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Comment by ffggvv | Hacker News Reader

the engineers etc i’ve worked with that were contractors were far worse and way below normal google hiring bar. sorry if that’s not PC but it’s the truth. if they could get hired at actual google they would’ve done it.

hell, if they could get hired as a SWE at a comparable firm they would do that instead of taking a massive pay cut to be a contractor

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I interviewed with the self driving car team while it was still part of google X. I was told that every single employee on the team started out as a contractor, people would be converted to full time on a first come first serve basis, usually about a year and a half in. There was no path to jumping straight to FTE according to the hiring manager.

That's ironic then, because a huge percentage of the full-time employees at FAANG are actually former contractors who've been converted. So that would suggest a large chunk of their full-time employees are sub-par.

And that still doesn't answer the question--why hire anybody directly at all?

If you're so much better than the other contractors, they could just pay you higher rates. It'd be the same thing.

"huge percentage".. got any numbers to back that up? i can tell you its a single digit percent at G.

It depends heavily on the role. For SWE and SRE you're probably correct, but for a number of UX engineering roles, temp-to-hire is weirdly common.

I've been on high performing teams at MSFT where it was over 70%.

You basically get to pick and choose who to hire after a year of seeing their code. Bonus if you pay contractors really high rates to attract good talent.

I am familiar with this process at most of the companies in question. No, it is not a huge percentage; to the contrary, it's very difficult for contractors to become full-time employees.

That begs the question: why is Google using subpar developers? It's hard to imagine there just not being any better ones, and it probably isn't a money issue. Are they so against having good old employees?

Opinions are my own. I also make no claim on the expertise of contractors.

The common saying in engineering is you use the right tools for the job. Likewise, you place the right people to the right job. It would be a mismatch to put an L5+ to do some low impact work. That would be an inefficient use of limited resources. The SWE would also be unhappy since that affects their perf/promo. Depends on the potential impact/difficulty/urgency, it might be more appropriate to save that work for an intern, fixterm, or TVC.

It's not about "so against having good old employees". It's business.

Just speculating (I work at a FAANG) – a lot of "software engineering" at these big tech companies is just centering divs and refactoring code – you don't need a 10xer to do that stuff.

sometimes you just need someone who can write super simple scripts to help process/clean some data or do grunt work that none of the devs want to do. And sometimes this need is just temporary for 4 months etc.

I wouldn't waste a google dev's on grunt work that any coder could do.

> who can write super simple scripts to help process/clean some data

If you can figure how to make that process "super simple" you can make staff engineer. Source: am L5 SWE at Google spending most of time wrangling unclean data

It's funny how arrogant you seem to have gotten working at Google. Looking through your post history a couple of years ago you were doing grunt work you would see as below you now. The belief that all Google employees are doing hard innovative work is untrue. A large portion are centering divs and wrangling JSON.

Hey now...this is Google we're talking about.

They're wrangle protobufs.

this account has had multiple owners.. i’ve never done grunt work

Why?

Contractor SWE's at Google are very rare. In my several years there as both a SWE and EM (I'm no longer at Google), I never encountered one. My understanding from other EM's/Directors was they were only hired for non core product work, which did not overlap with the work that Google FTE SWE's did, and was very routine work. Most likely without internal code access - it was that separate.

Core product/infra work, and anything non-trivial, is always done by FTE's.

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