
Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020 - prophetjohn
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/google-to-slow-hiring-for-rest-of-2020-ceo-pichai-tells-staff
======
cletus
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In fact this would be a good metric:

Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees)

where

Mean org depth = Mean of how many layers each IC has above them

~~~
JSavageOne
On the topic of not having enough work to do, here's a couple questions to any
Google employees:

1\. As someone generally frustrated with the quality of the search results I
get on Google, is improving search quality seen as any kind of priority within
the company?

To be fair I can't think of any other search engine that returns better
results. But I feel like Google's gotten very complacent with their search,
which is not surprising given the fact that it's practically a monopoly.

2\. Is there any initiative to rewrite gmail on the web? The damn thing takes
like 30 seconds to load. For a company pioneering progressive web apps and web
performance, it boggles my mind that they've put no effort into improving
gmail's atrocious load times over the last decade.

~~~
deegles
The cynical view about search quality is that the metric being optimized for
is not how satisfied people are with the results, but the amount of ads and
therefore revenue earned. Search results only need to be good enough to get
you to come back and not worse than the competition.

I wish Google had a subscription option (with actual support) that eliminated
all ads across their products. Imagine Amazon's customer obsession with Google
tech... I'm sure it would do well for the 4 years they would support it.

~~~
londons_explore
Google Contributor was their ad-free subscription option.

It was always a curious product, never really seemed to have management buy-
in, and was pretty much a one-man product, which a 'subscription to get rid of
ads across the whole web' shouldn't have been.

------
sytelus
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.

~~~
mike_d
> Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated
> hiring spree

That was a message to the stock market. In reality I haven't heard from a
Facebook recruiter in a month now.

~~~
edanm
Not sure why RivieraKid was getting downvoted - there's no "just a message to
the stock market". Lying in this context would be illegal, and would open FB
up to shareholders suing the company IMO.

~~~
perl4ever
I'm not a securities lawyer, but I would assume that there is little
deterrence for "sending a message to the stock market" with statements about
hopes, plans, or predictions for the future. As long as there's nothing
definitively false as of the moment you say it...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-
looking_statement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement)

------
paxys
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.

~~~
coliveira
Google depends on advertisers to make money, and the writing is on the wall
for these advertisers.

~~~
ibejoeb
Call me dumb, but are people not sitting around consuming advertising 10x
nowadays? There's never been a better time to get someone's attention.

~~~
grey-area
1\. Demand has fallen off a cliff globally - this is far worse for companies
than most realise, this has never happened before

2\. All companies are facing a cash crunch, gov loans are slow to arrive and
they have fixed costs like rent

3\. Companies need to conserve cash, turning off ads is a click of a button,
and given no demand, it's an obvious choice

This is going to be bad for google and Facebook if it lasts any significant
amount of time.

~~~
ForHackernews
On the other hand, Amazon is going gangbusters. I wonder if covid-19 will
ironically prompt a longer term re-alignment away from virtual interaction in
favour of real-world connections, as people realize how much they miss real
things during lockdown.

~~~
grey-area
I imagine Amazon will do well in some areas (consumers) initially, but overall
will see a drop in demand as the crisis really bites - businesses have stopped
ordering, and consumers will stop ordering soon to save money. It will be
interesting to see how this plays out but I think US markets are far too
optimistic at present, and this is going to have a very large impact
economically, because it won't be over as soon as say Trump hopes, and
premature attempts to reopen will be disastrous.

Strangely enough I think the disease and its impacts will have far less impact
on our behaviour than the economic impact of mass layoffs and shuttering the
world economy for months. I don't think we've ever seen a drop in consumption
of this magnitude and the road back to normality will be slow.

------
a1pulley
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

~~~
o10449366
Google has a notoriously slow hiring process. For new grads and internships,
the time between initial coding assessment to final hiring confirmation is
often several months.

~~~
sytelus
One has to think why the concept of employment is still considered like
marriage that require such an extensive ultra-deep multi-level deliberations.
Let's say you were local, why it shouldn't be possible to give someone on-the
spot offer after half-day of interviews as well as let them go with, say 2
weeks of standard severance if things don't work out?

~~~
dodobirdlord
At a large technology company with its own software stack it takes several
months before a new hire isn’t a net-negative to the team they join. And it
will be months after that before they reach full productivity. A bad hire is
an extremely expensive mistake.

~~~
sytelus
A bad hires are expensive mistake if you can't get rid of them until some
artificial annual event. While I understand onboarding complexities, my
experience is that the teams/companies which hasn't create good automated
process so new hire can commit their first change within 2-days are big red
flag (this was insisted upon by Zuck extensively at Facebook scale). I would
also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would
help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.

~~~
joshuamorton
Being able to make a change, and being able to make a change without
handholding are two different things.

> hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process
> more naturally and vice versa

Places where this happens are normally considered very high stress and
competitive.

------
the_watcher
It's briefly mentioned in the article, but Google actually shed jobs during
the financial crisis. _Facebook_ is the company that ramped up hiring newly
available talent.

~~~
xxpor
Through layoffs or attrition though?

~~~
topher200
Attrition

------
gbronner
Makes sense if they can't onboard the talent, and can't manage a 100%
distributed workforce.

Nevertheless, seems like a great time to acquire talent on the cheap, so long
as you can effectively use it.

~~~
tootie
Anecdotally, I've been told they require you to come onsite to get onboarded
and receive Google hardware and their offices are locked up. Some recent hires
are not able to work and now being paid to do nothing.

~~~
prophetjohn
They are mailing out the required hardware and doing remote onboarding for the
time being. But hardware shipments are getting delayed leading to some new
hires being paid to do nothing for a week or two.

------
code4tee
A lot of companies are cutting back big time on advertising spend and that’s
Google’s sacred cow of revenue so this isn’t a surprise.

~~~
kenhwang
I work in digital advertising. Spend* is up. Companies are diverting their
traditional advertising budgets into digital. I'd be surprised if Google is
unable to capitalize on this.

edit: I want to clarify it's strictly ad spend/booking. It's companies
committing budgets. They know they will want to run ads and will run more ads.
The ads haven't actually run yet, so ad payouts will tank.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
That is _totally_ not true across the board. I know for a fact that at one
point the big online travel sites (booking.com, expedia.com) were some of the
largest buyers of adwords among any companies. Can guarantee that is not
happening now.

I would guess spend is up only among companies that still have robust revenue.
Tons of sectors have essentially been frozen for the time being.

~~~
kenhwang
Ah, yeah, can confirm the travel segment cratered into the ground. I can see
adwords being an unpopular product overall at the moment. It's just an awful
format for rebranding/storytelling/marketing.

~~~
aabhay
This is super interesting. I never thought of search ads from the lens of
storytelling, only from the lens of click through. Interesting that a lot of
SEO-built brands have no way to even reach customers to repair brand now,
since search volume is so down.

~~~
eitally
I suspect this is one of the reasons advertising on Instagram is going
gangbusters. The combo of better targeting + a format that naturally lends
itself to storytelling makes for a much more compelling advertising platform.

------
kediz
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:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042)

------
edoo
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.

------
gunnihinn
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.

~~~
DeathArrow
So what? They have enough money to last trough years of economic depression.
Long term plans might be as important as short term plans, or more important.

They don't send a good signal to investors.

Micromanaging makes sense when you are in deep trouble - see LA Times. Is
Google in trouble? I believe not. Yet they send the message they are in
trouble.

~~~
varjag
As this crisis has illustrated, early inaction can get you into later trouble.

------
ipqk
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.

------
SSchick
I guess I'm lucky I got my approval just today. My recruiter did mention
things are slowing down drastically.

~~~
wanderer2323
Congratulations! It's a great place to work with amazing people. Source: got
hired not that long ago.

------
austincheney
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.

------
pcurve
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.

~~~
dchyrdvh
I feel so much optimism in your "the rest of the year".

~~~
cardiffspaceman
I have been asking my friends to speculate how us pandemic survivors will be
different from other people in the future? How we will be characterized in
novels? How would Sherlock Holmes distinguish us from the privileged ones who
by luck of birth were not involved in the pandemic? Dr. Watson would say,
after Holmes spotted the survivor, "If you worked from home for two years,
you'd behave that way too."

I always pose this a little more colorfully, but the part that gets the
response is the two years.

------
Ballu
Seems like some layoffs too,
[https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/122810842950535168...](https://twitter.com/whyhiannabelle/status/1228108429505351680?s=21)

~~~
jhwang5
In the cloud business, based on the tweet

~~~
Ballu
Yes. If you search at Bind, seems like some in marketing too.

------
throwawayc2020
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.

~~~
mardanian
I was also preparing for an interview and received a call from my recruiter
that the position has cancelled.

------
zabil
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.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/SIXk8](https://archive.md/SIXk8)

------
xtasy
Damn, will be interning this summer. I guess conversion to FT will be even
more unlikely now

------
bogomipz
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:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-
is-s...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-still-
hiring-11586712423)

Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.

~~~
defectbydesign
The tech sector as many other industries is always recruiting cheaper workers
anywhere in the world to make more profits distributed in priority to the
leaders.

Nothing new in a capitalist world...

------
amrx431
I just chickened out of Google interview last month. I dont know how I feel
now.

------
xenihn
People on Blind are posting that it's more than just slowing.

~~~
whoisjuan
It can't be more than a simple slow. This crisis decimated their revenues
while increasing their huge subsidized operational costs like bandwidth.

Take for instance YouTube. Just imagine the cost to operate the site
increasing exponentially overnight (because of all the quarantined people)
while their ad business goes down. You're in the worst possible situation for
a business with a model that is heavily dependent on that particular ad
revenue.

That's like a supermarket having three times more foot traffic but people only
buying gum.

~~~
mywittyname
The threat to YouTube has also never been higher.

The spike in usage means that YT needs content creators to make more, but also
earn less money. A forward-thinking startup could capitalize on this by paying
content creators more to migrate to their own service, and work to get the
attention of those eyeballs which are bored of YT content.

------
tehjoker
Fingers crossed for the end of surveillance capitalism.

------
defectbydesign
How many jobs will go to India?

~~~
0xFFC
As third party observer, why this gets downvoted?

I’m genuinely asking.

~~~
_IsThisRealLife
Probably because it is perceived to be a fairly uninformed question. It's sort
of like talking about the USPS potential insolvency and someone asking how
many postmen will be replaced with gig economy workers. As far as I'm aware,
major leading American tech companies have never really exported jobs to
India, it has been almost entirely companies that need mediocre quality work
contracting out to companies that fill those contracts with workers from India
or elsewhere. Without carefully developing an office, culture, and employee
pipelines over 3-5+ years you carry extremely large risk outsourcing important
work.

~~~
defectbydesign
Is it a joke?

In many industries it's not uncommon to subcontract a service by a
subcontractor which himself subcontract the same service to another
subcontractor (usually cheaper).

In the end it is only a question of money!

Actually top american tech companies don't have to go directly to India to get
cheaper workers but instead they call american subcontractor to get cheaper
workers anywhere in the world. Even more with restricted green cards thanks to
Donald TRUMP. :-)

~~~
eitally
i don't know why you were downvoted -- you're exactly right.

~~~
mywittyname
It was right 10-15 years ago, but less so now. There's been a huge pushback on
off-shore development in the past decade for a variety of reasons, mainly poor
results, issues with time zone differences, and the negligible cost savings.
Most of the big consulting firms we associate with off-shore contracting (like
TATA) are supplying mostly on-shore (engineering) consultants to domestic
companies (but maintaining services like help desk offshore).

Middle management got tired of having daily meetings at midnight or 6 AM, and
it got too expensive to bring people over who were fine with doing so. The
India job market got pretty tight around '14 or so, to the point where
engineers were leaving jobs every 4-6 months for greener pastures. And even
though the consulting companies are supposed to be in charge of KT, so that
transitions don't impact the clients, the rate of change was just too high to
maintain good quality.

------
lawrenceyan
If even Google, which is pretty much the pinnacle of Silicon Valley tech, is
slowing down, imagine what the Chinese tech scene must be like.

~~~
kediz
Comparing Chinese tech companies with Google here feels like comparing apples
and oranges and also "Chinese tech companies" is too big a entity to be
compared with a single company. But scenes at Yahoo/Reddit/Baidu and other
smaller ads-driven companies aren't pretty

------
defectbydesign
Open source foundations will go to bankruptcy without subsidies from Google
and others.

Are you ready for the dot com bubble 2.0? :-D

~~~
zelly
Death of open source? Don't get me excited

~~~
defectbydesign
Death of unfair competition from communist organizations living on private
money from anticompetitive tech giants.

Open source have to die to give back value to the software industry.

------
tehlike
This is the outcome of crazy hiring, more than you can actually make use of in
the past few years.

------
denormalfloat
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?

