So years ago this came up with Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google through the GFC. After 2007, Google had selective layoffs (probably not in engineering) and slowed hiring. They also paused construction projects in Mountain View and probably elsewhere.<p>Eric said when asked about it that it was a mistake. He said that if Google was healthy there was no need to have a kneejerk reaction to the slowdown. And this caused significant growing pains later.<p>Is the situation the same now? I'm not so sure. I think this economic shock is potentially far more serious and could last much longer. But also, I don't think Google really knows what Google is anymore. We're long passed the mission statement of making the world's information accessible and useful. And certainly my impression from working there (now >3 years ago) was that even then there were a ton of teams and orgs that didn't really have a reason to exist.<p>Have people sitting around and they will find things that "need" doing. I saw many a project that was simply rewriting something where I at least had questions as to the real need for that. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy as they say.<p>And there was (and I imagine still is) too many layers of middle management. The ideal is (IMHO) CEO -> SVP (PA level) -> VP -> Eng Director -> Manager (of managers) -> Manager (of ICs) -> IC. That's 7 levels. I don't know what Google's mean org depth is in engineering but my guess is it's closer to 11, maybe even 12.<p>In fact this would be a good metric:<p>Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees)<p>where<p>Mean org depth = Mean of how many layers each IC has above them
Before everyone starts painting bleak picture, reminder: Facebook's Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated hiring spree this year, opening massive 10,000 more positions! Google as well as Facebook both depend on ads so I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion.
I wonder if so many layoffs, freezes etc. happening at the moment are directly due to the crisis or something that was long overdue and can now be done without much negative PR.
I’ve been stuck in the final SVP approval part of their hiring process for a week. At this point I think I’m just going to keep my current job. Too bad — seemed like a good time to get equity at a good “strike” price
It's briefly mentioned in the article, but Google actually shed jobs during the financial crisis. <i>Facebook</i> is the company that ramped up hiring newly available talent.
Makes sense if they can't onboard the talent, and can't manage a 100% distributed workforce.<p>Nevertheless, seems like a great time to acquire talent on the cheap, so long as you can effectively use it.
I recently posted a Ask HN asking about the effect of how drop in ads money would affect Google/FB and someone did a quick and dirty analysis for their runway: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042</a>
Maybe the travel, restaurant etc industries have stopped paying for clicks so Google gets less cash? My work cut down on PPC by a lot and we spent a lot of money on it.
One thing is that people just aren't leaving their jobs in general. Most hiring rates take into account natural attrition, but if your attrition is close to zero, then you just have to scale back your hiring to even hit the rates had planned before the crises.
It will be interesting to track the frequency of Google walkouts while the economy has tanked, hiring has slowed to a crawl, and layoffs could be in the future.
I think... there will still be work. I think it means they will be going heavier on contractors, so they have more 'cushion' to preserve FTE when things unexpectedly go south. At this point, companies simply don't know how the rest of the year will pan out.
Seems like some layoffs too,
<a href="https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/1228108429505351680?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168...</a>
Ooof. I've been studying for months for my upcoming virtual onsite interview at Google. I wonder what this means for my interview. I was also recently laid off.
I've also seen slow hiring and hiring freezes used by orgs to reduce head count by letting natural attrition take over. IMHO it is better than layoffs.
As a counter point there was an article the Wall Street Journal two days ago that large tech companies(Apple, FB and Amazon) are all looking to hire:<p><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-still-hiring-11586712423" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-s...</a><p>Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.
This is just getting started. Everything is so interconnected. Each chunk of the economy that falls away will have a cascade effect that takes weeks or months to knock the next piece out. Once everyone finally heads back to work it will take years to regrow everything to the point it was.
With the number of people who go through Google's interview process, this might actually change the industry to think more carefully about the interview process. If Google isn't making whiteboard interviews the norm, who will keep it going?