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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Instructive the degree to which good HR, recruiting, and operational onboarding can create giant moats for these larger tech cos.

Hiring 700 "mostly engineer" employees in a year!

I pride myself as an "operator" and have worked in businesses that have scaled quickly but it is unimaginable how one doubles the highly compensated / hard to find employee count in a year at that scale.

In an economy where excess labor of that quality is non-existent.

That's an average of almost 3 people a work day you need to recruit away from probably another high income role, getting them to show up, get devtools opened, build and manage security clearances, trying to integrate into the org, etc.

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This was my thinking as well. The power and wealth of the big-five tech companies is staggering, with their smaller siblings (Uber, Cloudflare, AirBnB, Dropbox, etc.) trailing not far behind. It is very tough for startups to compete with public companies who can offer liquid RSUs monthly along with whatever salary is necessary to close the deal.

.. I should add: This is a great time to be an engineer. Enjoy it while it lasts. The time to be a founder will be after the next recession.

Quite a bold claim. Care to give reasoning?

A colleague explained it to me like this:

"During a recession, all the big companies will tighten their budgets and not throw money to copy your products"

They then pointed out that all the companies that took off in the 10s started during the 2008 recession.

Look at what happened to Snapchat for an example of what happens when other companies have money to spend to catch up with your product quickly.

2008 was also when the iPhone SDK unleashed massive opportunity.

My non US experience is I have seen no correlation of the boom/bust cycles and "how good it is to be an engineer". I realize that FAANG employees are of course raking it in like never before. But I thought that was because of a lack of a salary cartel and general software eating the world.

Yes GP probably meant it's a great time to be an engineer in the US other countries not so sure.

There is a cascading effect on software engineer compensation worldwide.

True to a degree. Thanks to the huge influx of SV companies opening up shops in Eastern Europe, even if it's just outsourcing the "boring stuff", has led to an increase in local tech salaries that they're now rivaling Western Europe.

Not that Western Europe has big IT salaries compared to the US. It never seemed to me that IT is viewed in EU as this big growth engine compared to the USA and salaries and prestige seem to reflect it.

That is changing as well. US tech companies are hiring more and more across Europe, and the local startup ecosystem is growing also. Some local founders who have made money in the US are coming back and seeding local startups, which has an accelerating effect. Another factor is remote work, with some developers getting nearly US-level salaries while living in Europe. The result is a new class of ultra-well-paid software developers enjoying the good life in many European cities. It's still a niche phenomenon, but not for long. The SF Bay Area was in the same place around 2011-2012. I expect a massive wave of gentrification and anti-tech sentiment in Europe in 2-5 years, similar to what the US is experiencing now.

Do you have any examples of cities or companies that pay well in Europe relative to the CoL?

Maybe I'm not in a good niche anymore, but seems to me many US companies are setting up local shops which means they won't hire you remotely as an independent contractor but as a local employee / contractor which has much lower rates.

There are some lucky few that still manage this or some that even manage to get US-level rates doing open source but that's like winning the lottery; outliers.

Yes, most of those new bigtech/startup employees are getting compensation in the local band. But they are in the very top of that band, and gradually shifting it up as US companies compete for talent, and VC-funded local companies start competing more seriously as well.

It’s a gradual process but in my experience it’s very real.

This gradual process might also happen because compensation has to cover the costs. While some things have kept their prices seems to me some services have gone way up. I was just discussing that a hotel we went to long ago basically tripled their prices. Real estate is also up.

Lost generation

Waymo offers Waymo RSUs which are not liquid.

Yes, but they are worth waymo than your typical startup options.

They allow transfers from Google, rather than a full interview slate.

My bet is transfers outweigh anything you're praising here.

Wow, that's clever. Also dangerous, of course. If I were at Google and had a direct report who was not up to snuff, I might point them at such a convenient option.

Internal transfers still get interviewed to a degree.

I believe the hiring manager has access to your perf history, which is far more valuable than interviews.

That's one way to look at it. The other is that it creates an internal market - as a manager, you have to make your team attractive or people will transfer away and people won't transfer to it.

In reality, market is not that liquid: interesting projects have no headcount, problematic projects are available. At the end of the day you need to know people and come with recommendations to actually transfer to something good. Ask me how I know.

You can do a 20% project for them even if they don't have headcount and managers can view your performance history so it is not hard to join an interesting project if you are good. Also if you are good enough they will add headcount to the team so you can join even if there weren't any before. Ask me how I know.

You are just advancing my point. I agree with what you say, but my point is that what is taunted as egalitarian fair system - “once you are in, it’s easy to transfer, just click the Transfer button” in reality doesn’t work like this at all.

Ah right, if your point is that you can't just transfer to a good team when you get in I agree, but it sounded as if being friends with the right people was required. It is all up to manager discretion, if they like you for any reason (beer or skills) you are good. Skills are usually easier to work with since it can be used to ask for more headcount while nobody would give you headcount so you can hire your beer buddy (I hope...).

How do you know?

Changed projects while at Google :)

People who get bad ratings can't move as freely.

Manager at the team you're transferring to gets to see your perf history before they accept.

Very, very few Googlers are "not up to snuff." As controversial as their interview process is, it does tend to let only highly capable people through. If a Googler is not meeting expectations, the vast majority of the time it's effectively remedied with the proverbial "new manager and 6 more months" treatment.

Disagree. I have worked at Google, other startups and middle sized companies. By far the least productive place per employee was Google. Not that the average employee was stupid but the average output per engineer was comically low. A lot of Googlers take it very easy there and work 10 to 5.

And to be more on point, I met definitely more than a couple subpar employee that would be fired after a couple months in a startup.

Seems like your key metric is “hours spent at desk”. By that measure, you are probably correct.

No, my metric is output per engineer which losely correlates with hours spent at desk. The output quality and quantity was the lowest at Google

How are you measuring this other than the hours-spent-at-desk metric? Quality and quantity of what output?

Very loosely for example I was reviewing a well known uk job site just spending a couple of hours to check the site out

And I diagnosed a serious problem and got a fix actioned - the problem had cost them > 500,000 k in less than a week.

And yet if there is one thing these tech giants are famous for it's output per employee, measured in dollars.

This is something common in all really profitable companies and tech is merely the best example. Oil "tech" is another. Financial tech is yet another.

Europe, where engineers don't seem to be paid well is very much lacking in the sort of very profitable companies we see elsewhere. And even Baidu is known for paying very well (relatively for China, but even in absolute terms they're paying ... certainly Amazon level).

I see a few indications this may not be a coincidence. Big, huge, very profitable companies ... pay their employees well. Europe, clearly, would rather fade into non-importance. Currently Germany is a bit of an exception but if Tesla does take off, how long will that last?

Agree with you here. Some of the worst engineers I’ve worked with have been at Google, especially the younger newer ones. There’s a combination of impostor syndrome driving people to dogma (thus lack of thinking) as well as annoying arrogance towards anything that not orthodox.

There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...

When I was an engineering manager at Google, my group would look more closely at impact than we would at output. In fact, if the output ended up being more technical debt than durable improvement (the proverbial "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!" effect that Dilbert spelled out), we would count that against the engineer's evaluated performance. And it would usually take more than 2 months to determine when that was the case.

And if I found out that a manager was shipping low performers to other people to deal with rather than doing their job and either helping that person or managing them out...

> but it is unimaginable how one doubles the highly compensated / hard to find employee count in a year at that scale.

You throw an EXCESSIVE amount of money at the problem and over-hire (and just naturally weed people out). Recruiting firms will gladly take anyones money to help solve this problem.

You might waste some money, but at least they're not creating value for the other players. Is that their strategy?

The other people hired? Those individuals are likely getting paid $500k all-in and get to work on "world changing" software with unlimited future career opportunities ("I worked on AI at Waymo").

Why on earth wouldn't you take that job? Who cares if it actually turns out in the end.

For Waymo, you could hire 10x teams of 10 people to do the same thing. One team would eventually get it right.

If autonomous driving is the next trillion dollar idea, then this is all chump change.

There are many problems of hiring randomly and hastily:

1. Employees are usually the biggest expense and engineers are some of the priciest, so there goes the run rate (unless Alphabet foots the bill).

2. Hiring too quickly ruins the dynamic of existing teams and throws them into chaos.

3. Hiring too quickly tends to not apply good due-diligence because the few staff who are demonstrably good at hiring will be spread too thin to have an impact. This leads to hiring second- and third-stringers who will slow everyone down more than better hires, add to office political BS with their non-value-add/sabotaging drama, zap morale, and drive away A-players to their next adventure.

4. It may or may not be the case, but without a per-department plan to scale their organizations' resources (systems, budgets and staff) according to anticipated added demand to support massive numbers of new hires, that scaling too much in one area tends to overwhelm other departments. I hope they practice safe and sane scaling before it's too late.

PS: Dern, I could probably get a job there and I've been out-of-work for 9 years. Of course, it doesn't sound like a sustainable or happy place to work, more like a pressure-cooker that's hurrying to spend that money before daddy Alpha warbucks cuts off their allowance.

One of the most dangerous things in a tech organization is a group of developers productively and efficiently building completely the wrong thing. What would scare me about adding 800 engineers in a year is how to set up an org that points them all at the right problems.

There’s a lot of ways you can get that number. Lateral movements within the co, temp conversion, lowering the bar/changing the scope.

But agree, there simply isn’t that kind of liquidity in the market to make that number without it being suspicious on technical levels.

Turnover in professional jobs is quite high, sometimes around 20% per annum.

There may not be many people out of work, but there are always people looking for the next job.

20% per annum is 1 transfer every 5 years.

I just had a job change after 6 years and was constantly asked why I stayed so long.

The distribution is not symmetric. The mode is less than the average and there’s a long tail of survivors.

In the us the tech industry attrition rates Ive seen are around 15% per annum. Varies slightly based on company/year/market/location etc. 20% is “bad” and 10% would be surprisingly “good.”

The article says many of the eng hires were transfers from Google.

When I was at Google most recently, I saw quite a few transfers to Waymo that initially struck me as odd matches. Aside from the pseudo-retention (aka denial of talent) aspect, there's also a lot of non-car related work (e.g. apps, demand prediction) that needs to be done for Waymo to progress.

I suspect that most are transferees, big companies can do that back when I worked for British Telecom they moved 800 people onto middleware projects for example.

Didn't Stripe just do the same thing?

Hi, how do we get in touch?

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