What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes?

The people I know who are still inside (Google) seem optimistic that maybe the company is taking a pause to deal with some of its bureaucracy and internal politics issues and with people&#x27;s complaints about perf. I suppose that&#x27;s good.<p>From my perspective: They&#x27;ve got way too many people doing a lot of meh work and feeling really ... important about it. And it&#x27;s on the whole asphyxiating the industry.

&gt; As several of these statements blatantly contradict one another, I went back to the data and ran the same sanity check that I did with Facebook above. In other words, what if Google is using the hiring freeze as a smoke screen and only continuing with the strongest candidates, while keeping the rest on the bench?<p>An actual hiring freeze sends a very strong negative signal to employees and investors. To employees it says &quot;the ship is sinking.&quot; Layoffs are right around the corner and that is absolute poison to morale. To investors it says &quot;technical or not, we&#x27;ve hit a recession.&quot; Brace yourselves for impact. Google and Facebook are both advertising companies, so they are tightly coupled to the business cycle. When business spending starts to falter, they&#x27;ll feel it first. And they have.<p>So it&#x27;s not surprising that the companies themselves are far from clear about this, sending mixed messages. I expect them to continue to do so for as long as they possibly can.<p>The bubble has inflated so far for so long, I get the sense that even among cynical young employees and &quot;investors&quot; there&#x27;s a sense of permanence in the positions of both companies. The thing is, those with fewer than 10 years experience have never seen the ferocity of the other side of the business cycle. When it turns, that mofo <i>turns</i>. Those in top management positions have seen it, and they&#x27;re going to do everything in their ability to deny and evade it.

Google has always recruited and interviewed independently of whether they actually have roles open that make sense for you. Earlier this year, I passed the interview and spent six weeks in &quot;team match&quot; before I gave up and took a role with another company. Had a friend who did the same for months for a PM role.<p>Just bc you&#x27;re getting contacted by Google recruiters this week or interviewing doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;ll ever find a team or get a real offer.

Freeze? Both me and my friend from a previous project were recently approached by G&#x27;s recruiters in Poland.<p>I wasn&#x27;t pursuing new roles at the time, but my friend figured he&#x27;d try and found that the recruiter&#x27;s calendar was filled up to the brim.<p>He asked what&#x27;s going on and she replied that she has KPI to fulfill and this is the result. He followed up with a question about compensation and got a number which was... very close to the current market rate.<p>This is a major shift in policy comparing to just three years ago and with Poland being a popular outsourcing destination I suspect that this is what&#x27;s happening, especially that due to the Russian invasion there&#x27;s additional talent from Ukraine in Warsaw.

As others have commented, this seems like a smokescreen rather than a real freeze. But as someone who wants to see every monopolistic company broken up or fail spectacularly, I think a hiring freeze at FAANGs is a great opportunity for talented people to consider growing a spine and working somewhere less big and lucrative. To people facing that choice, I would say this: The world is in a weird place right now, and you have probably in some aspect of your life realized that the status quo you have come to expect is unsustainable at best (and a death cult careening off a cliff in many cases). Being able to adapt and handle crises is rapidly becoming the most important skillset to have. Finding opportunities to cultivate it while still making a decent living is a lot less instability than people who aren&#x27;t still sought-after technical talent have to deal with, and will likely serve you better than grasping at an illusory sense of stability.

My hunch is that these companies are cargo-culting their strategies. The hiring freeze is as essentially a gut reaction. If one starts with layoffs, others will follow. The real problem is that companies of the Google scale will always need new engineers for particular projects and have a surplus for others. A global freeze or even layoffs simply don&#x27;t fit.

We&#x27;re not in a recession. Yet. Google and Facebook are ahead of the curve and mostly using the headlines to shake things up internally right now.<p>It does show that the billionaires are kind of enthusiastic though about the coming recession and economic pain being inflicted on the lower classes, and getting those uppity workers a bit more under control. They&#x27;re not so worried about asset prices &#x2F; stock prices &#x2F; sales &#x2F; etc and probably correctly assume that everything will rebound just fine for them.

It&#x27;s kind of odd that people are this shocked about this. Google and FB have frozen various roles for various periods of time over the last 2-3 years. I&#x27;m guessing they have on and off for most of their existence. I just want clued into their hiring process then.<p>The freezes almost always are for lower level roles only (l3 or l4) and dont REALLY impact anything since these companies are pretty slow to begin with. The people impacted by this are early career folks who are likely interviewing for general swe roles at these companies and a slew of others.<p>FB and Alphabet will almost always still be moving folks with specialized skills sets through their pipeline and even if &quot;no offers are going out&quot; a L7 machine learning engineer or security engineer or android engineer who is already matched with a team is still getting an offer.

I&#x27;m not sure I buy that they&#x27;re actually on a hiring freeze, but I may be wrong. The day before it was announced I got a text from a google recruiter literally saying feel free to contact me on 8&#x2F;8 (after the freeze is supposedly finished). I feel like this was definitely a show for the shareholders, and a way to drop your dead weight. Everyone seems worried about employee productivity and profitably all of a sudden, or at least they&#x27;re pretending to.<p>My advice is only if you know what you&#x27;re doing, there&#x27;s always a job for you.

&gt; Moreover, these freezes materially affect our business.<p>Related and slightly OT, but I didn&#x27;t know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company. Which, in retrospect, of course that it makes a lot of sense and I get it, from an economic pov, but I still find it kind of strange.<p>I had recently become quite bearish on these companies (especially Google and FB), this type of info only reinforces that opinion, you cannot truly innovate while you&#x27;re employing people who see working there has an end in itself. Hope that monopoly-like thingie will continue to work for them (again, I&#x27;m thinking mainly about FB and Google), otherwise I see dark days ahead for these two companies.

Didn’t Sundar just recently demand increased productivity? Sounds like he’s setting the stage for layoffs.

My process with Google just stopped. No further update form the recruiter. It just went on silence. Sometimes it feels like I made the right choice not changing to Klarna early this year and staying at my current work.

I suppose this is &quot;old man yells at clouds&quot; material, but I feel like engineers should be practicing for <i>their future jobs</i>, not for interviews.

Ads market may be peaking as would inevitably happen. I’m increasingly seeing google and Facebook make idiotic decisions that clearly improve ad revenue at the cost of user retention.<p>I recently started searching cpp documentation and the only thing that comes up is copy pasta sites. I need a new search engine, and I just deleted instagram last week. YouTube now runs multiple back to back video ads.<p>Maybe this is just a pause, or a momentary restructuring- but all markets peak eventually.

What&#x27;s going on is there is a giant recession half-cycle heading our way and Google (don&#x27;t know about FB) have teams of folks whose sole job is to forecast these cycles.<p>My bet is they are seeing which way the wind is turning and battening down the hatches.

I think they&#x27;re trying to push down salaries, there&#x27;s still plenty of hiring for technical roles. Recruiters, marketers, sales reps on the other hand..

Their data is based on a survey. According to LinkedIn, the following number of jobs per company have been created in the past week:<p>Google 7k+<p>Apple 2k+<p>Amazon 39k+<p>Meta 2k+<p>If anyone has that premium feature (I don&#x27;t have it anymore), you can check how the numbers changed over time.

maybe they realized hiring leetcode junkies is not a great strategy and they want to freeze that while they find a better interview system

How can large companies with high turnover like Google and Facebook afford to stop hiring engineers? Do they downsize teams, shut down projects, or something else?

A legit Google recruiter emailed me about multiple roles this week. But then, that’s just the kind of quality (none) and attention to detail (nil) I already have learned to expect from Google.<p>Comment from kleinsch in this thread is spot on.

For what it&#x27;s worth, Meta offered me slightly after the hiring freeze was announced for a security engineer position (L4 IIRC). I&#x27;m interviewing with Google for Security Engineering as well and still they haven&#x27;t told me anything about a hiring freeze yet.

We lost a product manager candidate to Meta yesterday so not so sure about any hiring freeze.

It’s almost as if infinite growth can’t continue on forever…

How does this jive with their very recent purchase of the Thomson Center in Chicago?? They also announced they&#x27;d be hiring over 4000 people to fill it (making it the second largest google hub in the world)

If I was an exec at either company and hiring was all of a sudden a bit less competitive and&#x2F;or I had better access to top tier employees at other companies who were now more amenable to being recruited... I would certainly hit the &quot;freeze&quot; button for a few hiring cycles to recalibrate around this new reality. I would not need to look at my business plan or P&amp;L to do that.

&gt;freeze<p>Yeah, unless you&#x27;re a staff engineer :P<p>The fight over STSMs is only getting more brutal. More like a freeze on training engineers up to become staff members

Very simple, an economic downturn leads to any public company looking at their cost structure and polishing up the numbers. Big companies accumulate a lot of organizational debt where teams, departments, and individuals under perform for whatever reason and often not even because of their own fault. Corporate stupidity, and mismanagement, are also things that plague big corporations. Just look at Google lately.<p>Regularly pruning the org tree is both something that needs some level of excuse as it would otherwise upset the rest of the org tree; and needs to happen once in a while. The people least likely to leave by themselves are usually the once targeted explicitly. So, any kind of economic down turn is usually a good moment for that. Doing it wrong means your best people leave first, which is usually counter productive. So, you have these trillion dollar companies shedding a few crocodile tears over having to say goodbye to a few not-so-valued employees and using all the usual euphemisms, cliches, and woke language for that.<p>So, classic targets for layoffs are HR (ironically), supporting functions like IT, middle management, people promoted to their level of incompetence (Peter principle), etc.

SMH it feels like a lot of people here _want_ another dot com crash. Why? Like, you really want to make less money?

Someone needs to tell Meta&#x27;s recruiters that there&#x27;s a hiring freeze because they keep contacting me about open positions. While they&#x27;re specialist positions, they&#x27;re not extremely niche so it seems if there&#x27;s a freeze, it&#x27;s not a very cold one.

I don&#x27;t know why anyone still needs to ask, but we&#x27;re still in the early stages of a <i>globl economic meltdown</i>, despite what you might hear (or even not-hear) from politicians.

This may also be a big mistake by Google. I fully expect other companies such as Apple will take advantage of this mistake to hire even more in specific areas.

They don&#x27;t really need to stop hiring, they just need to match the number of people leaving the company (which is always happening).

what happened to the &#x27;great resignation&#x2F;dropout wave&#x27;? And what will happen to those who participated in the movement?

Both Google and Meta have reached out to me directly for an interview in the last week. When did this hiring freeze begin?

Both companies derive nearly 100% of their revenue from digital advertising. Digital advertising can be lucrative. It can also go away in a second. If there is a recession the first thing every company cuts is their ad budget. Facebook and Google are preparing for a recession. They probably have indications that one is coming. They can&#x27;t wait for it because it is going to hit them first.

Google&#x27;s freeze was supposed to last two weeks since May. Are they still doing the freeze?

I literally saw a new job posting from Google yesterday.<p>Either way, hiring freezes usually happen before layoffs. The freeze allows the numbers to naturally reduce as people leave and they aren&#x27;t replaced. Then they can move on to laying off the remaining number of people they need to reduce by.

I think companies have had to lower expectations for new hires over the last several years. These companies now see an opportunity with a slight market correction to freeze hiring to deal with the lower performers and possibly replace.

And Oracle, and pretty much all the FANG MAAMAs except Amazon.

I still have Meta and Google recruiters hitting me up even though there is a hiring freeze.<p>Niche enough jobs are still being hired for, and both recruiters repeated the line that there’s a hiring freeze except for “this” position.<p>I felt special for a second.

Does anybody know what&#x27;s going on with Walmart Global Tech? A couple of weeks ago I was told I got great feedback and was moving on to the final step which was a call with a VP. Then silence for two or three weeks and no response when I email. Will they come back?

Interesting and well written article supported by factual data. I wonder if this is a temp thing, or if it is another early warning that regression is coming. Is a major regression coming?

The Google internal propaganda game must be crazy strong if the actual employees are believing random management explanations designed to keep people from panicking. The US just formally entered a recession, in within a week of the economic turmoil multiple companies freeze hiring...

Apple. Do not track. Ad impressions plummet. Revenue drops. Hiring stops.<p>That’s why Facebook is trying to get you to stop looking at your phone and strap on an oculus….. there are no privacy guards there.