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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

Google doesn’t care if most employees quit, they are replaceable. The few that they do care about, they will arrange unofficial exemptions for.

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1. I'd assume that a cost to replace 1 SE employee at google is close to USD 1,000,000

2. It's hard as never before to hire someone to from from the office (US tech giants are hiring many H1Bs)

So, I disagree. It can become a long-term crisis.

Based on the competitiveness of googles hiring process I imagine there's a pretty big pool of candidates for them to choose from though.

Not really. As somebody who has seen both sides of a hiring process like that, the reality is the vast majority of candidates are just awful. You can probably rule out nearly 75% of applicants right off the bat. Add in hiring laws, bureaucracy, immigration, negotiation, candidates withdrawing, and finding a good person who works for your team can take months.

Awful in what respects?

I was under the impression that it was sort of like Harvard: lots of applications, but a good chunk of those denied could have just have easily been accepted if there was space

You seem to have experience with their hiring and I have none (only applying) so I have much more faith in what you're saying than my preconceived ideas.

As in, a significant chunk of candidates cannot write code, have outright lies on their CV, have never used anything other than visual basic, etc...

In addition, basic statistics suggests you need all new hires to be better than 50% of the existing company, or your average skill level will go down, which makes hiring just hard mathematically.

Can't you rule a lot of those candidate (other than CV liars) out algorithmically?

>In addition, basic statistics suggests you need all new hires to be better than 50% of the existing company,

This seems especially difficult when hiring graduates/junior roles due to the lack of unknowns.

Thanks for taking the time to respond!

> Can't you rule a lot of those candidate (other than CV liars) out algorithmically?

I think all companies do this, but it's really easy to game the metrics. People do it unconsciously, even.

> This seems especially difficult when hiring graduates/junior roles due to the lack of unknowns.

Yep, so it takes hours of interviewing per candidate, across dozens of candidates just to hire to minimise the risk for one role. At a global level, FAANGs are hiring loads, but at a team/local level there's never enough people due to specific team needs or turnover.

Cannot write code is very different from cannot write code on a whiteboard to solve a difficult problem in a limited amount of time in a stressful setting where you constantly have to keep talking and explaining what you are doing and cannot pause to think.

I know that's a popular trope, but I really mean the 'cannot code' crowd. They are separate groups.

I don't understand how cannot code would even hold a job for more than a month.

There are many people who can't do anything except React.js, for example.

Yes, could you elaborate on the awful nature of most applicants? Do you mean that they are not fit to make software or that they are not Google material?

The job market is a lemon market for employers.

The former. Everybody knows top quality engineers are very hard to find, but there is also an inverse problem - the amount of programmers who know nothing but React.js or other <buzzword> is shockingly high.

Where does your estimate come from?

As stated in my message “I assume”

Yeah, was there some thought behind that or did you just pick a number that sounded nice?

I kind of estimated. But, not really feel comfortable to share my calcs.

Google for what is the cost for an average US business is to simply replace an employee. You might be surprised.

OK, I literally Googled "cost for an average US business is to simply replace an employee":

Thirty case studies taken from the 11 most-relevant research papers on the costs of employee turnover demonstrate that it costs businesses about one-fifth of a worker’s salary to replace that worker.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2012...

So... did you mean $100,000?

Nah, people say they will quit , but they wont, there are people who do want to go back to the office, and will die to work at Google, also very competent (not as much as people here that love working from home, I'm sure). Also most tech companies will go back, MSFT, Amazon, ... You can go to FB tho, but then you will be working for FB, if you care only about the money, then is fine I guess, at least personally is not a place I would love to be in.

This take entirely ignores the invested human capital, which you lose entirely when you drive a worker to quit. Google have invested a lot into retaining their workers as well, so I'm sure that they know that as well.

Is Google even good at retaining employees? The average tenure appears to be 1 to 2 years. [1] [2] [3]

Hardly enough time to even know the impact and costs of what you developed and shipped. Kind of makes you wonder what type of work force you're creating when a large percentage of them are constantly leaving. Maybe for ICs this isn't a concern compared to Directors, VPs, or maybe Staff SEs?

[1] https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full...

[2] https://buffer.com/resources/employee-tenure/

[3] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/10/17/thi...

I mean it intuitively kind of makes sense. If you work in a city with many other high paying prestigious jobs, why wouldn't you job hop? There's little risk, whereas if you were in a city that had very few prospects you'd probably stick around longer.

I live in Boston and I jump around every year'ish getting more salary at each place I've worked at. If you worked at Google (or any other prestigious company), I imagine it's far far easier interviewing else where. Especially if you jump from prestigious company to prestigious company.

wow every year? I'm doing every 2-3 which I was worried would be too often.

It's never hurt me, at least IME. I still get recruiters from Amazon, Facebook, Apple, WayFair, and HubSpot hounding once every few months. I think my only skills that stand out are a11y and data viz. A11y seems to be in a real demand as of the last two years, maybe that keeps me in the running? IDK.

I figured people will always need devs and people really blow the "job hopper" thing out of proportion. Every job hopper I know makes a lot of money and they never struggled to find jobs. If anything they seem to have the best jobs from what I see.

The large tech companies routinely say that hiring qualified engineers is their biggest challenge.

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