37 ms·

What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

433 points by leeny 4y ago

metadat 4y ago
And Oracle, and pretty much all the FANG MAAMAs except Amazon.
- firstSpeaker 4y ago
  I wonder what is going on with Amazon. They seem to be going strong with hiring.
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    My money is on Amazon being more fine with "aggressively pruning their workforce" on a regular basis. The point of a hiring freeze is so that you can move employees around internally to prune unprofitable parts of the business without pruning workers.
  - Olreich 4y ago
    Estimates put the workforce for AWS at ~100k-200k right now. AWS income is ~80b right now according to their Q2 earnings release. Based on these numbers, a person working for AWS is making Amazon ~$400k in revenue. The profit for AWS at the moment is 30% according to the Q2 filings and nets out to ~$24b. So, assuming 200k employees for AWS which is very software-developer heavy says they are making at least $120k per developer in AWS. If they think they can continue that trend, they should be hiring every last engineer they can get for less than $280k a year. If they think they can grow their margin, they should be hiring up to an even higher number.
    - bsaul 4y ago
      those numbers are scary for anyone ever thinking about competing with amazon... I'm really stupefied by the way this company is operating..
      - rubiquity 4y ago
        Those precious margins will be their competitor's opportunity. Right now the cloud cartel is happy to all grow quickly and pretend compete with each other, but once that stops the margins will thin out.
  - nojito 4y ago
    They cut about 100k jobs. https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/07/29/amazon-shrinks-staff-by-100000-joining-netflix-and-google-in-hiring-slowdown/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/07/29/amazon-shrinks-staff-...
    - weezin 4y ago
      These are mostly warehouse jobs because they had to ramp up drastically during the pandemic, but don't need as much capacity now. They are still hiring SWEs.
- georgeburdell 4y ago
  I haven’t heard of Apple freezing hiring
water8 4y ago
- pavlov 4y ago
  Both Google and Meta have millions of PCs in data centers and the number just keeps growing, so I guess you can call it a cancer.
  - ur-whale 4y ago
    Unless you're being facetious, I suspect that PC == political correctness in this context.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      I just wish PC would still mean "IBM / Wintel platform computer" on HN.
- solardev 4y ago
  Is there any evidence these are connected?
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    Things got bad enough to warrant guidelines around the discussion of politics and non-work related matters on internal lists.
    - macintux 4y ago
      The U.S. has been suffering from incredibly divisive politics for the last several years. It's not exactly shocking that a company would lock down internal discussion forums.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Then how do you explain the business troubles of companies that ban political discussion, whether Coinbase or Basecamp?
cbanek 4y ago
I'm not sure I buy that they're actually on a hiring freeze, but I may be wrong. The day before it was announced I got a text from a google recruiter literally saying feel free to contact me on 8/8 (after the freeze is supposedly finished). I feel like this was definitely a show for the shareholders, and a way to drop your dead weight. Everyone seems worried about employee productivity and profitably all of a sudden, or at least they're pretending to. My advice is only if you know what you're doing, there's always a job for you.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > The day before it was announced These recruiters may have heard the news at the same time it was announced.
- meldyr 4y ago
  Be careful with young and ambitious recruiters these days. When large companies can do hiring freezes they do not immediately fire a large proportion of their recruiters immediately. Recruiters will spent the same time interviewing for less vacancies to fill. Be careful not to waste your time on this.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    +1 to this. In big companies, I've seen hundreds of applicants interviewed to start work on a project, when the project had already been cancelled months ago, and none of those interviewed were hired. They'd already made it into the interview pipeline, and management hadn't let recruitment know that this position was no longer needed, so all the interviews went ahead as scheduled. Hundreds of person-days wasted! The reputation of the firm damaged, good people missed (would you re-apply soon after being rejected?)... And I don't think this is a rare story.
- eatonphil 4y ago
  If you're a recruiter and your entire job is to find and interview candidates and there's a hiring freeze but you (the recruiter) haven't been laid off... what are you going to spend your time doing? Finding and interviewing candidates.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Didn’t Sundar just recently demand increased productivity? Sounds like he’s setting the stage for layoffs.
- papito 4y ago
  Maybe give everyone leetcode problems - that's what they trained for.
- ripper1138 4y ago
  Inevitable. Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. Most of the Googlers I know have been spending 20% of their time on Google and 80% on side projects for the past year now.
  - fnands 4y ago
    Seems like a sweet gig
  - trasz 4y ago
    It should be sustainable if those two hours were spent building something useful, and not just another random thing to be forgotten in three years.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.
    - ninkendo 4y ago
      Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.
choeger 4y ago
My hunch is that these companies are cargo-culting their strategies. The hiring freeze is as essentially a gut reaction. If one starts with layoffs, others will follow. The real problem is that companies of the Google scale will always need new engineers for particular projects and have a surplus for others. A global freeze or even layoffs simply don't fit.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Is it just doing what markets expect? They currently expect the companies to signal hiring freezes, thinking it will lower costs and increase profitability... Probably started by some that needed to do something and now rest just follow.
- philjohn 4y ago
  Or they both over-hired and are taking similar steps to lean into natural attrition. As for new engineers and surplus of others, I'm sure they'll be moving people around. A backend dev on one project can move to another backend project. Same for frontend, mobile, etc. So little of the work being done at these companies is massively specialised as they all have mature systems you're weaving together to deliver solutions.
- blagie 4y ago
  The best businesses I've seen work counter-cyclically. When there are hiring freezes and layoffs, it's easy to find good cheap engineers and you hire. When job markets are hot, you put a pause on hiring. The same goes for many other things. A recession is an ideal time for deep R&D. There's little competition, and it's possible to do long-term thinking. When the recession ends, and the bubble begins, you hit jackpot. All of this requires deep enough pockets to weather a few years, though, and patient investors. That's rare. Cargo culting for Google and Facebook make little sense organization-wide, since they do have deep pockets. They make complete sense employee-wise. No one got fired for following industry best practices, conventions, or cycles.
  - int0x2e 4y ago
    I couldn't agree with you more. A FAANG-tier company with which I'm closely familiar pretty much did the worst thing every time during the past 2 years - they tried to tighten the belt when COVID first hit (missing a ton of great talent when the initial uncertainly killed off some of the smaller companies), then they tried growing and chasing talent really hard, right when the bubble was at its peak, and now that the economic outlook is negative, they've halted / significantly slowed down hiring. My personal opinion is that Warren Buffett's old quote to be "fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful" rings really true.
firstSpeaker 4y ago
My process with Google just stopped. No further update form the recruiter. It just went on silence. Sometimes it feels like I made the right choice not changing to Klarna early this year and staying at my current work.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  This happened to me. In general, G has a terrible process - but I ended up getting a higher offer elsewhere. Turns out my recruiter had been fired.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kafrofrite 4y ago
For what it's worth, Meta offered me slightly after the hiring freeze was announced for a security engineer position (L4 IIRC). I'm interviewing with Google for Security Engineering as well and still they haven't told me anything about a hiring freeze yet.
- modarts 4y ago
  A hiring freeze is typically a freeze on new job reqs (candidates already interviewing wouldn't be exposed to this)
  - gen220 4y ago
    In this instance, Google is freezing people below the Staff-Eng level who have already done their onsites.
- gen220 4y ago
  As far as I understand, the freeze is applying to standard SWE roles at levels below staff. If you're interviewing for something more specialized (security, sre, production engineering), the freeze may not apply to you. The hiring pipeline for those specialized roles is comparatively quite narrow and competitive, it doesn't make sense to squeeze them.
aulin 4y ago
maybe they realized hiring leetcode junkies is not a great strategy and they want to freeze that while they find a better interview system
- nowherebeen 4y ago
  It’s a way to filter out more experienced candidates because they want cheap and young. Even a Meta recruiter admits to me that Leetcode has nothing to do with the job, it’s just a company requirement that no one questions.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ahtihn 4y ago
    Why do they pay more than anyone else if they want cheap? They could easily pay 30% less and still fill their positions if they just lowered the bar to get hired.
    - nowherebeen 4y ago
      If they are paying 30% less then they will be competing against late stage startups. They have a cash cow to help tilt the lever to their advantage. However that 30% is unlikely to make older workers works more because they have other family obligations. Priorities change in your 30s.
  - ascar 4y ago
    Your logic doesn't add up. Sure, these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance and indeed they shifted more and more from general intelligence assessment to algorithm coding assessment. Solving the algorithm is only part of the equation though. Writing readable code, explaining your thought process and decisions and communicating well with the interviewer are also vital points of the assessment. Is it a perfect or even good proxy for job performance? I dunno. Do we have a better one within a 40 minute interview? Not really. Past experience is unfortunately also a weak indicator, starting with the question if what's in the CV is an accurate reflection of the truth. There is also an interesting cultural aspect to lying on your CV. Every approach comes with its own unique set of problems and as long as the position is sought after people will prepare and try to game the system. The opinion of a recruiter on the matter isn't really the most relevant either. Especially Google should have quite some data on their various approaches and correlation to job performance and seems to use it. E.g. the trick questions were abandoned as they didn't show a correlation to job performance.
ur-whale 4y ago
What's going on is there is a giant recession half-cycle heading our way and Google (don't know about FB) have teams of folks whose sole job is to forecast these cycles. My bet is they are seeing which way the wind is turning and battening down the hatches.
Tade0 4y ago
Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland. I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim. He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was... very close to the current market rate. This is a major shift in policy comparing to just three years ago and with Poland being a popular outsourcing destination I suspect that this is what's happening, especially that due to the Russian invasion there's additional talent from Ukraine in Warsaw.
- pzduniak 4y ago
  Market rates? Oof, I thought they were still more competitive. They flat out refused to discuss comp with me before passing the interviews. Fascinating that now VC-funded companies are suddenly getting more and more competitive by not discriminating by region. Everyone tries to beat the market and they're more flexible regarding the employment contract, so eg. you can be self-employed and save 20% of your income from taxes.
- __exit__ 4y ago
  When you say the compensation was very close to the current market rate, I assume you mean the market rate in Poland, correct? No fancy Silicon Valley salaries for devs in Poland, that is.
  - woadwarrior01 4y ago
    I left G in Ireland about 4 months ago for a fully remote position at a startup. Up until then, G's Polish salaries were low even by Western European standards (which is ~ >= 1/2 of SV pay).
    - gwnywg 4y ago
      In my opinion this makes sense, what would be the incentive to hire there if wages were the same?
Mandatum 4y ago
I think they're trying to push down salaries, there's still plenty of hiring for technical roles. Recruiters, marketers, sales reps on the other hand..
paganel 4y ago
> Moreover, these freezes materially affect our business. Related and slightly OT, but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company. Which, in retrospect, of course that it makes a lot of sense and I get it, from an economic pov, but I still find it kind of strange. I had recently become quite bearish on these companies (especially Google and FB), this type of info only reinforces that opinion, you cannot truly innovate while you're employing people who see working there has an end in itself. Hope that monopoly-like thingie will continue to work for them (again, I'm thinking mainly about FB and Google), otherwise I see dark days ahead for these two companies.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  > but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company I've made xxk of side income every year over the last few years working for companies that help people land at faang companies. It's a huge business. If you're an average swe making 100K-150K and you could spend 6 months and xk-xxk to be making 200K+ for the rest of your career, its a pretty easy decision.
user_named 4y ago
Does anybody know what's going on with Walmart Global Tech? A couple of weeks ago I was told I got great feedback and was moving on to the final step which was a call with a VP. Then silence for two or three weeks and no response when I email. Will they come back?
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Walmart’s tech hiring is a complete and total shit show regardless of the economy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they never get back to you. In fact (and you didn’t hear this from me), I’ve never witnessed a higher density of incompetence than when [SWIM] worked as a coder at their home office. Don’t work there if you want to maintain your sanity.
  - treis 4y ago
    > [SWIM] What does this mean?
    - user_named 4y ago
      Someone who is not me
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      “Someone who isn’t me”
    - nick__m 4y ago
      Someone Who Isn't Me
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  Sometimes yes, it's the summer and people go on long vacations.
mkl95 4y ago
How can large companies with high turnover like Google and Facebook afford to stop hiring engineers? Do they downsize teams, shut down projects, or something else?
- discordance 4y ago
  You don’t need thousands of devs and PMs to make good things. Think about WhatsApp, which was built by a handful of engineers. I work at a large tech company and a lot of the hiring sprees seem more like VP measuring contests.
- aliyeysides 4y ago
  My recruiter told me Google's attrition rate this year has been one of the lowest in recent memory. Fears of recession could have to do with that. People don't want to take the risk of leaving a "stable" job.
fareesh 4y ago
- jstx1 4y ago
  Nobody has updated the definition of recession, in the US this has always been determined by a comission - https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107581150/recession-referees https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107581150/recession-referees
  - codereviewed 4y ago
    You are 100% correct. The confusion in the public stems from the fact that the news media selectively reports on recession in different ways depending on which party is in power. They ignore your fact when one party is in power and they highlight the "2 quarters of no growth" rule of thumb instead. Then when their guy is in power they go out of their way to say "Akshually a recession isn't defined by that it is defined by a committee." Just a few examples: https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      > Just a few examples: https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU Well, its just 1 example because BBC and Reuters were only in your Imgur link with a timestamp saying in 2020 that it was a recession. And in your only example the person (Ben White -- CNBC) explicitly call out a double digit decrease in their claim of recession. The current situation is not a double digit decrease so it's not hypocritical. Certainly somebody is going to be hypocritical in when they call a recession but Ben White's two comments you've quoted aren't.
      - codereviewed 4y ago
emanresu3 4y ago
It’s almost as if infinite growth can’t continue on forever…
jmacd 4y ago
If I was an exec at either company and hiring was all of a sudden a bit less competitive and/or I had better access to top tier employees at other companies who were now more amenable to being recruited... I would certainly hit the "freeze" button for a few hiring cycles to recalibrate around this new reality. I would not need to look at my business plan or P&L to do that.
kleinsch 4y ago
Google has always recruited and interviewed independently of whether they actually have roles open that make sense for you. Earlier this year, I passed the interview and spent six weeks in "team match" before I gave up and took a role with another company. Had a friend who did the same for months for a PM role. Just bc you're getting contacted by Google recruiters this week or interviewing doesn't mean you'll ever find a team or get a real offer.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
  Were you paid during this time?
  - itg 4y ago
    You don't get paid because they don't formally extend an offer until you match with a team.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      You don’t get paid until your start date.
- bena 4y ago
  It kind of makes sense to keep people in the pipeline as it were. If you shut down the whole apparatus, you have to spin it back up when hiring is unfrozen. But if you keep the machine running, you're ready to hire the instant you can. For them that is. Sucks for you and me.
  - chem83 4y ago
    At Google, upon entering the process, recruiters explain that an offer within engineering (including PM, T/PgM etc.) is valid for 12 months from the date of approval from the hiring committee. So while it can take a long time for someone to find a team match, that flexibility is also available for the candidate, so they get to keep declining teams that are not interesting until a real match for both sides is available. At Facebook, it's possible to match before starting, but candidates usually try to do the matching in the 2 weeks (or so) of training they do in Menlo Park. It's up to them to cold call and find time with hiring managers to sell themselves (and vice-versa). But time-wise, the process is much more constrained than Google's.
s1k3s 4y ago
Their data is based on a survey. According to LinkedIn, the following number of jobs per company have been created in the past week: Google 7k+ Apple 2k+ Amazon 39k+ Meta 2k+ If anyone has that premium feature (I don't have it anymore), you can check how the numbers changed over time.
- kyrra 4y ago
  Googler opinions are my own. I don't understand how they could have Google's true job posting numbers. Many of our postings are for general SWE roles, and that posting could hide any number of actual openings.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- TecoAndJix 4y ago
  Here are screenshots of the LinkedIn Premium insights: Google - https://pasteboard.co/X7VROVRXt9rE.png https://pasteboard.co/X7VROVRXt9rE.png Apple - https://pasteboard.co/ILHP3rzuCmCZ.png https://pasteboard.co/ILHP3rzuCmCZ.png Amazon - https://pasteboard.co/fKxc5gF1YIi5.png https://pasteboard.co/fKxc5gF1YIi5.png Meta - https://pasteboard.co/OSHCnfUE4V1B.png https://pasteboard.co/OSHCnfUE4V1B.png
- bluGill 4y ago
  Do not confusing job posting with openings. Companies have often posted advertisements for jobs they had no intent of hiring anyone for. The purpose is investors see those ads and think the company must be growing, even though management knows more people in that role would not translate it more profits in the future.
- dthul 4y ago
  I tried getting an interview for one of those LinkedIn posts and even though I had a really good starting point (successful internship within the last few months plus an internal referral from someone working in the group I applied for plus being a good fit based on my skills and education) I wasn't even invited for a first interview, only got a generic rejection by email. So I don't think these postings are all real.
kache_ 4y ago
>freeze Yeah, unless you're a staff engineer :P The fight over STSMs is only getting more brutal. More like a freeze on training engineers up to become staff members
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
The people I know who are still inside (Google) seem optimistic that maybe the company is taking a pause to deal with some of its bureaucracy and internal politics issues and with people's complaints about perf. I suppose that's good. From my perspective: They've got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  If someone thinks Google can even scratch any of those issues in two weeks then you've really been drinking some Google kool aid. edit: Increased clarity.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Yeah, nah, obv I don't think that. I quit. But maybe you mean a hypothetical "you" of other people still working there. Obviously it's a mix, but I suspect on the whole most people are smart enough to see that these kinds of things are unlikely to accomplish much. But they're also likely happy that upper management is finally acknowledging these dysfunctions.
    - acomjean 4y ago
      When I was just a coder at a fortune 500 company, I was voluntold to be on a "Morale Committee". Not much came of it (one meeting with about 20 of us, they had an ice cream social, because people like ice cream and the work environment was very siloed people weren't interacting). It didn't do much, but employees took notice that management realized morale was low. The round of layoffs that came soon after overshadowed that however.
- smugma 4y ago
  This has been true for at least 20 years.
- PheonixPharts 4y ago
  > And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry. My understanding was that asphyxiating the industry was always the plan. For those who worked in industry pre-2008, one of the major drivers that allowed new startups to be so disruptive was that startups could very often compete with the then major tech companies on compensation. If there was a difference in pay, it was usually minor and could easily be made up for by better quality of life and a nice promotion in title. Once Google and Facebook started growing it's clear they realized that every talented engineer on the market is a potential threat. As time has moved on the gap in pay between startup and FAANG and now startup and any company offering RSUs is just too large for startups to compete for talent. I generally prefer startups to large companies, but can't find a single startup offering comp even remotely close to what I have in my current role. Unless I started to absolutely hate my current position, and found a startup that had essentially my dream role, there's no way I would seriously consider a switch. My suspicion is that as funding for startups starts to dry up as money becomes more expensive, we'll see large, high paying tech companies start to let go of more staff and start driving comp down. When the market cools Google and similar companies asphyxiation strategy will have been completed. Startups starved of talent and finally starved of dollars will be no threat, that means they can safely reduce labor costs while maintaining market dominance.
coliveira 4y ago
They don't really need to stop hiring, they just need to match the number of people leaving the company (which is always happening).
coliveira 4y ago
This may also be a big mistake by Google. I fully expect other companies such as Apple will take advantage of this mistake to hire even more in specific areas.
SQueeeeeL 4y ago
The Google internal propaganda game must be crazy strong if the actual employees are believing random management explanations designed to keep people from panicking. The US just formally entered a recession, in within a week of the economic turmoil multiple companies freeze hiring...
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Aside from the debate about 'formally*' entering a recession - if you do abide by the strict two quarters of real GDP decline rule, the economy still added ~2 million jobs during those same two quarters and the economy grew at a nominal ~6%. I don't think we're quite to the "economic turmoil" phase of things.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Decision makers are now starting to openly push for moves to increase unemployment to get wage "inflation" down. I feel we're about to enter into a situation very similar to the early 90s, and we'll see a wave of pro-austerity politics and a lot of talk about "tightening our belts" -- slashing employee rights and social programs and cutting all kinds of social spending -- which is really about re-instilling labour discipline. I suspect here in Canada the temporary foreign worker program is about to have the floodgates opened. Employers, especially small businesses, are really not happy about having to pay more than minimum wage, and they're very unhappy about having their authority in the workplace undermined by workers with seemingly excessive bargaining power. The situation in the US is obviously more complicated by their messed up immigration system.
    - davidw 4y ago
      I have no idea what will happen myself, but it all feels a bit different. I think a lot of what's going on are still shocks from the pandemic, supply chains, and geopolitical stuff.
      - randomdata 4y ago
rootsudo 4y ago
I still have Meta and Google recruiters hitting me up even though there is a hiring freeze. Niche enough jobs are still being hired for, and both recruiters repeated the line that there’s a hiring freeze except for “this” position. I felt special for a second.
yuan43 4y ago
> As several of these statements blatantly contradict one another, I went back to the data and ran the same sanity check that I did with Facebook above. In other words, what if Google is using the hiring freeze as a smoke screen and only continuing with the strongest candidates, while keeping the rest on the bench? An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. To investors it says "technical or not, we've hit a recession." Brace yourselves for impact. Google and Facebook are both advertising companies, so they are tightly coupled to the business cycle. When business spending starts to falter, they'll feel it first. And they have. So it's not surprising that the companies themselves are far from clear about this, sending mixed messages. I expect them to continue to do so for as long as they possibly can. The bubble has inflated so far for so long, I get the sense that even among cynical young employees and "investors" there's a sense of permanence in the positions of both companies. The thing is, those with fewer than 10 years experience have never seen the ferocity of the other side of the business cycle. When it turns, that mofo turns. Those in top management positions have seen it, and they're going to do everything in their ability to deny and evade it.
- nomel 4y ago
  > To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. To investors it says "technical or not, we've hit a recession." Brace yourselves for impact While it’s possibly true in this case, that’s definitely not always true. I’ve been in two companies that had to implement a hiring freeze because growth was too fast. Everyone understood, because nobody new each other, because half the company was just hired.
  - unicornmama 4y ago
    Layoffs can be positively received by the market if it cuts the fat to increase profit. No one expects Google or any other company to grow unboundedly.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  > the business cycle Just an aside, that this rebranding of Marx's theory of crisis never fails to get a chuckle out of me. In mainstream economics is presented as some magical property of the way economies work, where Marx specifically predicts cyclically economic crisis created by contradictions inherent in the structure of capitalism, the periodically build to a tipping point leading to crisis and ultimately the resolution of these contradictions. For Marx, these crises ultimately culminate in the unavoidable collapse of capitalism. Which is where the fundamental drive to find alternatives to capitalism comes from for Marx, not because it is an ethically questionable system, but because it is one fundamentally headed towards its own destruction. But "business cycle" sounds much better, and leaves off all that spooky "systemic problem" stuff.
davidw 4y ago
I suppose this is "old man yells at clouds" material, but I feel like engineers should be practicing for their future jobs, not for interviews.
- the_doctah 4y ago
  Neither my current job nor my future job require me to invert a binary tree but here I am practicing it anyway.
- ep103 4y ago
  In our industry, the interview process is completely divorced from the skillset required for the actual job. Fittingly, this is because Google developed an interviewing process that was scalable, required minimal training, human-interactive or soft skills, and was objectively measurable (leetcode), while non-obviously biasing the interview process towards cheaper, younger interviewees. It is also an interview process that is utterly incapable of differentiating low skill from high skill engineers. For Google, which needed a way to choose between the very best resumes in its pile, this made sense. For the rest of the industry, it does not. But apparently our industry just does whatever the "big players" do, blindly, so here we are.
  - papito 4y ago
    Remember how Google was asking completely useless brain teasers and everyone just blindly started copycatting it? The "we want to be like Google" syndrome in tech is just devastating.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      > The "we want to be like Google" syndrome in tech is just devastating. I think it is dead & dying though. Nobody would start asking brainteasers if Google went back to doing it.
      - Espressosaurus 4y ago
        Brainteasers are dead. The parent's point that the industry follows Google's lead is a cogent observation however.
MichaelMoser123 4y ago
what happened to the 'great resignation/dropout wave'? And what will happen to those who participated in the movement?
jasonwilk 4y ago
We lost a product manager candidate to Meta yesterday so not so sure about any hiring freeze.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  It’s only for eng
lumost 4y ago
Ads market may be peaking as would inevitably happen. I’m increasingly seeing google and Facebook make idiotic decisions that clearly improve ad revenue at the cost of user retention. I recently started searching cpp documentation and the only thing that comes up is copy pasta sites. I need a new search engine, and I just deleted instagram last week. YouTube now runs multiple back to back video ads. Maybe this is just a pause, or a momentary restructuring- but all markets peak eventually.
bonestamp2 4y ago
I literally saw a new job posting from Google yesterday. Either way, hiring freezes usually happen before layoffs. The freeze allows the numbers to naturally reduce as people leave and they aren't replaced. Then they can move on to laying off the remaining number of people they need to reduce by.
vinnymac 4y ago
Both Google and Meta have reached out to me directly for an interview in the last week. When did this hiring freeze begin?
- harambae 4y ago
  Meta reached out to me yesterday afternoon about a position, it doesn't looking they're freezing for technical positions in AR/VR.
  - 121789 4y ago
    They aren't. There is plenty of hiring if you are in one the priority areas (AR/VR, AI/ML, short form video, ads, privacy) or if you have specific skillsets (ML mostly). Other teams will have trouble getting headcount
dejongh 4y ago
Interesting and well written article supported by factual data. I wonder if this is a temp thing, or if it is another early warning that regression is coming. Is a major regression coming?
kweinber 4y ago
Apple. Do not track. Ad impressions plummet. Revenue drops. Hiring stops. That’s why Facebook is trying to get you to stop looking at your phone and strap on an oculus….. there are no privacy guards there.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Don't think the Apple thing was as impactful to Google as it is to other players. I think the primary problem is that attribution becomes difficult, not that impressions plummet.
twirlock 4y ago
AlwaysRock 4y ago
It's kind of odd that people are this shocked about this. Google and FB have frozen various roles for various periods of time over the last 2-3 years. I'm guessing they have on and off for most of their existence. I just want clued into their hiring process then. The freezes almost always are for lower level roles only (l3 or l4) and dont REALLY impact anything since these companies are pretty slow to begin with. The people impacted by this are early career folks who are likely interviewing for general swe roles at these companies and a slew of others. FB and Alphabet will almost always still be moving folks with specialized skills sets through their pipeline and even if "no offers are going out" a L7 machine learning engineer or security engineer or android engineer who is already matched with a team is still getting an offer.
- baby 4y ago
  This ^ I remember hiring being frozen for some time at the beginning of covid for FB
lamontcg 4y ago
We're not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now. It does show that the billionaires are kind of enthusiastic though about the coming recession and economic pain being inflicted on the lower classes, and getting those uppity workers a bit more under control. They're not so worried about asset prices / stock prices / sales / etc and probably correctly assume that everything will rebound just fine for them.
- baby 4y ago
  I mean FB's stock got halved in the last few months
  - rapsey 4y ago
    That is because investors don't see a good future for that company. It is basically failing on all fronts.
    - baby 4y ago
      this is response to this comment: > We're not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now. which has nothing to do with investors
      - hervature 4y ago
        In case you're not aware, your response is heavily implying that FB's stock falling is proof of a recession. That's why they responded by clarifying that the drop is due to future outlook of investors and not the economy at large.
        baby 4y ago
        It's not, the OP said that they were ahead of the curve, and I pointed out that their stock halved. I do believe we're in a recession though, but Meta's stock is not going to show you that.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Very simple, an economic downturn leads to any public company looking at their cost structure and polishing up the numbers. Big companies accumulate a lot of organizational debt where teams, departments, and individuals under perform for whatever reason and often not even because of their own fault. Corporate stupidity, and mismanagement, are also things that plague big corporations. Just look at Google lately. Regularly pruning the org tree is both something that needs some level of excuse as it would otherwise upset the rest of the org tree; and needs to happen once in a while. The people least likely to leave by themselves are usually the once targeted explicitly. So, any kind of economic down turn is usually a good moment for that. Doing it wrong means your best people leave first, which is usually counter productive. So, you have these trillion dollar companies shedding a few crocodile tears over having to say goodbye to a few not-so-valued employees and using all the usual euphemisms, cliches, and woke language for that. So, classic targets for layoffs are HR (ironically), supporting functions like IT, middle management, people promoted to their level of incompetence (Peter principle), etc.
Kharvok 4y ago
I think companies have had to lower expectations for new hires over the last several years. These companies now see an opportunity with a slight market correction to freeze hiring to deal with the lower performers and possibly replace.
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  I think hiring standards have gotten higher but performance standards took a back seat the last couple years.
natch 4y ago
A legit Google recruiter emailed me about multiple roles this week. But then, that’s just the kind of quality (none) and attention to detail (nil) I already have learned to expect from Google. Comment from kleinsch in this thread is spot on.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Google knows you wont get an offer for months, and the hiring freeze will be long over by then.
  - natch 4y ago
    That’s actually a fair theory but I doubt they really know when the hiring freeze will be over. On the other hand, when can any business really predict the future flawlessly? Never. But they could include a line addressing the risk.
    - thehappypm 4y ago
      Even if the recruiters are wrong about the freeze it’s the candidates (not the recruiters) who get negatively impacted, so the incentive is there to keep recruiting
etempleton 4y ago
Both companies derive nearly 100% of their revenue from digital advertising. Digital advertising can be lucrative. It can also go away in a second. If there is a recession the first thing every company cuts is their ad budget. Facebook and Google are preparing for a recession. They probably have indications that one is coming. They can't wait for it because it is going to hit them first.
itslennysfault 4y ago
How does this jive with their very recent purchase of the Thomson Center in Chicago?? They also announced they'd be hiring over 4000 people to fill it (making it the second largest google hub in the world)
advael 4y ago
As others have commented, this seems like a smokescreen rather than a real freeze. But as someone who wants to see every monopolistic company broken up or fail spectacularly, I think a hiring freeze at FAANGs is a great opportunity for talented people to consider growing a spine and working somewhere less big and lucrative. To people facing that choice, I would say this: The world is in a weird place right now, and you have probably in some aspect of your life realized that the status quo you have come to expect is unsustainable at best (and a death cult careening off a cliff in many cases). Being able to adapt and handle crises is rapidly becoming the most important skillset to have. Finding opportunities to cultivate it while still making a decent living is a lot less instability than people who aren't still sought-after technical talent have to deal with, and will likely serve you better than grasping at an illusory sense of stability.
- rco8786 4y ago
  For someone who seems to agree that this is a smokescreen it’s odd to continue on to admonish FAANG engineers for sticking with something that’s only illusory stable? If it’s a smokescreen that would imply that no stability has been lost for existing employees there.
  - advael 4y ago
    I am not claiming the hiring freeze makes the stability illusory, I am claiming that the entire concept of stability is fictional EDIT: Actually, you've also missed my point in another respect: Even if there's a real hiring freeze the immediate impact would be on people seeking FAANG jobs, not those who already have them. Honestly I don't even know what you think you're responding to. Maybe you're at a FAANG and think I'm admonishing you? There's no need to be defensive. I am trying to offer advice, not to moralize at people
    - mattmanser 4y ago
      You don't really have a point, or if you do you're referencing it so obliquely and mysteriously it's almost completely impossible to tell what it is. As far as I can tell you hate big tech. You think the programming job market will collapse. And it'll be good for us, as we'll learn to deal with uncertainty! Woo hoo. But you have no actual advice on how.
WWLink 4y ago
SMH it feels like a lot of people here _want_ another dot com crash. Why? Like, you really want to make less money?
EGreg 4y ago
Google's freeze was supposed to last two weeks since May. Are they still doing the freeze?
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Someone needs to tell Meta's recruiters that there's a hiring freeze because they keep contacting me about open positions. While they're specialist positions, they're not extremely niche so it seems if there's a freeze, it's not a very cold one.
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  Meta never had a full freeze.
MrYellowP 4y ago
I don't know why anyone still needs to ask, but we're still in the early stages of a globl economic meltdown, despite what you might hear (or even not-hear) from politicians.

433 points by leeny 4y ago

metadat 4y ago

And Oracle, and pretty much all the FANG MAAMAs except Amazon.

firstSpeaker 4y ago
I wonder what is going on with Amazon. They seem to be going strong with hiring.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  My money is on Amazon being more fine with "aggressively pruning their workforce" on a regular basis. The point of a hiring freeze is so that you can move employees around internally to prune unprofitable parts of the business without pruning workers.
- Olreich 4y ago
  Estimates put the workforce for AWS at ~100k-200k right now. AWS income is ~80b right now according to their Q2 earnings release. Based on these numbers, a person working for AWS is making Amazon ~$400k in revenue. The profit for AWS at the moment is 30% according to the Q2 filings and nets out to ~$24b. So, assuming 200k employees for AWS which is very software-developer heavy says they are making at least $120k per developer in AWS. If they think they can continue that trend, they should be hiring every last engineer they can get for less than $280k a year. If they think they can grow their margin, they should be hiring up to an even higher number.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    those numbers are scary for anyone ever thinking about competing with amazon... I'm really stupefied by the way this company is operating..
    - rubiquity 4y ago
      Those precious margins will be their competitor's opportunity. Right now the cloud cartel is happy to all grow quickly and pretend compete with each other, but once that stops the margins will thin out.
- nojito 4y ago
  They cut about 100k jobs. https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/07/29/amazon-shrinks-staff-by-100000-joining-netflix-and-google-in-hiring-slowdown/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/07/29/amazon-shrinks-staff-...
  - weezin 4y ago
    These are mostly warehouse jobs because they had to ramp up drastically during the pandemic, but don't need as much capacity now. They are still hiring SWEs.
georgeburdell 4y ago
I haven’t heard of Apple freezing hiring

water8 4y ago

pavlov 4y ago
Both Google and Meta have millions of PCs in data centers and the number just keeps growing, so I guess you can call it a cancer.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  Unless you're being facetious, I suspect that PC == political correctness in this context.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    I just wish PC would still mean "IBM / Wintel platform computer" on HN.
solardev 4y ago
Is there any evidence these are connected?
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Things got bad enough to warrant guidelines around the discussion of politics and non-work related matters on internal lists.
  - macintux 4y ago
    The U.S. has been suffering from incredibly divisive politics for the last several years. It's not exactly shocking that a company would lock down internal discussion forums.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Then how do you explain the business troubles of companies that ban political discussion, whether Coinbase or Basecamp?

cbanek 4y ago

I'm not sure I buy that they're actually on a hiring freeze, but I may be wrong. The day before it was announced I got a text from a google recruiter literally saying feel free to contact me on 8/8 (after the freeze is supposedly finished). I feel like this was definitely a show for the shareholders, and a way to drop your dead weight. Everyone seems worried about employee productivity and profitably all of a sudden, or at least they're pretending to. My advice is only if you know what you're doing, there's always a job for you.

yodsanklai 4y ago
> The day before it was announced These recruiters may have heard the news at the same time it was announced.
meldyr 4y ago
Be careful with young and ambitious recruiters these days. When large companies can do hiring freezes they do not immediately fire a large proportion of their recruiters immediately. Recruiters will spent the same time interviewing for less vacancies to fill. Be careful not to waste your time on this.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  +1 to this. In big companies, I've seen hundreds of applicants interviewed to start work on a project, when the project had already been cancelled months ago, and none of those interviewed were hired. They'd already made it into the interview pipeline, and management hadn't let recruitment know that this position was no longer needed, so all the interviews went ahead as scheduled. Hundreds of person-days wasted! The reputation of the firm damaged, good people missed (would you re-apply soon after being rejected?)... And I don't think this is a rare story.
eatonphil 4y ago
If you're a recruiter and your entire job is to find and interview candidates and there's a hiring freeze but you (the recruiter) haven't been laid off... what are you going to spend your time doing? Finding and interviewing candidates.

TrackerFF 4y ago

Didn’t Sundar just recently demand increased productivity? Sounds like he’s setting the stage for layoffs.

papito 4y ago
Maybe give everyone leetcode problems - that's what they trained for.
ripper1138 4y ago
Inevitable. Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. Most of the Googlers I know have been spending 20% of their time on Google and 80% on side projects for the past year now.
- fnands 4y ago
  Seems like a sweet gig
- trasz 4y ago
  It should be sustainable if those two hours were spent building something useful, and not just another random thing to be forgotten in three years.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Working 2 hours a day while getting paid 300K+ is unsustainable. That's just not true though. If you can generate $50m of revenue by working 2 hours a day then you're brilliant at your job, and demanding you work more hours is idiotic. Put simply, there is no function that converts "salary / hours" into any useful measure of a person's output.
  - ninkendo 4y ago
    Or the far more likely scenario is that your job is only barely needed in the first place, and you were hired because some line manager knows that increasing their head count is the best way to get promoted. And since their manager is thinking the same (and probably one layer above too), and the company is still doing gangbusters on ad revenue, no one really questions it.

choeger 4y ago

My hunch is that these companies are cargo-culting their strategies. The hiring freeze is as essentially a gut reaction. If one starts with layoffs, others will follow. The real problem is that companies of the Google scale will always need new engineers for particular projects and have a surplus for others. A global freeze or even layoffs simply don't fit.

Ekaros 4y ago
Is it just doing what markets expect? They currently expect the companies to signal hiring freezes, thinking it will lower costs and increase profitability... Probably started by some that needed to do something and now rest just follow.
philjohn 4y ago
Or they both over-hired and are taking similar steps to lean into natural attrition. As for new engineers and surplus of others, I'm sure they'll be moving people around. A backend dev on one project can move to another backend project. Same for frontend, mobile, etc. So little of the work being done at these companies is massively specialised as they all have mature systems you're weaving together to deliver solutions.
blagie 4y ago
The best businesses I've seen work counter-cyclically. When there are hiring freezes and layoffs, it's easy to find good cheap engineers and you hire. When job markets are hot, you put a pause on hiring. The same goes for many other things. A recession is an ideal time for deep R&D. There's little competition, and it's possible to do long-term thinking. When the recession ends, and the bubble begins, you hit jackpot. All of this requires deep enough pockets to weather a few years, though, and patient investors. That's rare. Cargo culting for Google and Facebook make little sense organization-wide, since they do have deep pockets. They make complete sense employee-wise. No one got fired for following industry best practices, conventions, or cycles.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  I couldn't agree with you more. A FAANG-tier company with which I'm closely familiar pretty much did the worst thing every time during the past 2 years - they tried to tighten the belt when COVID first hit (missing a ton of great talent when the initial uncertainly killed off some of the smaller companies), then they tried growing and chasing talent really hard, right when the bubble was at its peak, and now that the economic outlook is negative, they've halted / significantly slowed down hiring. My personal opinion is that Warren Buffett's old quote to be "fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful" rings really true.

firstSpeaker 4y ago

My process with Google just stopped. No further update form the recruiter. It just went on silence. Sometimes it feels like I made the right choice not changing to Klarna early this year and staying at my current work.

whimsicalism 4y ago
This happened to me. In general, G has a terrible process - but I ended up getting a higher offer elsewhere. Turns out my recruiter had been fired.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kafrofrite 4y ago

For what it's worth, Meta offered me slightly after the hiring freeze was announced for a security engineer position (L4 IIRC). I'm interviewing with Google for Security Engineering as well and still they haven't told me anything about a hiring freeze yet.

modarts 4y ago
A hiring freeze is typically a freeze on new job reqs (candidates already interviewing wouldn't be exposed to this)
- gen220 4y ago
  In this instance, Google is freezing people below the Staff-Eng level who have already done their onsites.
gen220 4y ago
As far as I understand, the freeze is applying to standard SWE roles at levels below staff. If you're interviewing for something more specialized (security, sre, production engineering), the freeze may not apply to you. The hiring pipeline for those specialized roles is comparatively quite narrow and competitive, it doesn't make sense to squeeze them.

aulin 4y ago

maybe they realized hiring leetcode junkies is not a great strategy and they want to freeze that while they find a better interview system

nowherebeen 4y ago
It’s a way to filter out more experienced candidates because they want cheap and young. Even a Meta recruiter admits to me that Leetcode has nothing to do with the job, it’s just a company requirement that no one questions.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ahtihn 4y ago
  Why do they pay more than anyone else if they want cheap? They could easily pay 30% less and still fill their positions if they just lowered the bar to get hired.
  - nowherebeen 4y ago
    If they are paying 30% less then they will be competing against late stage startups. They have a cash cow to help tilt the lever to their advantage. However that 30% is unlikely to make older workers works more because they have other family obligations. Priorities change in your 30s.
- ascar 4y ago
  Your logic doesn't add up. Sure, these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance and indeed they shifted more and more from general intelligence assessment to algorithm coding assessment. Solving the algorithm is only part of the equation though. Writing readable code, explaining your thought process and decisions and communicating well with the interviewer are also vital points of the assessment. Is it a perfect or even good proxy for job performance? I dunno. Do we have a better one within a 40 minute interview? Not really. Past experience is unfortunately also a weak indicator, starting with the question if what's in the CV is an accurate reflection of the truth. There is also an interesting cultural aspect to lying on your CV. Every approach comes with its own unique set of problems and as long as the position is sought after people will prepare and try to game the system. The opinion of a recruiter on the matter isn't really the most relevant either. Especially Google should have quite some data on their various approaches and correlation to job performance and seems to use it. E.g. the trick questions were abandoned as they didn't show a correlation to job performance.

ur-whale 4y ago

What's going on is there is a giant recession half-cycle heading our way and Google (don't know about FB) have teams of folks whose sole job is to forecast these cycles. My bet is they are seeing which way the wind is turning and battening down the hatches.

Tade0 4y ago

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G's recruiters in Poland. I wasn't pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he'd try and found that the recruiter's calendar was filled up to the brim. He asked what's going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was... very close to the current market rate. This is a major shift in policy comparing to just three years ago and with Poland being a popular outsourcing destination I suspect that this is what's happening, especially that due to the Russian invasion there's additional talent from Ukraine in Warsaw.

pzduniak 4y ago
Market rates? Oof, I thought they were still more competitive. They flat out refused to discuss comp with me before passing the interviews. Fascinating that now VC-funded companies are suddenly getting more and more competitive by not discriminating by region. Everyone tries to beat the market and they're more flexible regarding the employment contract, so eg. you can be self-employed and save 20% of your income from taxes.
__exit__ 4y ago
When you say the compensation was very close to the current market rate, I assume you mean the market rate in Poland, correct? No fancy Silicon Valley salaries for devs in Poland, that is.
- woadwarrior01 4y ago
  I left G in Ireland about 4 months ago for a fully remote position at a startup. Up until then, G's Polish salaries were low even by Western European standards (which is ~ >= 1/2 of SV pay).
  - gwnywg 4y ago
    In my opinion this makes sense, what would be the incentive to hire there if wages were the same?

Mandatum 4y ago

I think they're trying to push down salaries, there's still plenty of hiring for technical roles. Recruiters, marketers, sales reps on the other hand..

paganel 4y ago

> Moreover, these freezes materially affect our business. Related and slightly OT, but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company. Which, in retrospect, of course that it makes a lot of sense and I get it, from an economic pov, but I still find it kind of strange. I had recently become quite bearish on these companies (especially Google and FB), this type of info only reinforces that opinion, you cannot truly innovate while you're employing people who see working there has an end in itself. Hope that monopoly-like thingie will continue to work for them (again, I'm thinking mainly about FB and Google), otherwise I see dark days ahead for these two companies.

AlwaysRock 4y ago
> but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company I've made xxk of side income every year over the last few years working for companies that help people land at faang companies. It's a huge business. If you're an average swe making 100K-150K and you could spend 6 months and xk-xxk to be making 200K+ for the rest of your career, its a pretty easy decision.

user_named 4y ago

Does anybody know what's going on with Walmart Global Tech? A couple of weeks ago I was told I got great feedback and was moving on to the final step which was a call with a VP. Then silence for two or three weeks and no response when I email. Will they come back?

ShamelessC 4y ago
Walmart’s tech hiring is a complete and total shit show regardless of the economy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they never get back to you. In fact (and you didn’t hear this from me), I’ve never witnessed a higher density of incompetence than when [SWIM] worked as a coder at their home office. Don’t work there if you want to maintain your sanity.
- treis 4y ago
  > [SWIM] What does this mean?
  - user_named 4y ago
    Someone who is not me
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    “Someone who isn’t me”
  - nick__m 4y ago
    Someone Who Isn't Me
ricardobayes 4y ago
Sometimes yes, it's the summer and people go on long vacations.

mkl95 4y ago

How can large companies with high turnover like Google and Facebook afford to stop hiring engineers? Do they downsize teams, shut down projects, or something else?

discordance 4y ago
You don’t need thousands of devs and PMs to make good things. Think about WhatsApp, which was built by a handful of engineers. I work at a large tech company and a lot of the hiring sprees seem more like VP measuring contests.
aliyeysides 4y ago
My recruiter told me Google's attrition rate this year has been one of the lowest in recent memory. Fears of recession could have to do with that. People don't want to take the risk of leaving a "stable" job.

fareesh 4y ago

jstx1 4y ago
Nobody has updated the definition of recession, in the US this has always been determined by a comission - https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107581150/recession-referees https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1107581150/recession-referees
- codereviewed 4y ago
  You are 100% correct. The confusion in the public stems from the fact that the news media selectively reports on recession in different ways depending on which party is in power. They ignore your fact when one party is in power and they highlight the "2 quarters of no growth" rule of thumb instead. Then when their guy is in power they go out of their way to say "Akshually a recession isn't defined by that it is defined by a committee." Just a few examples: https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    > Just a few examples: https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU https://imgur.com/a/xbBzLIU Well, its just 1 example because BBC and Reuters were only in your Imgur link with a timestamp saying in 2020 that it was a recession. And in your only example the person (Ben White -- CNBC) explicitly call out a double digit decrease in their claim of recession. The current situation is not a double digit decrease so it's not hypocritical. Certainly somebody is going to be hypocritical in when they call a recession but Ben White's two comments you've quoted aren't.
    - codereviewed 4y ago

emanresu3 4y ago

It’s almost as if infinite growth can’t continue on forever…

jmacd 4y ago

If I was an exec at either company and hiring was all of a sudden a bit less competitive and/or I had better access to top tier employees at other companies who were now more amenable to being recruited... I would certainly hit the "freeze" button for a few hiring cycles to recalibrate around this new reality. I would not need to look at my business plan or P&L to do that.

kleinsch 4y ago

Google has always recruited and interviewed independently of whether they actually have roles open that make sense for you. Earlier this year, I passed the interview and spent six weeks in "team match" before I gave up and took a role with another company. Had a friend who did the same for months for a PM role. Just bc you're getting contacted by Google recruiters this week or interviewing doesn't mean you'll ever find a team or get a real offer.

x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
Were you paid during this time?
- itg 4y ago
  You don't get paid because they don't formally extend an offer until you match with a team.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    You don’t get paid until your start date.
bena 4y ago
It kind of makes sense to keep people in the pipeline as it were. If you shut down the whole apparatus, you have to spin it back up when hiring is unfrozen. But if you keep the machine running, you're ready to hire the instant you can. For them that is. Sucks for you and me.
- chem83 4y ago
  At Google, upon entering the process, recruiters explain that an offer within engineering (including PM, T/PgM etc.) is valid for 12 months from the date of approval from the hiring committee. So while it can take a long time for someone to find a team match, that flexibility is also available for the candidate, so they get to keep declining teams that are not interesting until a real match for both sides is available. At Facebook, it's possible to match before starting, but candidates usually try to do the matching in the 2 weeks (or so) of training they do in Menlo Park. It's up to them to cold call and find time with hiring managers to sell themselves (and vice-versa). But time-wise, the process is much more constrained than Google's.

s1k3s 4y ago

Their data is based on a survey. According to LinkedIn, the following number of jobs per company have been created in the past week: Google 7k+ Apple 2k+ Amazon 39k+ Meta 2k+ If anyone has that premium feature (I don't have it anymore), you can check how the numbers changed over time.

kyrra 4y ago
Googler opinions are my own. I don't understand how they could have Google's true job posting numbers. Many of our postings are for general SWE roles, and that posting could hide any number of actual openings.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
TecoAndJix 4y ago
Here are screenshots of the LinkedIn Premium insights: Google - https://pasteboard.co/X7VROVRXt9rE.png https://pasteboard.co/X7VROVRXt9rE.png Apple - https://pasteboard.co/ILHP3rzuCmCZ.png https://pasteboard.co/ILHP3rzuCmCZ.png Amazon - https://pasteboard.co/fKxc5gF1YIi5.png https://pasteboard.co/fKxc5gF1YIi5.png Meta - https://pasteboard.co/OSHCnfUE4V1B.png https://pasteboard.co/OSHCnfUE4V1B.png
bluGill 4y ago
Do not confusing job posting with openings. Companies have often posted advertisements for jobs they had no intent of hiring anyone for. The purpose is investors see those ads and think the company must be growing, even though management knows more people in that role would not translate it more profits in the future.
dthul 4y ago
I tried getting an interview for one of those LinkedIn posts and even though I had a really good starting point (successful internship within the last few months plus an internal referral from someone working in the group I applied for plus being a good fit based on my skills and education) I wasn't even invited for a first interview, only got a generic rejection by email. So I don't think these postings are all real.

kache_ 4y ago

>freeze Yeah, unless you're a staff engineer :P The fight over STSMs is only getting more brutal. More like a freeze on training engineers up to become staff members

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

The people I know who are still inside (Google) seem optimistic that maybe the company is taking a pause to deal with some of its bureaucracy and internal politics issues and with people's complaints about perf. I suppose that's good. From my perspective: They've got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry.

marcinzm 4y ago
If someone thinks Google can even scratch any of those issues in two weeks then you've really been drinking some Google kool aid. edit: Increased clarity.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Yeah, nah, obv I don't think that. I quit. But maybe you mean a hypothetical "you" of other people still working there. Obviously it's a mix, but I suspect on the whole most people are smart enough to see that these kinds of things are unlikely to accomplish much. But they're also likely happy that upper management is finally acknowledging these dysfunctions.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    When I was just a coder at a fortune 500 company, I was voluntold to be on a "Morale Committee". Not much came of it (one meeting with about 20 of us, they had an ice cream social, because people like ice cream and the work environment was very siloed people weren't interacting). It didn't do much, but employees took notice that management realized morale was low. The round of layoffs that came soon after overshadowed that however.
smugma 4y ago
This has been true for at least 20 years.
PheonixPharts 4y ago
> And it's on the whole asphyxiating the industry. My understanding was that asphyxiating the industry was always the plan. For those who worked in industry pre-2008, one of the major drivers that allowed new startups to be so disruptive was that startups could very often compete with the then major tech companies on compensation. If there was a difference in pay, it was usually minor and could easily be made up for by better quality of life and a nice promotion in title. Once Google and Facebook started growing it's clear they realized that every talented engineer on the market is a potential threat. As time has moved on the gap in pay between startup and FAANG and now startup and any company offering RSUs is just too large for startups to compete for talent. I generally prefer startups to large companies, but can't find a single startup offering comp even remotely close to what I have in my current role. Unless I started to absolutely hate my current position, and found a startup that had essentially my dream role, there's no way I would seriously consider a switch. My suspicion is that as funding for startups starts to dry up as money becomes more expensive, we'll see large, high paying tech companies start to let go of more staff and start driving comp down. When the market cools Google and similar companies asphyxiation strategy will have been completed. Startups starved of talent and finally starved of dollars will be no threat, that means they can safely reduce labor costs while maintaining market dominance.

coliveira 4y ago

They don't really need to stop hiring, they just need to match the number of people leaving the company (which is always happening).

coliveira 4y ago

This may also be a big mistake by Google. I fully expect other companies such as Apple will take advantage of this mistake to hire even more in specific areas.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago

The Google internal propaganda game must be crazy strong if the actual employees are believing random management explanations designed to keep people from panicking. The US just formally entered a recession, in within a week of the economic turmoil multiple companies freeze hiring...

mikeyouse 4y ago
Aside from the debate about 'formally*' entering a recession - if you do abide by the strict two quarters of real GDP decline rule, the economy still added ~2 million jobs during those same two quarters and the economy grew at a nominal ~6%. I don't think we're quite to the "economic turmoil" phase of things.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Decision makers are now starting to openly push for moves to increase unemployment to get wage "inflation" down. I feel we're about to enter into a situation very similar to the early 90s, and we'll see a wave of pro-austerity politics and a lot of talk about "tightening our belts" -- slashing employee rights and social programs and cutting all kinds of social spending -- which is really about re-instilling labour discipline. I suspect here in Canada the temporary foreign worker program is about to have the floodgates opened. Employers, especially small businesses, are really not happy about having to pay more than minimum wage, and they're very unhappy about having their authority in the workplace undermined by workers with seemingly excessive bargaining power. The situation in the US is obviously more complicated by their messed up immigration system.
  - davidw 4y ago
    I have no idea what will happen myself, but it all feels a bit different. I think a lot of what's going on are still shocks from the pandemic, supply chains, and geopolitical stuff.
    - randomdata 4y ago

rootsudo 4y ago

I still have Meta and Google recruiters hitting me up even though there is a hiring freeze. Niche enough jobs are still being hired for, and both recruiters repeated the line that there’s a hiring freeze except for “this” position. I felt special for a second.

yuan43 4y ago

> As several of these statements blatantly contradict one another, I went back to the data and ran the same sanity check that I did with Facebook above. In other words, what if Google is using the hiring freeze as a smoke screen and only continuing with the strongest candidates, while keeping the rest on the bench? An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. To investors it says "technical or not, we've hit a recession." Brace yourselves for impact. Google and Facebook are both advertising companies, so they are tightly coupled to the business cycle. When business spending starts to falter, they'll feel it first. And they have. So it's not surprising that the companies themselves are far from clear about this, sending mixed messages. I expect them to continue to do so for as long as they possibly can. The bubble has inflated so far for so long, I get the sense that even among cynical young employees and "investors" there's a sense of permanence in the positions of both companies. The thing is, those with fewer than 10 years experience have never seen the ferocity of the other side of the business cycle. When it turns, that mofo turns. Those in top management positions have seen it, and they're going to do everything in their ability to deny and evade it.

nomel 4y ago
> To employees it says "the ship is sinking." Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. To investors it says "technical or not, we've hit a recession." Brace yourselves for impact While it’s possibly true in this case, that’s definitely not always true. I’ve been in two companies that had to implement a hiring freeze because growth was too fast. Everyone understood, because nobody new each other, because half the company was just hired.
- unicornmama 4y ago
  Layoffs can be positively received by the market if it cuts the fat to increase profit. No one expects Google or any other company to grow unboundedly.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> the business cycle Just an aside, that this rebranding of Marx's theory of crisis never fails to get a chuckle out of me. In mainstream economics is presented as some magical property of the way economies work, where Marx specifically predicts cyclically economic crisis created by contradictions inherent in the structure of capitalism, the periodically build to a tipping point leading to crisis and ultimately the resolution of these contradictions. For Marx, these crises ultimately culminate in the unavoidable collapse of capitalism. Which is where the fundamental drive to find alternatives to capitalism comes from for Marx, not because it is an ethically questionable system, but because it is one fundamentally headed towards its own destruction. But "business cycle" sounds much better, and leaves off all that spooky "systemic problem" stuff.

davidw 4y ago

I suppose this is "old man yells at clouds" material, but I feel like engineers should be practicing for their future jobs, not for interviews.

the_doctah 4y ago
Neither my current job nor my future job require me to invert a binary tree but here I am practicing it anyway.
ep103 4y ago
In our industry, the interview process is completely divorced from the skillset required for the actual job. Fittingly, this is because Google developed an interviewing process that was scalable, required minimal training, human-interactive or soft skills, and was objectively measurable (leetcode), while non-obviously biasing the interview process towards cheaper, younger interviewees. It is also an interview process that is utterly incapable of differentiating low skill from high skill engineers. For Google, which needed a way to choose between the very best resumes in its pile, this made sense. For the rest of the industry, it does not. But apparently our industry just does whatever the "big players" do, blindly, so here we are.
- papito 4y ago
  Remember how Google was asking completely useless brain teasers and everyone just blindly started copycatting it? The "we want to be like Google" syndrome in tech is just devastating.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    > The "we want to be like Google" syndrome in tech is just devastating. I think it is dead & dying though. Nobody would start asking brainteasers if Google went back to doing it.
    - Espressosaurus 4y ago
      Brainteasers are dead. The parent's point that the industry follows Google's lead is a cogent observation however.

MichaelMoser123 4y ago

what happened to the 'great resignation/dropout wave'? And what will happen to those who participated in the movement?

jasonwilk 4y ago

We lost a product manager candidate to Meta yesterday so not so sure about any hiring freeze.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
It’s only for eng

lumost 4y ago

Ads market may be peaking as would inevitably happen. I’m increasingly seeing google and Facebook make idiotic decisions that clearly improve ad revenue at the cost of user retention. I recently started searching cpp documentation and the only thing that comes up is copy pasta sites. I need a new search engine, and I just deleted instagram last week. YouTube now runs multiple back to back video ads. Maybe this is just a pause, or a momentary restructuring- but all markets peak eventually.

bonestamp2 4y ago

I literally saw a new job posting from Google yesterday. Either way, hiring freezes usually happen before layoffs. The freeze allows the numbers to naturally reduce as people leave and they aren't replaced. Then they can move on to laying off the remaining number of people they need to reduce by.

vinnymac 4y ago

Both Google and Meta have reached out to me directly for an interview in the last week. When did this hiring freeze begin?

harambae 4y ago
Meta reached out to me yesterday afternoon about a position, it doesn't looking they're freezing for technical positions in AR/VR.
- 121789 4y ago
  They aren't. There is plenty of hiring if you are in one the priority areas (AR/VR, AI/ML, short form video, ads, privacy) or if you have specific skillsets (ML mostly). Other teams will have trouble getting headcount

dejongh 4y ago

Interesting and well written article supported by factual data. I wonder if this is a temp thing, or if it is another early warning that regression is coming. Is a major regression coming?

kweinber 4y ago

Apple. Do not track. Ad impressions plummet. Revenue drops. Hiring stops. That’s why Facebook is trying to get you to stop looking at your phone and strap on an oculus….. there are no privacy guards there.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Don't think the Apple thing was as impactful to Google as it is to other players. I think the primary problem is that attribution becomes difficult, not that impressions plummet.

twirlock 4y ago

AlwaysRock 4y ago

It's kind of odd that people are this shocked about this. Google and FB have frozen various roles for various periods of time over the last 2-3 years. I'm guessing they have on and off for most of their existence. I just want clued into their hiring process then. The freezes almost always are for lower level roles only (l3 or l4) and dont REALLY impact anything since these companies are pretty slow to begin with. The people impacted by this are early career folks who are likely interviewing for general swe roles at these companies and a slew of others. FB and Alphabet will almost always still be moving folks with specialized skills sets through their pipeline and even if "no offers are going out" a L7 machine learning engineer or security engineer or android engineer who is already matched with a team is still getting an offer.

baby 4y ago
This ^ I remember hiring being frozen for some time at the beginning of covid for FB

lamontcg 4y ago

We're not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now. It does show that the billionaires are kind of enthusiastic though about the coming recession and economic pain being inflicted on the lower classes, and getting those uppity workers a bit more under control. They're not so worried about asset prices / stock prices / sales / etc and probably correctly assume that everything will rebound just fine for them.

baby 4y ago
I mean FB's stock got halved in the last few months
- rapsey 4y ago
  That is because investors don't see a good future for that company. It is basically failing on all fronts.
  - baby 4y ago
    this is response to this comment: > We're not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now. which has nothing to do with investors
    - hervature 4y ago
      In case you're not aware, your response is heavily implying that FB's stock falling is proof of a recession. That's why they responded by clarifying that the drop is due to future outlook of investors and not the economy at large.
      - baby 4y ago
        It's not, the OP said that they were ahead of the curve, and I pointed out that their stock halved. I do believe we're in a recession though, but Meta's stock is not going to show you that.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Very simple, an economic downturn leads to any public company looking at their cost structure and polishing up the numbers. Big companies accumulate a lot of organizational debt where teams, departments, and individuals under perform for whatever reason and often not even because of their own fault. Corporate stupidity, and mismanagement, are also things that plague big corporations. Just look at Google lately. Regularly pruning the org tree is both something that needs some level of excuse as it would otherwise upset the rest of the org tree; and needs to happen once in a while. The people least likely to leave by themselves are usually the once targeted explicitly. So, any kind of economic down turn is usually a good moment for that. Doing it wrong means your best people leave first, which is usually counter productive. So, you have these trillion dollar companies shedding a few crocodile tears over having to say goodbye to a few not-so-valued employees and using all the usual euphemisms, cliches, and woke language for that. So, classic targets for layoffs are HR (ironically), supporting functions like IT, middle management, people promoted to their level of incompetence (Peter principle), etc.

Kharvok 4y ago

I think companies have had to lower expectations for new hires over the last several years. These companies now see an opportunity with a slight market correction to freeze hiring to deal with the lower performers and possibly replace.

VirusNewbie 4y ago
I think hiring standards have gotten higher but performance standards took a back seat the last couple years.

natch 4y ago

A legit Google recruiter emailed me about multiple roles this week. But then, that’s just the kind of quality (none) and attention to detail (nil) I already have learned to expect from Google. Comment from kleinsch in this thread is spot on.

thehappypm 4y ago
Google knows you wont get an offer for months, and the hiring freeze will be long over by then.
- natch 4y ago
  That’s actually a fair theory but I doubt they really know when the hiring freeze will be over. On the other hand, when can any business really predict the future flawlessly? Never. But they could include a line addressing the risk.
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    Even if the recruiters are wrong about the freeze it’s the candidates (not the recruiters) who get negatively impacted, so the incentive is there to keep recruiting

etempleton 4y ago

Both companies derive nearly 100% of their revenue from digital advertising. Digital advertising can be lucrative. It can also go away in a second. If there is a recession the first thing every company cuts is their ad budget. Facebook and Google are preparing for a recession. They probably have indications that one is coming. They can't wait for it because it is going to hit them first.

itslennysfault 4y ago

How does this jive with their very recent purchase of the Thomson Center in Chicago?? They also announced they'd be hiring over 4000 people to fill it (making it the second largest google hub in the world)

advael 4y ago

As others have commented, this seems like a smokescreen rather than a real freeze. But as someone who wants to see every monopolistic company broken up or fail spectacularly, I think a hiring freeze at FAANGs is a great opportunity for talented people to consider growing a spine and working somewhere less big and lucrative. To people facing that choice, I would say this: The world is in a weird place right now, and you have probably in some aspect of your life realized that the status quo you have come to expect is unsustainable at best (and a death cult careening off a cliff in many cases). Being able to adapt and handle crises is rapidly becoming the most important skillset to have. Finding opportunities to cultivate it while still making a decent living is a lot less instability than people who aren't still sought-after technical talent have to deal with, and will likely serve you better than grasping at an illusory sense of stability.

rco8786 4y ago
For someone who seems to agree that this is a smokescreen it’s odd to continue on to admonish FAANG engineers for sticking with something that’s only illusory stable? If it’s a smokescreen that would imply that no stability has been lost for existing employees there.
- advael 4y ago
  I am not claiming the hiring freeze makes the stability illusory, I am claiming that the entire concept of stability is fictional EDIT: Actually, you've also missed my point in another respect: Even if there's a real hiring freeze the immediate impact would be on people seeking FAANG jobs, not those who already have them. Honestly I don't even know what you think you're responding to. Maybe you're at a FAANG and think I'm admonishing you? There's no need to be defensive. I am trying to offer advice, not to moralize at people
  - mattmanser 4y ago
    You don't really have a point, or if you do you're referencing it so obliquely and mysteriously it's almost completely impossible to tell what it is. As far as I can tell you hate big tech. You think the programming job market will collapse. And it'll be good for us, as we'll learn to deal with uncertainty! Woo hoo. But you have no actual advice on how.

WWLink 4y ago

SMH it feels like a lot of people here _want_ another dot com crash. Why? Like, you really want to make less money?

EGreg 4y ago

Google's freeze was supposed to last two weeks since May. Are they still doing the freeze?

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

Someone needs to tell Meta's recruiters that there's a hiring freeze because they keep contacting me about open positions. While they're specialist positions, they're not extremely niche so it seems if there's a freeze, it's not a very cold one.

VirusNewbie 4y ago
Meta never had a full freeze.

MrYellowP 4y ago

I don't know why anyone still needs to ask, but we're still in the early stages of a globl economic meltdown, despite what you might hear (or even not-hear) from politicians.