[tytso]

I work at Google so my perspective is to be biased, but that's not what I see.

I work on infrastructure, and so a few years back, when I proposed a major project, I had to demonstrate how it would save *many* times the fully loaded cost of the engineers on the team, by reducing the Storage TCO for all of Google (for example). It was not enough for the project to "break even" --- the benefits had to do more than just exceed the "nominal" SWE cost. It had to be multiple times the cost of the SWE's, to account for the opportunity cost of those SWE's --- SWE's are a constrained resource, which is why a project needs to save $$$ (or increase profits) by many multiples the fully loaded SWE cost. (That project has since been completed, successfully, and I got a promotion to Sr Staff Engineer out of it.)

The reason why SWE's are a constrained resource is becaused finding good SWE's is non-trivial. As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day. I'm trying to find highly motivated, smart, and talented SWE's who can also be team players. And if they need to have domain expertise (say, be proficient kernel engineers), it's super-duper difficult.

So I don't see any indication of people getting hired just to starve statups of talented engineers. We need every single talented engineer we can get for the projects that we want to accomplish. And in the time when we may need to slow down our growth, it may mean that we will need to slow, or shut down some projects. That may suck, especially if it's a project that we had invested a lot of passion into. But it's certainly no reason to panic. Slowing down growth is not the same as layoffs, and there is no shortage of work for us to do.

[kragen]

You also wrote major parts of Linux, so it's possible your contact with Googlers might be biased towards the more functional parts of the organization. Your bar for "talented engineer" may be higher than average parts of Google.

[saagarjha]

> As a TL, I don't want to waste my precious approved headcount on people who just want to rest and vest, or people who believe in the crazy talk of only needing to work 30 minutes each day.

And yet these people exist and get hired, even at Google. Perhaps not on your team, but they’re definitely there.

[sbierwagen]

21% of Alphabet was hired this quarter.

>Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said its head count rose 21% in the second quarter of 2022 to 174,014 full-time employees from 144,056 the year prior. https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/corporate-wellness/...

SV talks the big talk about hiring the best of the best of the best, then hires 30 thousand people in three months. There probably aren't that many 10x programmers in the world.

[vl]

As so many people learned over the years in storage org, essential modus operandi was “just do your current shit, this new shit you are proposing is too hard and we don’t want to do it”. I lost count of improvement proposals that ultimately were not getting supported (there was a funny one with (first) hosted NFS prototype, when they tried to turn it off, turned out there were pissed-off customers running business workloads already). Instead we tried to fit square pegs into the round holes “by using existing technology”.

[tytso]

Oh, you can certainly do big projects. My project[1] spanned 3 departments, and involved dozens of engineers, and required that we work with multiple hard drive vendors (our first two partners for Hybrid SMR were Seagate and WDC) on an entirely new type of HDD, as well as the T10/T13 standards committees so we could standardize the commands that we need to send to these HDD's. So this was all a huge amount of "new shit" that was not only new to Google, it was new to the HDD industry. You just have to have a really strong business case that shows how you can save Google a large amount of money.

[1] https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/dynamic-hybrid-smr...

[2] https://www.t10.org/pipermail/t10/2018-September/018566.html

On the production kernel team, colleagues of mine worked on some really cool and new shit: ghOSt, which delegates scheduling decisions to userspace in a highly efficient manner[3]. It was published in SOSP 2021/SIGOPS [4][5], so peer reviewers thought it was a pretty big deal. I wasn't involved in it, but I'm in awe this cool new work that my peers in the prodkernel team created, all of which was not only described in detail in peer-reviewed papers, but also published as Open Source.

[3] https://research.google/pubs/pub50833/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ABe4dsbIY

[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483542

We have some really top-notch engineers in our production kernel team, and I'm very proud to be part of an organization has this kind of talent.

[dekhn]

Don't get me started on how many times Google Cloud started and then killed cloud NFS (I see now they have an EFS-like product). Or how hard it was to buy a spindle.

[francisofascii]

> proficient kernel engineers

How is the world does one become a proficient kernel engineer? Without already being at a FANNG.

[tytso]

Here are the latest development statistics from the just-released 5.19 kernel. (Please consider supporting Linux Weekly News by subscribing if you find content like this useful; one of the benefits is you can help share subscriber-only content to friends and colleagues via Subscriber Links):

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/902854/b788a6a3d77aba7a/

If you scroll down to the Most active employers in 5.19 by commits you'll see:

1. Intel 10.9% 2. (Unknown) 7.5% 3. Linaro 5.7% 4. AMD 5.5% 5. Red Hat 5.2% 6. (None) 4.3% 7. Google 4.1% 8. Meta 3.5% 9. SUSE 3.1% 10. Huawei 2.9%

The statistics are slightly different if you count by lines of codes changed, but either way, it's not all FANNG companies, not by a long shot. There are plenty of people who get started coding via kernelnewbies.org and other resources.