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Google made two major mistakes: 1. They scaled up new hiring too quickly, and did so when they couldn't adequately vet applicants (around pandemic times) the c

Google made two major mistakes: 1. They scaled up new hiring too quickly, and did so when they couldn't adequately vet applicants (around pandemic times) the company grew its headcount too much in a very short period during a windfall and did so likely without due diligence. 2. The windfall ended. The board got upset because now the company was hemorrhaging money during a downturn because they hired too many people. Leadership never had to face these poor economic conditions or pressures from a board before, and did not know how to effectively make good decisions to turn things around. So they made poor decisions. Then more poor decisions. Then more poor decisions. Their own public panic over chat-gpt then made them look worse in the eyes of investors. This led to, on top of the layoffs, high-performing, long-tenured employees suddenly feeling it might be time to retire/leave, and those that remained now have abysmal morale. It's poor leadership in the face of change, and inability to manage the rate of wide-scale internal upheavals. It's basically just mismanagement happening at a huge scale.

tsunamifury 3y ago
This is a much better recent tactical take than the article.
dietr1ch 3y ago
At some point it felt like FAANG companies were just drowning competition by hiring everyone decent enough instead of keeping up with their high bars, but you could say that at the time everyone wanted people who could code. So much that Bootcamps started being a popular way of getting people up to speed without going through the 4yr+ education that was deemed not entirely required and relevant anymore by more and more practicing engineers in the startup world. The not-so-evil view is that some MBAs figured each engineer was worth on average 3-5x their salary, so why not hire everyone until that almost evens out?
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  > So much that Bootcamps started being a popular way of getting people up to speed without going through the 4yr+ education that was deemed not entirely required and relevant anymore by more and more practicing engineers in the startup world. Bootcamps seem unlikely to go away even without zero percent interest. At most companies the amount of CS you need during your day job is usually laughably small. The most important question is whether you can ship, and plenty of people with CS degrees can't for one reason or another. If you're somewhere like FAANG, you need more CS, but if you have a quantitative background it's pretty straightforward to achieve that level of competency or exceed it. e.g. anyone who works through all the exercises in Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces[0] is likely to have better OS fundamentals than the median FAANG Staff level engineer I've worked with. CS is pretty unusual in this way because ultimately for most of these learnings the computer can tells us whether we're right and have learned something correctly. [0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

tsunamifury 3y ago

This is a much better recent tactical take than the article.

dietr1ch 3y ago

At some point it felt like FAANG companies were just drowning competition by hiring everyone decent enough instead of keeping up with their high bars, but you could say that at the time everyone wanted people who could code. So much that Bootcamps started being a popular way of getting people up to speed without going through the 4yr+ education that was deemed not entirely required and relevant anymore by more and more practicing engineers in the startup world. The not-so-evil view is that some MBAs figured each engineer was worth on average 3-5x their salary, so why not hire everyone until that almost evens out?

Hermitian909 3y ago
> So much that Bootcamps started being a popular way of getting people up to speed without going through the 4yr+ education that was deemed not entirely required and relevant anymore by more and more practicing engineers in the startup world. Bootcamps seem unlikely to go away even without zero percent interest. At most companies the amount of CS you need during your day job is usually laughably small. The most important question is whether you can ship, and plenty of people with CS degrees can't for one reason or another. If you're somewhere like FAANG, you need more CS, but if you have a quantitative background it's pretty straightforward to achieve that level of competency or exceed it. e.g. anyone who works through all the exercises in Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces[0] is likely to have better OS fundamentals than the median FAANG Staff level engineer I've worked with. CS is pretty unusual in this way because ultimately for most of these learnings the computer can tells us whether we're right and have learned something correctly. [0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/