9 ms·
Instructive the degree to which good HR, recruiting, and operational onboarding can create giant moats for these larger tech cos. Hiring 700 "mostly engineer"
by aresant 7y ago
Instructive the degree to which good HR, recruiting, and operational onboarding can create giant moats for these larger tech cos.
Hiring 700 "mostly engineer" employees in a year!
I pride myself as an "operator" and have worked in businesses that have scaled quickly but it is unimaginable how one doubles the highly compensated / hard to find employee count in a year at that scale.
In an economy where excess labor of that quality is non-existent.
That's an average of almost 3 people a work day you need to recruit away from probably another high income role, getting them to show up, get devtools opened, build and manage security clearances, trying to integrate into the org, etc.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoThere’s a lot of ways you can get that number. Lateral movements within the co, temp conversion, lowering the bar/changing the scope. But agree, there simply isn’t that kind of liquidity in the market to make that number without it being suspicious on technical levels.
- mr_toad 7y agoTurnover in professional jobs is quite high, sometimes around 20% per annum. There may not be many people out of work, but there are always people looking for the next job.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago20% per annum is 1 transfer every 5 years. I just had a job change after 6 years and was constantly asked why I stayed so long.
- mr_toad 7y agoThe distribution is not symmetric. The mode is less than the average and there’s a long tail of survivors.
- donavanm 7y agoIn the us the tech industry attrition rates Ive seen are around 15% per annum. Varies slightly based on company/year/market/location etc. 20% is “bad” and 10% would be surprisingly “good.”
- milofeynman 7y agoDidn't Stripe just do the same thing?
- ttul 7y agoThis was my thinking as well. The power and wealth of the big-five tech companies is staggering, with their smaller siblings (Uber, Cloudflare, AirBnB, Dropbox, etc.) trailing not far behind. It is very tough for startups to compete with public companies who can offer liquid RSUs monthly along with whatever salary is necessary to close the deal.
- ttul 7y ago.. I should add: This is a great time to be an engineer. Enjoy it while it lasts. The time to be a founder will be after the next recession.
- Lambdanaut 7y agoQuite a bold claim. Care to give reasoning?
- dilippkumar 7y agoA colleague explained it to me like this: "During a recession, all the big companies will tighten their budgets and not throw money to copy your products" They then pointed out that all the companies that took off in the 10s started during the 2008 recession. Look at what happened to Snapchat for an example of what happens when other companies have money to spend to catch up with your product quickly.
- mallorypaine 7y ago2008 was also when the iPhone SDK unleashed massive opportunity.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mc3 7y agoMy non US experience is I have seen no correlation of the boom/bust cycles and "how good it is to be an engineer". I realize that FAANG employees are of course raking it in like never before. But I thought that was because of a lack of a salary cartel and general software eating the world.
- mbesto 7y ago> but it is unimaginable how one doubles the highly compensated / hard to find employee count in a year at that scale. You throw an EXCESSIVE amount of money at the problem and over-hire (and just naturally weed people out). Recruiting firms will gladly take anyones money to help solve this problem.
- hnick 7y agoYou might waste some money, but at least they're not creating value for the other players. Is that their strategy?
- mbesto 7y agoThe other people hired? Those individuals are likely getting paid $500k all-in and get to work on "world changing" software with unlimited future career opportunities ("I worked on AI at Waymo"). Why on earth wouldn't you take that job? Who cares if it actually turns out in the end. For Waymo, you could hire 10x teams of 10 people to do the same thing. One team would eventually get it right. If autonomous driving is the next trillion dollar idea, then this is all chump change.
- codemac 7y agoThey allow transfers from Google, rather than a full interview slate. My bet is transfers outweigh anything you're praising here.
- wpietri 7y agoWow, that's clever. Also dangerous, of course. If I were at Google and had a direct report who was not up to snuff, I might point them at such a convenient option.
- sgtnoodle 7y agoInternal transfers still get interviewed to a degree.
- Shebanator 7y agoI believe the hiring manager has access to your perf history, which is far more valuable than interviews.
- mindvirus 7y agoThat's one way to look at it. The other is that it creates an internal market - as a manager, you have to make your team attractive or people will transfer away and people won't transfer to it.
- vl 7y agoIn reality, market is not that liquid: interesting projects have no headcount, problematic projects are available. At the end of the day you need to know people and come with recommendations to actually transfer to something good. Ask me how I know.
- username90 7y agoYou can do a 20% project for them even if they don't have headcount and managers can view your performance history so it is not hard to join an interesting project if you are good. Also if you are good enough they will add headcount to the team so you can join even if there weren't any before. Ask me how I know.
- gniv 7y agoThe article says many of the eng hires were transfers from Google.
- entangledqubit 7y agoWhen I was at Google most recently, I saw quite a few transfers to Waymo that initially struck me as odd matches. Aside from the pseudo-retention (aka denial of talent) aspect, there's also a lot of non-car related work (e.g. apps, demand prediction) that needs to be done for Waymo to progress.
- draw_down 7y agoI wouldn’t start praising them just yet. They do still need to... ship something. Could be a huge success or a huge failure.
- anonsivalley652 7y agoThere are many problems of hiring randomly and hastily: 1. Employees are usually the biggest expense and engineers are some of the priciest, so there goes the run rate (unless Alphabet foots the bill). 2. Hiring too quickly ruins the dynamic of existing teams and throws them into chaos. 3. Hiring too quickly tends to not apply good due-diligence because the few staff who are demonstrably good at hiring will be spread too thin to have an impact. This leads to hiring second- and third-stringers who will slow everyone down more than better hires, add to office political BS with their non-value-add/sabotaging drama, zap morale, and drive away A-players to their next adventure. 4. It may or may not be the case, but without a per-department plan to scale their organizations' resources (systems, budgets and staff) according to anticipated added demand to support massive numbers of new hires, that scaling too much in one area tends to overwhelm other departments. I hope they practice safe and sane scaling before it's too late. PS: Dern, I could probably get a job there and I've been out-of-work for 9 years. Of course, it doesn't sound like a sustainable or happy place to work, more like a pressure-cooker that's hurrying to spend that money before daddy Alpha warbucks cuts off their allowance.
- jameshart 7y agoOne of the most dangerous things in a tech organization is a group of developers productively and efficiently building completely the wrong thing. What would scare me about adding 800 engineers in a year is how to set up an org that points them all at the right problems.
- alaskamiller 7y agoHi, how do we get in touch?
- C1sc0cat 7y agoI suspect that most are transferees, big companies can do that back when I worked for British Telecom they moved 800 people onto middleware projects for example.