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
I think it's also important to look at scale - in 2007/2008, Google had ~25.000 employees. Now it has over 100.000. If I'm looking at the graph correctly, Google hired 20.000+ of those in last year or two. The size of whole company in 2007!
That's a whole different ballpark than what hiring was in 2008. A slowdown in this scale can easily mean "just" hiring more people than anyone else.
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.
I'd like to see an org-chart depth analysis for different organizations. It'd be interesting to map bureaucratic processes to the structure of an org chart and verify Conway's law.
The U.S. Army uses the concept of a span of control that dictates each level of hierarchy should have between 2 and 5 reports. There's about 10 levels between a private and the secretary of the army. The Active Duty Army is about 470k which works out to 3.7 reports per level from 470000^(1/10). There's about 1M total personnel which works out to 3.9 reports per level.
Google has 114k employees. With your ideal of 7, that works out to 5.3 reports per level given by 114000^(1/7). I'd be pretty surprised if there's a depth of 12 at Google. That's 2.6 reports per level.
A major way that things are different now is that it's much harder to get new people up to speed. My team is doing ok remotely, but we're not that good at it and I think the only reason it's going as well as it has been is because we had a lot of face to face time earlier. Bringing someone new on where we didn't previously have that time is a lot harder.
If we were going to be fully remote forever this would be different, but since this is (very likely!) temporary that's a reason to prefer to hire more later.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
(Well, I guess I work at home, but Google is my employer)
> Management overhead = Mean org depth / log(# of employees)
Your model is in the right direction but misses more important aspects. When consulting I measure overhead of the orgs I'm working for in great detail.
Cultural aspects like fear, autonomy, transparency, etc have a much higher impact on management overhead than the org chart structure itself.
“ 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.”
Was this covered by the media? Having a hard time finding anything about it.
Nope. That was perhaps the case in the 50-80s, but today we can do much better, and it's dependent on the people, the culture, and the market/product structure and strategy.
There can be no absolute correct number of layers. That is obviously too many layers for a 20 person company. And what if Google grew to one million employees. Would that still be the right number of layers?
On a slightly different note: this isn't a good metric. It's a metric of how "balanced" the company is, not the management overhead. If you imagine a company with 150000 engineers and one salesperson, with sales reporting directly to the CEO, hiring more people under the sales director will decrease this metric, while increasing the mean org depth. That probably doesn't measure what you want it to.
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.
One of the best offensive strategies you can have is to make sure all talented people work for you, rather than the competition.
If smaller companies and startups fade away due to coronavirus-induced instability, making sure that their talent winds up with you is a smart move. If you are big enough to afford it, that is, which both of these companies arguably are -- regardless of whether their Q1 and Q2(?) results are worse this year than last.
Besides New Hiring, I would be impressed if large companies honour their existing job offers; Which IT services firms which does bulk recruiting in India seem to be doing.
IT firms such as TCS (30,000 recruits this financial year), Wipro (12,000), Cognizant (20,000) and Capgemini (10,000 over January-June) say they are sticking by their offer letters[1].
I've personally witnessed jobs from these companies lift several out of poverty in India (Most of them being the first graduate in their family).
But, obviously those who pass out this year especially the Engineering freshers are going to be the worst hit.
Facebook may well be the worlds most powerful sentiment capture and analysis engine ever built but Google tracks conversions and has pretty stellar sentiment capture/analysis capabilities.
Google appears to also have twice as much cash on hand as Facebook. Wonder what they’ll use it for if not to hire competent people to prevent them from starting the next big thing...
True, but their value to advertisers depends on users. Facebook is likely seeing a massive spike in (ad-viewing) users, whereas Google a much more modest one. I'm sure Google Search and YouTube have gone up, but the former won't have gone up much, and the latter has not yet been profitable for Google in the first place.
> I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion
Neither needs to tighten belts. Both have enormous amounts of cash.
Should be easier for FB and Amazon to fill those positions now that Google is not sucking as much air from the atmosphere. I think Google may come to regret its decision for this reason. Part of the reason for these companies to hire is "area denial": the employee is not only hired to do great things, but also to prevent them from doing great things for a competitor. If you stop hiring, you allow a lower-paying competitor like Amazon or Microsoft to scoop up the engineers that would previously be inaccessible to them.
If I were to guess, Facebook's recruiting pipeline is centralized. Whether or not to hire is done at the executive level. When Facebook hires someone, they are first a "Facebook employee", go through the bootcamp, and decide on a team 1-2 months into the job.
Google on the other hand, the recruiting pipeline is more spread out. Whether or not to hire is done at the organizational level (i.e. Cloud, Ads, Search, Core, etc), and that depends on whether or not there are openings in any teams. You are matched with a team before you are even hired.
So, like, obviously, if you have the cash to burn, now is the right time to hire employees. You can get good talent pretty cheap right now. So it's in Google's best interest to ramp up hiring. Unfortunately Google's recruiting pipeline does not support hiring a bunch of people and figuring out what team to be on later.
So yeah, basically, Google has shitty hiring practices. It has nothing to do with them "losing money", they have so much cash in the bank which will easily last till this is over.
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.
That's always possible. The version I heard from a company I may or may not work for: investors watch revenue vs expenses. If you expect a downturn in revenue, you cut expenses to avoid problems.
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
Good luck. I recently went through the google interview process and it took months. The lockdowns were starting and the economy was melting down around me, and then I myself got sick with covid-19. It was a stressful time.
I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.
Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.
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.
I think everybody who interviews at Google gets “stuck in the final process for a week”. That’s kinda how they do things. I interviewed there and they rejected me at the final stage after many days of no-communication; but they told me I almost made it, which made me feel good until I talked to other people and found out they say that to everyone. Still: best of luck to you :)
I was rejected by an SVP at Google. Recruiter was surprised but said it happens. Said I did a good job and could pick a different role (wasn’t for SWE), got the offer the second time around but had to start all over and got passed to a new recruiter.
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.
Eric Schmidt says that's the worst mistake he made as CEO of Google, though. They were well-positioned to clean up all the good engineers in Silicon Valley (lots of cash, solid business) and instead Facebook catalyzed their growth. I think they haven't forgotten, and that's why this isn't a blanket hiring freeze, it's them getting more selective. (Technically, '09 wasn't a hiring freeze either: I was hired in Jan 2009. My Noogler class had 13 people hired across all of Google for the 3 weeks it covered, and half of them had received their offers in July '08 - so effectively it was a hiring freeze.)
Actually it doesn't. Everyone is working from home. We have little idea when this may end and if there would be next waves. Fully functioning without need to be in-person is absolutely essential for every tech company. If your stack is so undocumented that someone must sit down with you and give every single new hire 1:1 hand holding in repetitive manner, something is very broken.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
One color I would add - hearing the tax season deadline moving to July drastically reduced the ad spend from tax filing software services companies. Of course, ad spend is also just down overall.
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.
You hope. The consequences of this lockdown frenzy were never going to remain limited to just service workers and shop keeps. I predict a sudden increase of interest in more flexible policies as professional workers start getting pinched.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think Blind is a trustworthy source for this kind of thing. I know some companies that are actively hiring - new employees still showing up every week - but have been reported to be on a freeze.
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.
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
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?
cletus|5 years ago
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
izacus|5 years ago
That's a whole different ballpark than what hiring was in 2008. A slowdown in this scale can easily mean "just" hiring more people than anyone else.
JSavageOne|5 years ago
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.
sa46|5 years ago
The U.S. Army uses the concept of a span of control that dictates each level of hierarchy should have between 2 and 5 reports. There's about 10 levels between a private and the secretary of the army. The Active Duty Army is about 470k which works out to 3.7 reports per level from 470000^(1/10). There's about 1M total personnel which works out to 3.9 reports per level.
Google has 114k employees. With your ideal of 7, that works out to 5.3 reports per level given by 114000^(1/7). I'd be pretty surprised if there's a depth of 12 at Google. That's 2.6 reports per level.
jefftk|5 years ago
If we were going to be fully remote forever this would be different, but since this is (very likely!) temporary that's a reason to prefer to hire more later.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself) (Well, I guess I work at home, but Google is my employer)
DeathArrow|5 years ago
Acquire skilled people (it would be much harder to do it after crisis), buy land, buy companies, build buildings, build tech.
credit_guy|5 years ago
He had the benefit of hindsight. In 2008 noone could predict if the GFC would last for one year or three years and how deep it would be.
amf12|5 years ago
There is some difference in the current situation, however I am not sure how much it factors into this decision.
Hiring and onboarding people is logistically very difficult when travel has been affected worldwide and everyone is working from home.
netjiro|5 years ago
Your model is in the right direction but misses more important aspects. When consulting I measure overhead of the orgs I'm working for in great detail.
Cultural aspects like fear, autonomy, transparency, etc have a much higher impact on management overhead than the org chart structure itself.
kapuasuite|5 years ago
Was this covered by the media? Having a hard time finding anything about it.
netjiro|5 years ago
Nope. That was perhaps the case in the 50-80s, but today we can do much better, and it's dependent on the people, the culture, and the market/product structure and strategy.
gniv|5 years ago
That assumes a fanout of 7-8 at the current size of Google. I think that's too much at certain levels.
UncleMeat|5 years ago
joshuamorton|5 years ago
> In fact this would be a good metric:
On a slightly different note: this isn't a good metric. It's a metric of how "balanced" the company is, not the management overhead. If you imagine a company with 150000 engineers and one salesperson, with sales reporting directly to the CEO, hiring more people under the sales director will decrease this metric, while increasing the mean org depth. That probably doesn't measure what you want it to.
tyingq|5 years ago
swyx|5 years ago
mav3rick|5 years ago
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sytelus|5 years ago
llarsson|5 years ago
If smaller companies and startups fade away due to coronavirus-induced instability, making sure that their talent winds up with you is a smart move. If you are big enough to afford it, that is, which both of these companies arguably are -- regardless of whether their Q1 and Q2(?) results are worse this year than last.
ronyeh|5 years ago
There are only so many Google searches I can do in a day. Many of them end on Amazon where I may or may not purchase something.
mike_d|5 years ago
That was a message to the stock market. In reality I haven't heard from a Facebook recruiter in a month now.
Abishek_Muthian|5 years ago
IT firms such as TCS (30,000 recruits this financial year), Wipro (12,000), Cognizant (20,000) and Capgemini (10,000 over January-June) say they are sticking by their offer letters[1].
I've personally witnessed jobs from these companies lift several out of poverty in India (Most of them being the first graduate in their family).
But, obviously those who pass out this year especially the Engineering freshers are going to be the worst hit.
[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
godzillabrennus|5 years ago
Facebook may well be the worlds most powerful sentiment capture and analysis engine ever built but Google tracks conversions and has pretty stellar sentiment capture/analysis capabilities.
Google appears to also have twice as much cash on hand as Facebook. Wonder what they’ll use it for if not to hire competent people to prevent them from starting the next big thing...
Karishma1234|5 years ago
[deleted]
_pmf_|5 years ago
smt88|5 years ago
True, but their value to advertisers depends on users. Facebook is likely seeing a massive spike in (ad-viewing) users, whereas Google a much more modest one. I'm sure Google Search and YouTube have gone up, but the former won't have gone up much, and the latter has not yet been profitable for Google in the first place.
> I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion
Neither needs to tighten belts. Both have enormous amounts of cash.
m0zg|5 years ago
imprettycool|5 years ago
Google on the other hand, the recruiting pipeline is more spread out. Whether or not to hire is done at the organizational level (i.e. Cloud, Ads, Search, Core, etc), and that depends on whether or not there are openings in any teams. You are matched with a team before you are even hired.
So, like, obviously, if you have the cash to burn, now is the right time to hire employees. You can get good talent pretty cheap right now. So it's in Google's best interest to ramp up hiring. Unfortunately Google's recruiting pipeline does not support hiring a bunch of people and figuring out what team to be on later.
So yeah, basically, Google has shitty hiring practices. It has nothing to do with them "losing money", they have so much cash in the bank which will easily last till this is over.
paxys|5 years ago
coliveira|5 years ago
ergothus|5 years ago
Which apparently becomes self fulfilling.
third_I|5 years ago
Anecdotally, I wonder the same thing myself.
justinzollars|5 years ago
sjg007|5 years ago
a1pulley|5 years ago
cowmoo728|5 years ago
I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.
Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.
o10449366|5 years ago
Analemma_|5 years ago
formercoder|5 years ago
aparc123|5 years ago
Note: I don't represent Google.
jdm2212|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
dehrmann|5 years ago
dvirsky|5 years ago
daleco|5 years ago
AlexCoventry|5 years ago
droithomme|5 years ago
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the_watcher|5 years ago
nostrademons|5 years ago
magicalist|5 years ago
Yeah but they were like 500 employees back then, so only really significant as relative growth.
xxpor|5 years ago
gbronner|5 years ago
Nevertheless, seems like a great time to acquire talent on the cheap, so long as you can effectively use it.
sytelus|5 years ago
tootie|5 years ago
kediz|5 years ago
code4tee|5 years ago
kenhwang|5 years ago
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.
gunnihinn|5 years ago
DeathArrow|5 years ago
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.
jhwang5|5 years ago
ipqk|5 years ago
SSchick|5 years ago
wanderer2323|5 years ago
austincheney|5 years ago
pcurve|5 years ago
topspin|5 years ago
dchyrdvh|5 years ago
Ballu|5 years ago
gundmc|5 years ago
jhwang5|5 years ago
throwawayc2020|5 years ago
mardanian|5 years ago
wuunderbar|5 years ago
zabil|5 years ago
neonate|5 years ago
xtasy|5 years ago
bogomipz|5 years ago
https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-s...
Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.
defectbydesign|5 years ago
Nothing new in a capitalist world...
amrx431|5 years ago
xenihn|5 years ago
whoisjuan|5 years ago
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.
SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago
tehjoker|5 years ago
edoo|5 years ago
zelly|5 years ago
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zelly|5 years ago
[deleted]
Panini_Jones|5 years ago
[deleted]
codingslave|5 years ago
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Antoninus|5 years ago
defectbydesign|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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0xFFC|5 years ago
I’m genuinely asking.
lawrenceyan|5 years ago
kediz|5 years ago
dehrmann|5 years ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/bytedance...
defectbydesign|5 years ago
Are you ready for the dot com bubble 2.0? :-D
zelly|5 years ago
tehlike|5 years ago
denormalfloat|5 years ago