Google slowing hiring to “technical and critical roles” only

Oof, I&#x27;ve got an L3 interview with Google in a little over a week. Hearing about hiring slowdowns like this is making me wish I&#x27;d been more aggressive with my interview timeline, but I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;ve prepared enough as-is. If I&#x27;d gone any faster I &#x2F;definitely&#x2F; wouldn&#x27;t have had enough time to refresh on DS&amp;A and grind out Leetcode.<p>I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special (and not that hard to get into!), but for a recent grad with mediocre internships from the pandemic and minimal opportunities for development in the role I&#x27;m currently in, getting clout like that on my resume early in my career would be awesome. Here&#x27;s hoping the slowdowns really don&#x27;t end up hitting technical roles as hard.

&gt; In Q2 alone, we added approximately 10,000 Googlers...<p>Maybe it is okay to slow hiring if &#x27;normal&#x27; is <i>ten thousand new hires in three months</i>

As a new parent, I was planning on leaving my current stressful startup for Google, as I hear it’s must more intentional and slower paced.<p>Not sure what my options are now but I’m running out of steam during a recession that is projected to last for 1-2 years. I’m the sole provider for a young family and also my aging mother whom didn’t plan for retirement.<p>Hopefully this all blows over quickly or I can harness resolve to keep grinding it out.

Every single large company is expecting a long economic winter.<p>I&#x27;m just stating this in case people fool themselves in any way at the moment. Things are bleak and those who aren&#x27;t lay people have pessimistic outlooks.

It&#x27;s easy to forget that these systems have so many players in place outside of the technical roles, but they&#x27;re the ones that keep the ship moving. I will be curious if this has an at all stagnating affect, but this is Google, so it is doubtful.

Interesting because I was approached by two different recruiters from Google in the past few months.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s impostor syndrome or just sheer brand strength, but my first reaction was &quot;why would Google be interested in me?&quot;.<p>Judging by the tone of those emails it might be that Google turned up the heat in HR already and people are racing to meet KPIs.

I feel for the kids these days, last couple years under lockdowns and now they probably won’t have too many entry level tech jobs out there since everyone seems to be tightening their belts.

This looks like a more nuanced pullback than back in 2008 when it seemed like they stopped hiring almost completely. Back then it was more out of fear than logic.<p>Due to the literal hoard of cash sitting around, any meaningful then existential threat would have required a large rapid change of the world economic order and demanded a large scale reorg and mass firings anyway - so they may as well have assumed the world wasn&#x27;t ending and just kept hiring. That decision then really ended up mucking things up internally.

So the companies that actively sucked up all the new graduates because of the glut of cash now have to learn frugality. Poetic, don&#x27;t you think? It&#x27;s not even a sign of bad times - the times are totally normal. What was happening was abnormal.<p>A software engineer who does&#x27;t care about gaming the FAANG Leetcode interview process is still valuable - even <i>more</i> valuable.

I know it&#x27;s partially out of context, but to read about the CEO of a trillion+ company talk about &quot;more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days&quot;, with focus on the word &quot;hunger&quot;, is kind of neo-capitalist dystopian. Especially right now, as more and more people around the world are actually experiencing real hunger, not the made-up &quot;hunger&quot; meant to bring in even more profits for said trillion+ company. Completely tone-deaf.

I am working as a Security Engineer(SE) for a (well-known; not FB) social media platform, and got an offer for a similar SE role at Google. Career wise, making the change will not necessarily make me happier; however Google&#x27;s financial situation and stock perspectives feel better in this troublesome period, and makes me think that it will be better for my young family. What would you do?

Google and Amazon keep sending me emails, so I guess not so much slowing! GCP site of the house for the latest role, Engineer, SRE type.