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>I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially wa

>I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. I've heard this claimed but not sourced, and it doesn't really make sense - there are millions of software engineers out there and Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them.

metadat 4y ago
You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds up to a significant portion of the market. There is also a huge amount of medium sized whales such as SAP and PayPal who in total end up also consuming a lot of the talent.
- sushid 4y ago
  Arguably that's Google and Meta's strategy (maybe even Apple) but that's certainly not Amazon's. They just mass hire anyone without a care in the world. Not sure if Oracle even belongs in this group.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    It definitely wasn't Meta's strategy when I was there in 2018. They hired a lot of junior software engineers but all other positions had relatively limited headcount (which I mostly think is a good thing).
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    I believe it. Every single day I get emails from various Amazon recruiters. Often it's for positions I'm barely qualified for. As much as I think AWS is a great service, I'd be terrified to learn what lies beneath given how low their recruitment standards are.
    - wyclif 4y ago
      The level of churn at Amazon is incredibly high. They turnover a lot of their workforce and they're famous for "hire to fire."
      - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        I keep hearing that, but I know an absolute meathead who is a senior architect over there. Maybe he's just good at playing the "bro" game?
    - Ancapistani 4y ago
      Based on what I've seen from the outside about their corporate culture, I'm not in any way interested in working for Amazon/AWS. That said, the interactions I've had with the people working on AWS have been uniformly positive. They're easy to work with and obviously very skilled engineers.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      Their recruiting reach is high, but it doesn't have that much to do with desperation, and their actual interviewing standards aren't low. The recruiting reach is high because every single sub-group of teams within amazon has their own recruiters, and none of them communicate with recruiters from outside of that. Sometimes i get multiple emails from different AWS sub-group recruiters per day, but it isn't because AWS is desperate for me. It is simply because for them, the existence of the other ones reaching out at the same time is completely immaterial, just like if they were recruiters from other companies. And while yes, Amazon's interviewing bar might not be as high as Meta/Google/Dropbox/etc, it isn't far behind at all, and it is pretty much on par with Microsoft. Disclosure: never worked at Amazon, but interviewed with them and the rest of the companies mentioned, and worked at (or got offers from) some of them.
- itsdrewmiller 4y ago
  Closer to (edit: 13mm professional) developers - https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-are-there-in-the-world-in-2019/ https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-a... Most of those companies have less than 30k SWEs, not 100k - https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?lang=en https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?... (feel free to google the others) So for each company they represent at most around (edit: 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" portion is a small fraction of that.
  - metadat 4y ago
    (edit: parent originally claimed 30 million professional software engineers worldwide, then edited in a revised estimate of 13 million.. which is in the ballpark of my original figure? :) Just because someone "uses JavaScript" doesn't mean they are a full-time professional. In fact, most are dabblers. The number depends entirely on the definition - are all IT professionals considered software engineers? If so, that's about 24 million. I am talking about full-time SWEs. In any case Drew, it sounds like we're mostly in agreement. What a relief! :D We can't really know what is in the minds of Zuckerfk and Pikaichu, in the end it's all speculation.
    - itsdrewmiller 4y ago
      Yeah sorry I did edit the number down based on digging deeper into my link based on your comment here. I still think 0.3% (my original number was 0.1%) is not a meaningful amount of engineers for a "starve the rest of the world of talent" strategy to work.
  - YmiYugy 4y ago
    I think it's plausible that the superfluous hirings are caused by hirings of key individuals. It's quite common for these big tech companies to poach each others department heads and other key personnel. This can cause significant damage to a company so can be an attractive tactic. The downside is that in order to retain these people you don't just have to pay them a lot of money you also have to give them big projects and resources to implement them, i.e. lot's of people get hired. This can a problem when these projects aren't supported by the wider company but are just someones pet project.
- ehnto 4y ago
  > being up to BigCorps peculiar standards I'm glad you put it that way. It's not necessarily smarts or talent, but it does take a particular willingness for the institutional peculiarities to integrate with a big organization. I'm not one of those people, I tried it, and I will never do it again. I did note, you either had people who had just joined, or people who had been there for nearly a decade or more. I think of the word "institutionalized", as in, they had bought into the institution lifestyle, and were so full of it's arbitrary knowledge that moving on would be like starting over.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' engineers. I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a prestigious university is not always an indicator either. imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or are at smaller startups.
  - 202206241203 4y ago
    Some engineers see themselves as merely tools, so they "sharpen" themselves to be used effectively. Why would MAANAM (FAANG is a bit outdated) want more creative ones? They will get bored and leave.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    No, but if all of FAANG are hiring by that criteria, it still works; startups can hire good talent because they break the pareto equilibrium, but that's ok for FAANG because they obtain that tech through acquisition after the idea and execution are derisked. The system works!
  - tomuli38 4y ago
    Aren't the best engineers generally at national labs and NIST and NASA? FAANG is known to be full of money/status chasers.
    - WJW 4y ago
      That question is pretty meaningless unless you can somehow measure the quality of an engineer. Is it the engineer who can build systems nobody else can, the one who can build the cheapest system that performs to spec, the one that can work well in a team, the one that is always available, the one that can teach others, etc etc etc etc. I'm sure anyone can think of many more aspects to being a good engineer. I bet NASA and NIST have a great bunch of quality all-round engineers, but I'd be surprised if they were better at leetcode than the average FAANG dev. After all, FAANG devs have literally been filtered through an "are they good at leetcode" process. FAANG may be full of money chasers, but if the way to get more money there is by "being a good engineer" that does not mean much.
- cosmotic 4y ago
  Everyone claims they hire the best. For a long time Google and others had atypical hiring practices which they have since abandoned. I suspect this is because they discovered the techniques were less effective than originally thought. So 'best' by what measure?
  - tedivm 4y ago
    I've worked with some really good engineers who came out of google, but I've worked with far more that were extremely arrogant but could not actually get anything done. One of the startups I worked at got an "advisor" from Google (as part of a startup program) that probably set us further back than it ever helped. Anytime this guy didn't understand something he just got extremely belligerent instead of actually trying to get the problem. In general his advice was ignored because it didn't make sense, and he never delivered on any of the promises he made. Not to harp on this guy, as he's just one example amongst many, but it's reached the point where if I see google engineers on the founding team for a company I typically won't consider working for them. It turns out that being able to solve cute little puzzles while interviewing doesn't really help with systems level thinking.
    - dominotw 4y ago
      > Anytime this guy didn't understand something he just got extremely belligerent I think he might have backed himself into a corner by coming in as an 'advisor'. How can I be an advisor if I look like i don't even understand what is going. That must have been his mindset. So the only escape is being arrogant and belligerent.
- naveen99 4y ago
  Maybe one day there will be futures for software engineer contracts. the contracts are almost standardized on levels.fyi
- cma 4y ago
  Hording talent could be a leftover Chesterton's fence from when they had an illegal agreement between Google, Apple, etc. to not recruit each other's employees, but Facebook was never found to be part of that.
- subsubzero 4y ago
  Where are you getting the 10M number? Just curious not a criticism. I was thinking it would be around half of that(5M), with a tenth decent enough to work at most tech companies 500k, I think the bay area has 1M tech workers so half of them are engineers and thats one of the largest cluster of engineering on the planet.
  - metadat 4y ago
    A few years ago I was super curious how we stack up numbers-wise compared to doctors and attorneys (quantities artificially limited in the USA because of licenses). I did the research to calculate based on the number of CS graduates being produced by universities, combining it with average number of years worked before retiring. Unfortunately I don't have the references handy at this point.
    - subsubzero 4y ago
      Interesting, thanks for that info, licenses in other industries artificially reduce participants in that field. I wonder if tech not having them has resulted in our field to dominate most of the economy in the past 5-10 years(or helped that domination).
nix0n 4y ago
> Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them Yes, but they are competing for the same tiny fraction.
- 202206241203 4y ago
  Fighting for scraps that algotrading funds and seed-level start-ups left :).

metadat 4y ago

You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds up to a significant portion of the market. There is also a huge amount of medium sized whales such as SAP and PayPal who in total end up also consuming a lot of the talent.

sushid 4y ago
Arguably that's Google and Meta's strategy (maybe even Apple) but that's certainly not Amazon's. They just mass hire anyone without a care in the world. Not sure if Oracle even belongs in this group.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  It definitely wasn't Meta's strategy when I was there in 2018. They hired a lot of junior software engineers but all other positions had relatively limited headcount (which I mostly think is a good thing).
- ravenstine 4y ago
  I believe it. Every single day I get emails from various Amazon recruiters. Often it's for positions I'm barely qualified for. As much as I think AWS is a great service, I'd be terrified to learn what lies beneath given how low their recruitment standards are.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    The level of churn at Amazon is incredibly high. They turnover a lot of their workforce and they're famous for "hire to fire."
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      I keep hearing that, but I know an absolute meathead who is a senior architect over there. Maybe he's just good at playing the "bro" game?
  - Ancapistani 4y ago
    Based on what I've seen from the outside about their corporate culture, I'm not in any way interested in working for Amazon/AWS. That said, the interactions I've had with the people working on AWS have been uniformly positive. They're easy to work with and obviously very skilled engineers.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Their recruiting reach is high, but it doesn't have that much to do with desperation, and their actual interviewing standards aren't low. The recruiting reach is high because every single sub-group of teams within amazon has their own recruiters, and none of them communicate with recruiters from outside of that. Sometimes i get multiple emails from different AWS sub-group recruiters per day, but it isn't because AWS is desperate for me. It is simply because for them, the existence of the other ones reaching out at the same time is completely immaterial, just like if they were recruiters from other companies. And while yes, Amazon's interviewing bar might not be as high as Meta/Google/Dropbox/etc, it isn't far behind at all, and it is pretty much on par with Microsoft. Disclosure: never worked at Amazon, but interviewed with them and the rest of the companies mentioned, and worked at (or got offers from) some of them.
itsdrewmiller 4y ago
Closer to (edit: 13mm professional) developers - https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-are-there-in-the-world-in-2019/ https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-a... Most of those companies have less than 30k SWEs, not 100k - https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?lang=en https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?... (feel free to google the others) So for each company they represent at most around (edit: 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" portion is a small fraction of that.
- metadat 4y ago
  (edit: parent originally claimed 30 million professional software engineers worldwide, then edited in a revised estimate of 13 million.. which is in the ballpark of my original figure? :) Just because someone "uses JavaScript" doesn't mean they are a full-time professional. In fact, most are dabblers. The number depends entirely on the definition - are all IT professionals considered software engineers? If so, that's about 24 million. I am talking about full-time SWEs. In any case Drew, it sounds like we're mostly in agreement. What a relief! :D We can't really know what is in the minds of Zuckerfk and Pikaichu, in the end it's all speculation.
  - itsdrewmiller 4y ago
    Yeah sorry I did edit the number down based on digging deeper into my link based on your comment here. I still think 0.3% (my original number was 0.1%) is not a meaningful amount of engineers for a "starve the rest of the world of talent" strategy to work.
- YmiYugy 4y ago
  I think it's plausible that the superfluous hirings are caused by hirings of key individuals. It's quite common for these big tech companies to poach each others department heads and other key personnel. This can cause significant damage to a company so can be an attractive tactic. The downside is that in order to retain these people you don't just have to pay them a lot of money you also have to give them big projects and resources to implement them, i.e. lot's of people get hired. This can a problem when these projects aren't supported by the wider company but are just someones pet project.
ehnto 4y ago
> being up to BigCorps peculiar standards I'm glad you put it that way. It's not necessarily smarts or talent, but it does take a particular willingness for the institutional peculiarities to integrate with a big organization. I'm not one of those people, I tried it, and I will never do it again. I did note, you either had people who had just joined, or people who had been there for nearly a decade or more. I think of the word "institutionalized", as in, they had bought into the institution lifestyle, and were so full of it's arbitrary knowledge that moving on would be like starting over.
robotnikman 4y ago
Well, Google's and Facebooks definition of 'the best' engineers. I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a prestigious university is not always an indicator either. imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or are at smaller startups.
- 202206241203 4y ago
  Some engineers see themselves as merely tools, so they "sharpen" themselves to be used effectively. Why would MAANAM (FAANG is a bit outdated) want more creative ones? They will get bored and leave.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  No, but if all of FAANG are hiring by that criteria, it still works; startups can hire good talent because they break the pareto equilibrium, but that's ok for FAANG because they obtain that tech through acquisition after the idea and execution are derisked. The system works!
- tomuli38 4y ago
  Aren't the best engineers generally at national labs and NIST and NASA? FAANG is known to be full of money/status chasers.
  - WJW 4y ago
    That question is pretty meaningless unless you can somehow measure the quality of an engineer. Is it the engineer who can build systems nobody else can, the one who can build the cheapest system that performs to spec, the one that can work well in a team, the one that is always available, the one that can teach others, etc etc etc etc. I'm sure anyone can think of many more aspects to being a good engineer. I bet NASA and NIST have a great bunch of quality all-round engineers, but I'd be surprised if they were better at leetcode than the average FAANG dev. After all, FAANG devs have literally been filtered through an "are they good at leetcode" process. FAANG may be full of money chasers, but if the way to get more money there is by "being a good engineer" that does not mean much.
cosmotic 4y ago
Everyone claims they hire the best. For a long time Google and others had atypical hiring practices which they have since abandoned. I suspect this is because they discovered the techniques were less effective than originally thought. So 'best' by what measure?
- tedivm 4y ago
  I've worked with some really good engineers who came out of google, but I've worked with far more that were extremely arrogant but could not actually get anything done. One of the startups I worked at got an "advisor" from Google (as part of a startup program) that probably set us further back than it ever helped. Anytime this guy didn't understand something he just got extremely belligerent instead of actually trying to get the problem. In general his advice was ignored because it didn't make sense, and he never delivered on any of the promises he made. Not to harp on this guy, as he's just one example amongst many, but it's reached the point where if I see google engineers on the founding team for a company I typically won't consider working for them. It turns out that being able to solve cute little puzzles while interviewing doesn't really help with systems level thinking.
  - dominotw 4y ago
    > Anytime this guy didn't understand something he just got extremely belligerent I think he might have backed himself into a corner by coming in as an 'advisor'. How can I be an advisor if I look like i don't even understand what is going. That must have been his mindset. So the only escape is being arrogant and belligerent.
naveen99 4y ago
Maybe one day there will be futures for software engineer contracts. the contracts are almost standardized on levels.fyi
cma 4y ago
Hording talent could be a leftover Chesterton's fence from when they had an illegal agreement between Google, Apple, etc. to not recruit each other's employees, but Facebook was never found to be part of that.
subsubzero 4y ago
Where are you getting the 10M number? Just curious not a criticism. I was thinking it would be around half of that(5M), with a tenth decent enough to work at most tech companies 500k, I think the bay area has 1M tech workers so half of them are engineers and thats one of the largest cluster of engineering on the planet.
- metadat 4y ago
  A few years ago I was super curious how we stack up numbers-wise compared to doctors and attorneys (quantities artificially limited in the USA because of licenses). I did the research to calculate based on the number of CS graduates being produced by universities, combining it with average number of years worked before retiring. Unfortunately I don't have the references handy at this point.
  - subsubzero 4y ago
    Interesting, thanks for that info, licenses in other industries artificially reduce participants in that field. I wonder if tech not having them has resulted in our field to dominate most of the economy in the past 5-10 years(or helped that domination).

nix0n 4y ago

> Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them Yes, but they are competing for the same tiny fraction.

202206241203 4y ago
Fighting for scraps that algotrading funds and seed-level start-ups left :).