that included developers.
That's because we are only in the fourth week of this. The revenue of non-essential companies plummeted. They are going to start cutting headcount by mid-may.
Not every software department has been so lucky... I had similar thoughts to you and what do you know? A quarter of my team was let go yesterday.
In some cases this could be cover for taking more profits
They call it a race to the bottom for a reason, perhaps for more than one reason, and for multiple definitions of bottom, and of the bottom of what exactly. What are we talking about again?
The crisis.
I’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
Good luck. I recently went through the google interview process and it took months. The lockdowns were starting and the economy was melting down around me, and then I myself got sick with covid-19. It was a stressful time.
I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.
Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.
Google 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.
Yep, we took advantage of that at Netflix. Our average time from first contact to walking in the door was about two weeks if you wanted to move as quickly as we did.
We got a few folks who were in the final stage at Google, and we contacted them, interviewed them, made the offer, and got them in the door before Google ever got back to them.
They'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.
A friend interviewed with Google a few years ago and the process took well over six months before he actually got an official offer. It really is amazing how slow they are.
Counter point: The time between my on site interview and hire date was 1 month and 1 day. I skipped the phone interview so the time from initial referral to offer was under a month.
Having an internal reference may have helped, as did the fact that I told them I was actively interviewing and had offers.
Similar experience here. Having internal references seems to be very useful, not just for skipping the phone interview but for getting through the hiring committee. My start day is exactly one month after my interview, but even then that is because I put it back a week.
Does anybody get hired for SWE positions at Google _without_ an internal referral? When I was interviewing there 6 or so years ago I was under the impression that you, in practice, had to have an insider vouch for you.
The only internal reference I had was a distant acquaintance who - as they said themselves - just submitted one that basically read "don't know them much but they don't seem to be a jerk".
So you can absolutely get hired in engineering without internal references. (I'm also on a hiring committee myself.)
When I got hired back in 2004 that was pretty much the bar (helped that I knew how to fix servers I suspect too)!! :)
I was hired last year without a reference. I just submitted a resume to the careers page.
Sure, but my Fortune 500 employer takes 2-3 weeks to do that on average. Longer only if the new hire needs longer to unwind from prior commitments.
My story: first contact December 2005, started work October 2006.
My story: Interviewed October 2014, they wanted me to start December 2014, I pushed them to Jan 2015. My friend interviewed a week or two after me, started 1 week after me.
That seems longer than typical. From my first phone call with a recruiter to my first day of work was less than 4 months, and that includes me intentionally delaying my interview until after the holiday season, giving the job I left more than the standard 2 weeks notice, and my Google start date being pushed back due to the coronavirus situation
I purposely delayed my interview despite recruiter encouragement to get it over with, but I interviewed on March 20th, I was hired on the 30th (I think, it was in the week after the interview, I team matched by the end of the week), and I will onboard (unless something bad happens) next Monday. I’ve found Google to be much faster than I thought.
Congrats! Enjoy your time there. There's lots of good people, including some programming language luminaries.
One has to think why the concept of employment is still considered like marriage that require such an extensive ultra-deep multi-level deliberations. Let's say you were local, why it shouldn't be possible to give someone on-the spot offer after half-day of interviews as well as let them go with, say 2 weeks of standard severance if things don't work out?
At a large technology company with its own software stack it takes several months before a new hire isn’t a net-negative to the team they join. And it will be months after that before they reach full productivity. A bad hire is an extremely expensive mistake.
A bad hires are expensive mistake if you can't get rid of them until some artificial annual event. While I understand onboarding complexities, my experience is that the teams/companies which hasn't create good automated process so new hire can commit their first change within 2-days are big red flag (this was insisted upon by Zuck extensively at Facebook scale). I would also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.
Being able to make a change, and being able to make a change without handholding are two different things.
> hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa
Places where this happens are normally considered very high stress and competitive.
> I would also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.
You're arguing in favour of high turnover - that can't be good neither for the company nor for the employees.
As much as our industry sucks at interviewing, it sucks at performance management even more.
A congenial but mediocre developer can stick around forever in most places once they're in.
This performance management weakness also makes me suspicious of various companies claiming to have nailed the interview process.
A congenial but mediocre developer may actually be more valuable than a rowdy and talented one because she pisses off less number of other brilliant developers.
Correct.
But that congenial/mediocre developer is still taking up a headcount that could hold a congenial/high-performing developer instead. There is also a separate issue where mediocrity discourages high-performers.
Because employment is indeed like marriage. Divorce and bad marriage is costly.
I mean, in some places, with some companies, they hire people as temps or contractors and later make them permanent. That effectively amounts to the arrangement you describe. This can't be obscure, so I don't understand your tone as if it was. It's just a matter of what kind of employment you consider worth applying for.
That would be a creative and different way to hire local unemployed people.
But it'll give you a reputation that makes it difficult to entice the sort of people whose current employers don't want them to leave.
It costs millions of dollars to hire someone at a place like Google. If you get it wrong you’re making an extremely expensive mistake.
Bringing someone up to speed in a large complicated ecosystem is extremely expensive. They will have to invest months into you before you will be capable of contributing in a way that isn't a net loss and a drag on existing team members.
At worst you pose a massive threat to the company/codebase. LOL i accidentally leaked all our secrets to china/apple/MS whoops.
But most of these companies/teams already employ massive numbers of contractors. They typically sign NDAs and often work on same code.
I've been on development teams which had contractors as 20% or more members. We had just couple of interviews and next-day offers for contractors while full timers went through multi-month process. Both worked on same code, often similarly complex tasks and used same on-boarding docs etc. One difference was that full timers were given more longer term tasks although, looking back, I feel many longer tasks simply became longer term because of tribal knowledge full timers developed and kept to themselves. The contractors were required to extensively document everything all the time :).
Pretty much all of my University friends got into team matching at Google for an internship position (myself included). All of them would have taken the job, and none of them were able to because the process was too long. It's pretty absurd, they even set up a call with myself and a dozen other people in team matching to basically tell us that we should take any other offers we have because Google is too slow. And then for full time it was the same thing - my time from application to on-site to offer was like 2 weeks for Jane Street, why is it 3 months for Google? The worst was that the deadline kept getting pushed back - for a month, I was told that I would be matched with a team that week, and I never actually got matched before my other offer deadlines.
I 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 :)
If 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.
I was rejected by an SVP at Google. Recruiter was surprised but said it happens. Said I did a good job and could pick a different role (wasn’t for SWE), got the offer the second time around but had to start all over and got passed to a new recruiter.
I wish I could want to work at Google, but, between the hazing rituals on the front end, the long lead times, and these mysterious vetoing robed elders on the back end, they make it so unattractive.
I wonder whether their approach has been alienating entire large categories of people, and what diversity of ideas and influences they're missing as a result.
Yeah, I think most normal people would just never apply and that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think working at Google is FOR normal people. I am a normal person and I'm pretty sure Google is not suffering from the lack of me! :D
You know, I work in tech but I have never attempted to have a Career in Tech. I definitely don't own a whiteboard and I'm sure I'd never get past the resume stage. (I've only actively applied for a couple of jobs in my life and all in the past year, purely because I thought I should REALLY get some experience with applying for jobs. I actually just had an interview and bombed it so much, omg, at one point I claimed not to know JavaScript! :D I don't think it's for me.)
But out of the rareified circles of HN, I've not found any of the career stuff talked up on here to be necessary anyway. There's more code that needs writing than coders to write it and so long as that's true there'll be work going. I work a few days a week for a company and the rest for myself. I have fun and write code and invent things and people generally give me enough money to pay my bills so I'm happy with that. It's a pretty sweet deal! Before I was a coder I was an unpaid family caregiver (hence no school or credentials or career) so compared to that I can't really imagine a programming job that could really genuinely be BAD. They are all simply gradations of sweet.
My brother (who did massively go to school) works at Google and loves it. I drop in and hang out with him there sometimes and it does seem great for a certain kind of person. And they have so many resources and work on loads of fun games and obviously it would be great to be rich as well. I think it's really clear why it's so attractive. If you think you have a shot then go for it!
But if you know you don't have a shot, why break your heart over it, is my view. It's not a bad thing to be clear eyed about your prospects in life.
I'm in the same situation. That whole process makes me feel like a mindless cog about to enter a well oiled machine without the possibility to question some of those nonsensical steps.
How does that happen? The way interviewing should work is that every person that interviewed you should vote, and if its unanimous that you should be hired, then some SVP a few levels up decided to veto it, I'd be livid if I was a hiring manager.
So, your described situation almost never happens. There are candidates who get 100% hire votes, and they get hired. Most candidates have some variability- it is rare that everyone is 100% onboard. The svp review is to make sure that the hiring process has worked and nothing major has been missed.
Yeah, that screams micromanagement.
If you so lack in trust that the people on your team can make good hiring decisions, even to the point of rejecting somebody you haven’t actually met...well... that’s just nuts.
My theory was that it was a comp/background mismatch. I was interviewing for a role that someone with more of a sysadmin background could do but I had a SWE background and was trying to command that comp level.
For many (although not all) people being hired at Google, the SVP approval process happens before you're matched with a manager. The SVP approves you to work in their PA, and then you're matched with a manager within the PA.
Execs veto decisions lower down all the time, for good and bad reasons. If you don’t like it, get yourself promoted.
They are free to do so, but when they do it for arbitrary reasons, it instills a lack of trust in leadership. Leaders that lead through fear are much less effective than leaders that are able to motivate their followers in positive ways.
How common is this? What was it like going through a second time? Any stigma or negative associations you detected?
If you are past team matching phase then it is likely that you would get an offer.
Note: I don't represent Google.
I was one of the "special" ones who didn't make it past Google's final hiring committee review (although I now suspect this is a lot more common than they let on). And that happened after the recruiter had already called to check my references, matched me with a team, given me a verbal offer and told me it was "basically" final. The entire process took over 3 months. It has been years but I'm still annoyed by how they wasted my time.
Yeah, I was brought back after the final interview to do another round and was verbally told by the recruiter that everything looked great and that she would be extremely surprised if I didn't get an offer.
Guess who got to tell me I didn't get it (again)?
Note to recruiters: don't say that stuff.
Fortunately, I'm still happy in my current job.
Being brought back to do another interview is not a good sign at Google. Best case is your interviewers totally forgot to cover something important, but more commonly it means somebody has serious doubts about something and they need to check it again.
Or that you're being considered for a similar job but under a different hiring manager.
Another thing to note about Google hiring is that it's very different for different role types. Specifically, for SWEs, Sales, and other roles that are expected to function in a largely boilerplate manner, it's fairly cut & dried how things work, but for roles that are less clearly defined (for example, "program manager" or "solutions consultant") the actual responsibilities can be so highly variable (or so niche) that interviewing for them is a specialization in itself. These kind of one-off situations is where Google's "automate all the things" general mentality falls apart.
Same thing happened with me -- I wouldn't quite go as far as receiving a verbal offer, but had been discussing compensation and they were asking about my other offers to send off to the comp team after I matched with a team. Such a long, drawn out process to come up with nothing.
As a note, there’s another compensation review that takes place after hiring committee.
What makes you think that? I’m past team matching, HC, and VP. I’d be so disappointed to make it so far and not get the offer...
How often does one get past hiring committee but not match to a team? What happens then typically?
FWIW Google hiring is just generally really slow. Give it a few more days.
If you do get it, I'd strongly consider negotiating a severance for the risk you're taking on.
You might be okay, time to reach out to your recruiter.
I did — she said, paraphrased, "I wouldn't blame you if you took another offer. I have no idea how long it will take in light of today's memo"
I’m also stuck at the SVP approval since 8 days...
What's SVP?
Senior Vice President.
Every hire at google needs to be OK'd by a Senior Vice President?
Until 201x (not sure exactly when it changed), every hire needed to be approved by Larry (ref both my memory and https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-larry-page-on-hir...).
Thanks.
Didn’t know google had so many senior vice presidents ...
They don't.
job title inflation is a thing.
But not at the SVP level, at least not at Google.
It'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.
Eric 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.)
> 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.
Through layoffs or attrition though?
Attrition
Makes 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.
Actually 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.
Anecdotally, 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.
They 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.
I'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.
I 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
A 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.
I 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.
That 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.
Ah, 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.
This 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.
I 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.
If 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.
I like the idea of futures on everything.
Just 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://adrevenueindex.ezoic.com/ down like 30-40% year over year. Which matches what I've seen at my sites.
This is a cool resource, thanks for sharing.
How 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.
Google'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.
NBC 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-permanentl...
It 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.
Can you give an example segment of big players that are spending more? Insurance? Automobiles? Clothing? Entertainment?
The 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.
On all types of ad units?
Maybe 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.
So 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.
As this crisis has illustrated, early inaction can get you into later trouble.
One 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.
One 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.
I guess I'm lucky I got my approval just today. My recruiter did mention things are slowing down drastically.
Congratulations! It's a great place to work with amazing people. Source: got hired not that long ago.
It 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.
I 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.
You 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.
I feel so much optimism in your "the rest of the year".
I 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.
Seems like some layoffs too, https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168...
This tweet is from February, is unrelated to this story and was heavily discussed at the time.
In the cloud business, based on the tweet
Yes. If you search at Bind, seems like some in marketing too.
Ooof. 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.
I was also preparing for an interview and received a call from my recruiter that the position has cancelled.
Ask your recruiter.
I'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.
Damn, will be interning this summer. I guess conversion to FT will be even more unlikely now
As 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-s...
Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.
The 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...
I just chickened out of Google interview last month. I dont know how I feel now.
People on Blind are posting that it's more than just slowing.
It 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.
The 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.
I mean it's worse than just slowing down hiring (according to Blind).
On 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.
I 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.
The first step on the road to a freeze is a headcount cap. If you have 10k engineers and 2% are fired/quit each year that still means 4 new people are starting each week.
Fingers crossed for the end of surveillance capitalism.
This 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.
How many jobs will go to India?
As third party observer, why this gets downvoted?
I’m genuinely asking.
Probably 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.
Is 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. :-)
i don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right.
It was right 10-15 years ago, but less so now. There's been a huge pushback on off-shore development in the past decade for a variety of reasons, mainly poor results, issues with time zone differences, and the negligible cost savings. Most of the big consulting firms we associate with off-shore contracting (like TATA) are supplying mostly on-shore (engineering) consultants to domestic companies (but maintaining services like help desk offshore).
Middle management got tired of having daily meetings at midnight or 6 AM, and it got too expensive to bring people over who were fine with doing so. The India job market got pretty tight around '14 or so, to the point where engineers were leaving jobs every 4-6 months for greener pastures. And even though the consulting companies are supposed to be in charge of KT, so that transitions don't impact the clients, the rate of change was just too high to maintain good quality.
May be you should consider posting some data-driven citation.
AFAIK, jobs have stopped going to India for sometime now. Indian IT companies which relied heavily on offshoring had significant contraction as a result. A lot of modern IT jobs in India are in fact for new startups/companies meant for Indian population itself. Before COVID, India was seeing China like internal uprising with equivalent of many US tech companies poping up all over with jobs that were starting to match US salaries outside of tech hubs. Also, visa process had became unsustainably hard for most companies there so on-shore workforce augmentation sector has been quickly drying up as well.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/how-indian-it...
The Indian ITO firms have been seeing pressure for a while, but that doesn't also mean US tech companies have stopped hiring in India (or that they've stopped hiring contractors through those Indian firms).
Because it's silly and ignorant and possibly xenophobic.
It probably doesn't help that elsewhere in the thread they're making comments that make them sound kind of crazy:
> [open source orgs are] communist organizations living on private money from anticompetitive tech giants.
It's a bit of a non sequitur, and as others have said, it wasn't elaborated on.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com#section_traff...
Probably some of the less than 20 % of indian readers who prefer to hide the destruction of american jobs by India but actually by overpaid american tech leaders in the silicon valley. ;-)
If even Google, which is pretty much the pinnacle of Silicon Valley tech, is slowing down, imagine what the Chinese tech scene must be like.
Comparing 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
ByteDance is hiring 10,000.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/bytedance...
Open source foundations will go to bankruptcy without subsidies from Google and others.
Are you ready for the dot com bubble 2.0? :-D
Death of open source? Don't get me excited
Death 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.
This is the outcome of crazy hiring, more than you can actually make use of in the past few years.
With 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?