Google is still an advertising tech company. As such it's highly levered to two things:<p>1. The fluctuations in stock prices. Like many tech companies, Google uses its shares in place of currency. This work great when prices are going up.<p>2. Business spending on advertising. Despite ambitions in other areas, the company still just mostly sells ads. One of the first things companies cut back on when they start hurting is advertising.<p>When the stock market declines because the business cycle turns, Google gets a double whammy. In many ways, it's the canary's canary in the coal mine. Doubly levered to the business cycle.<p>There is such a taboo around pay cuts, that then the inevitable downturn happens, the only option is to first stop hiring and then start laying off.<p>I expect GOOG to be the epicenter of tech worker pain for this leg of the cycle.<p>During these booms, tech leaders take on a mythological quality. To even suggest that they could begin a protracted decline seems absurd. But it has happened time and again. Maybe it's this time or the next cycle that does it, but there's no version of the future where GOOG retains its dominating position.
Also recently:<p>Google pausing hiring for two weeks (seekingalpha.com)[1] with 14 comments<p>Google, GitHub, and Azure are freezing hiring effective immediately (linkedin.com)[2] with 24 comments<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32169672" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32169672</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32185152" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32185152</a>
Hired 10,000 people in Q2 this year alone? What percentage of those people actually do anything of value besides cash the company’s checks? That’s actually staggering to me. Cloud division I can see growing. What else?
I commented on the last post about Google hiring slowdowns, hoping that it wouldn't hit technical workers as hard, but it looks like that's not the case. I've got an L3 interview literally tomorrow. Can anyone with more insight into hiring practices comment on whether that's just a complete wash? (Outside of getting more interview experience, that is).<p>I know getting an offer "two weeks" (yeah, right) from now isn't gonna happen, but is there anything measurable I actually gain from doing well on the interview, e.g. skipping the phone screen or giving more positive data to the hiring committee if I end up applying again?
How are others doing these days? Is Amazon, et al. slowing down hiring as well?<p>Our company (~300 engineers, fintech clients) is slowing down and the bench (people who don't bring in money at the moment) is as large as it ever was.
Those big and insanely rich corporations are suffering big time from the nasty effect of Price's Law.<p>In my opinion this is a good thing, otherwise their power would be indestructible, they already have waaay too much power.
Two weeks seems like a really short time to have any effect... aren't the open positions and people applying for them going to be almost identical two weeks later?
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220720184258/https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/20/google-to-pause-all-hiring-for-two-weeks/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220720184258/https://techcrunc...</a>