Google slowing hiring to “technical and critical roles” only | Hacker News Reader

Google slowing hiring to “technical and critical roles” only

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223 pointsobnauticus109 comments

Oof, I've got an L3 interview with Google in a little over a week. Hearing about hiring slowdowns like this is making me wish I'd been more aggressive with my interview timeline, but I'm not sure I've prepared enough as-is. If I'd gone any faster I /definitely/ wouldn't have had enough time to refresh on DS&A and grind out Leetcode.

I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special (and not that hard to get into!), but for a recent grad with mediocre internships from the pandemic and minimal opportunities for development in the role I'm currently in, getting clout like that on my resume early in my career would be awesome. Here's hoping the slowdowns really don't end up hitting technical roles as hard.

Good luck buddy, wish all the best for you.

HN has plenty of people who say that, but I don’t think I would call it a consensus.

AFAIKT Google's recruitment for SWE and SRE (system engineer ladder) are separate. If you did not pass the SWE interview, ask the recruiter if you can do an SRE interview. Hope this helps!

Source: I went the process of failing the SWE interview but got an offer as an SRE.

It isn't to mean that SRE is any easier...

There are two separate tracks for SRE, SRE-SWE (same bar as SRE) and SRE-SE (Systems Engineering). While SE has a lower coding bar, it's arguably the harder of the two since they make up for it with Linux internals etc.

Any good resources to see how they interview for SRE-SE? For SWE you can find a lot of material on Leetcode and similar sites (and of course books) but "Linux internals" has a near infinite depth.

NALSD question is a required part of the interview. https://sre.google/workbook/non-abstract-design/ I did a quick search and it looks like there are youtube videos explaining it so that might be helpful.

Other than that I was asked to implement a 'tail' command using my familiar language, and explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

> explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

Because System deletes only the “pointer” to the file and not the actual file. For the exact same reason, cut+paste is faster than copy+paste

It does delete the file, as long as no other processes are accessing it and there are no other hard links to it.

Please check this one (I know you can edit Recycle Bin settings on Windows to directly deleted the file, instead of sending it in there) -

https://www.lacie.com/support/kb/available-disk-space-does-n....

I’m pretty sure Google is going to ask in the context of Linux, and isn’t referring to Windows or the Recycle Bin.

Why you said so? Google has teams supporting .net, sql server, Microsoft VMs as part of Google cloud offerings

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

I did a bunch of those panels in my time. Imo if you read 2-3 books on unix/linux/networking and can complete this wargame in a couple evenings you’ll stand out quite a bit.

In my experience the recruiters are great about helping you prep. They have a PDF called "Google Interview Prep Guide Site Reliability Engineer" that talks about SRE-SE vs. SRE-SWE vs. SWE, and links to books and topics to study.

Kirk McKusick's "FreeBSD Kernel Internals" course[1] was recommended to me, and it was excellent. But not cheap at $1495.

[1] https://www.mckusick.com/courses/introdescrip.html

No it's not easier, sorry if my reply gave that impression.

An SRE-SE requires a different skill set compared to SRE-SWE or SWE and the interview questions are different. If you have both skill sets, you effectively have two opportunities here :-)

It precisely means that.

SE is arguably much harder. Instead of just optimizing for coding, you need to be good at linux troubleshooting, low level kernel stuff and networking. There’s a reason most new hires come in as SWE, particularly new grads with not much real world experience.

That said, if you already possess this knowledge it could be easier as it takes a bit of the randomness out of getting a LeetCode question that you can’t figure out.

It is not harder, it is different. They just ask more system topics, while focusing less on coding. There is, however, a catch. If you get hired as a SRE-SWE, you can easily switch to a regular SWE. If you get hired as a SRE-SE, you may have to reinterview to change your job ladder. SE is okay, but you clearly have more possibilities as a SWE.

You only have to take some of the coding ones though iirc

Why is there such a distinction? What's the difference in the day to day of a SRE-SWE vs. an SRE-SE?

Entirely the same job, same pay. We just want to be open to folks with DIFFERENT yet valuable experience.

SRE-SWE and SRE-SE on the same team will have exactly the same expectation given the same level.

Depending on the project you work on, you might have a code-heavy project that requires you to work closely with the SWE team, or an operability-heavy project that doesn't have much coding.

I don't have time to memorize leetcode, and I'm just not good at it. Even considering it can just take time for everyone, I'm somehow unexpectedly bad despite my experience. I'm actually pretty good at actual software engineering work though (8 years). I'm also pretty good at OS level stuff across the board. I didn't know there non-leetcode paths without completely changing careers and abandoning my dev history.

I was just about to schedule my 1st-set whiteboard style interview with the recruiter, which always ends in a flaming disaster, but maybe I should consider their other routes.

I'm a full stack (backend main) software engineer but I'm usually exceptional at fixing server stuff and fully understanding logs to debug problems or find potential exploits through logs or when reading through code reviews. Everyone else I've ever worked with struggles at these things. I can just naturally comprehend other's code / architecture even across technologies.

If there's a career path I can show this in interviews instead of fumbling on even easy LeetCode problems or the other silly things I randomly get stuck on only in interviews, maybe I could actually shine for once.

I feel like I need to add my own 2 cents to this point:

Definitely ask your recruiter and have them confirm which track you're interviewing for.

They just have numbers to hit. They will try to drop you into whichever track they need to. If a recruiter ever "seemingly misspoke" and moved you from SWE to SWE-SRE, ask for confirmation and/or insist on interviewing the track you are actually interested in.

The title and article literally says that Google is still hiring engineering and technical roles.

Why do you think this would affect you interviewing as a software engineer?

They might be hiring as many developers as they use to

I hear you about the hypercompetitive perspective. I'm 20 years older and can't believe the stress that we put learners through.

If I can offer my voice - focus on doing some real shit. Don't worry about the career ladder - find experiences where you accomplished some real goals. Getting on the FAANG career ladder too early is probably very limiting. The big differentiator is whether you can take on accountability for making decisions; this requires practice (and luck) => experience.

Don't stress it. People told me this when I was a recent college grad in the mid 2000's. Develop your own heuristic of learning and growing versus stagnating. On the outside-of-FAANG-world, there are so many more opportunities for growth than a kept engineer can imagine.

> Getting on the FAANG career ladder too early is probably very limiting

I can’t help but at chuckle at this with how big a barrier there is in comp between faang and non faang companies. You can get in if you spend months studying again or have a job that legitimately has you using comp sci on a day to day basis but for most folks they are gonna forget the skills needed to get a faang job shortly after college if they don’t get into one

I started at a FAANG as a senior swe with 8 years of experience. I did not get a comp sci degree, nor did I start my first job as SWE.

Just keep working towards your goals. When I started out I made a point to work an extra hour or two every day. If there was no work to do, I would study a topic of interest.

Not for nothing man, but an extra hour or two of work every day over the course of years is a high barrier.

Good for you that you made it, but it’s not so trivial a bar that I think telling people to not worry about getting into a faang early in their career is good advice if they care about money or career progression

Indeed. For lots of us, 2 hours a day is basically all the free time we have with family and other obligations. Spending all your free time for 6 months-year is a pretty brutal proposition, not to mention a huge ROI risk if you don't get the job at the end. OTOH, I think FAANG companies see this is a feature of the process (it filters out people who have a lot of external obligations).

How much comp sci do you use on a daily basis at a FAANG company though? Especially, if you are working on front end stuff / UI work

Does it matter? If you’ve got the faang title on your resume it makes it easier to get into other faangs or companies in general and you don’t have to bootstrap as hard on the comp sci.

It matters in the reverse because heavy comp sci tests are what the faangs lean on, on top of all the other interview rounds

> I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special

It's nothing special to those who are OK with leaving 6-figures on the table per anum - or are independently wealthy.

I think OP called it "nothing special [on HN]" because the majority of HNers probably already work at or have worked at FAANG.

>majority

This can't really be right though, can it? There aren't enough engineers in FAANGs to equal half of the DAUs of HN, and I kind of doubt that all of them would be on HN.

> In Q2 alone, we added approximately 10,000 Googlers...

Maybe it is okay to slow hiring if 'normal' is ten thousand new hires in three months

That's really low for a company as large as Google

I think they were adding around 15k annually in previous years.

They must have a lot of churn, that's a significant percentage of their entire workforce.

I don't think churn is particularly high as a percentage of total workers. The company really is growing that fast. There have been over ten-thousand positions open via careers.google.com in the last several months (although I expect that to shrink in the coming days). And 10K isn't that unusual of a quarterly number.

No inside info here, just noting that that kind of hiring is par for the course.

I know for a fact GCP is a shit show, so I'm sure they've been manscaling it.

Every engineer says that about their own products. My Amazon buddies all say AWS is a huge shitshow and my Microsoft buddies say Azure is huge mess. Technology is chaotic by nature

It isn't my own product :) Thomas Kurian is a special kind of chaos.

But yeah, no clouds run themselves. Only GCP is a spectacular kind of mismanaged, since 2018 or so.

Anyhow, who cares! :D cheers @altdataseller

You have made a lot of bold statements. Do you have anything substantial to back up your statements?

How about personal experience working with TK and a bunch of friends working at Google on Cloud? You can look up the severe production outages GCP has suffered over the past years, if you care.

All big organizations are dysfunctional in their own way.

If you know better, I'm all ears! Not trying to discount the hard work of all those fantastic Google engineers. It's just, prod issues are prod issues, regardless of good intentions.

Toxic TK, otoh, he's selfish, self-aggrandizing, out of touch, and not very nice or cool at all. Everything he touches bears his mark.

It almost sounds like he used to be an Oracle exec.

If given a choice I'd take GCP's production outages over Azure's security vulnerabilities that show a complete and total lack of any care for anything resembling security in at least a few of their products.

I saw him posting certified enterprise nonsense the other day and it didn’t make me feel very good about it.

https://twitter.com/thomasortk/status/1542601634106195968

(for some reason I’m still following one of my college professors who’s since become a director at GCP somehow)

Most of that is growth, not churn. Alphabet has hovered around 20% net headcount growth per year for awhile, per their earnings reports.

No, the company has more than doubled (maybe tripled?) in size in the last 3-4 years.

85k in 2016 -> 135k in 2022

Given these figures, hiring 10k a quarter sounds like pretty high churn and employee turnover.

Perhaps folks make their money then GTFO?

It's from a press-release that is intended to minimize the fears among investors. So the number likely includes part-time youtube moderators, cafeteria staff, and a lot of other minor jobs with incredibly high churn.

I would assume those folks are not googlers, but are contract labor.

I'd bet the farm you are right. At the same time, I've worked at Google-sized companies (non-FAANG) for about five years now. And in my experience like anything else in corporate politics, the appearance is everything. Many of them will hire developers, PMs, designers, etc as 1099 employees and say "we treat you like everyone else!"

But you are maligned in little ways all the time. You get a desk and a computer like everyone else, but you're not invited to certain meetings. Or maybe you're forced to use only the shitty parking spaces. Worst of all you often don't get health insurance (though sometimes you do, especially if you're in a more white collar role).

I'm off on a tangent here. I've been burned by this system before as I'm sure is obvious now. But the point is, in my experience the same system that hires those people often happily will take advantage of any opportunity to include contractors as "Part of the family!" when it involves no effort beyond appearances for themselves and offers only good optics that may or may not benefit them.

I've felt for a while that tech companies have been overhiring. Some, like Google, just to ensure that competitors don't get that talent. Others, like Coinbase, just to add an extra point to their pitch deck.

> Some, like Google, just to ensure that competitors don't get that talent.

This meme never made sense to me. How big is Google compared to it's competitors? Even if we narrow the scope down to the top 5% of talent - Google jas plenty of competition there. At best, Google can hang onto employees for a few years: not a great strategy for competing when employee churn is high.

If Google really wanted to hoard talent, they'd ensure current employees earn as much as new hires.

Google is probably larger than most of its competitors by headcount.

My working assumption on the theory is that Google is keeping talent from all companies, not specific ones. So the correct analysis would be the headcount at Google vs everyone else.

As a new parent, I was planning on leaving my current stressful startup for Google, as I hear it’s must more intentional and slower paced.

Not sure what my options are now but I’m running out of steam during a recession that is projected to last for 1-2 years. I’m the sole provider for a young family and also my aging mother whom didn’t plan for retirement.

Hopefully this all blows over quickly or I can harness resolve to keep grinding it out.

In a similar situation myself. No option but to keep going..

>a recession that is projected to last for 1-2 years

What leads you to believe this will be the case?

Do you believe it will last longer?

No, I don’t think it will be more than a few months at most, which is why I was curious to understand why someone would think in terms of several years.

What makes you believe it’ll be a few months?

I'm not an economist, I'm just a guy, but when I look at the big picture, I see nothing but opportunity. We need more houses, which means construction and jobs. We don't have enough skilled labor, yet we have loads of people who say they want better paying jobs, IE: it's a training / skills problem and it's a pay problem, it's not entirely a bodies problem. We're at the start of a mass switchover to renewable energy in the world economy, and that's only going to mean jobs, revenue, innovation, etc. It's easier and cheaper than ever to innovate with software, meaning entrepreneurial opportunities. While college is expensive, access to education and information is borderline free, meaning more people can be more knowledgeable than at any time in history. Point is - all of these things should be economic catalysts and any recession is bound to be short-lived, especially since in the big picture the past few have all been relatively brief and there were clearer reasons for those to have occurred.

Someone will probably talk about cost of capital and that kind of thing, but there's always money sitting on the sidelines somewhere and the market has a way of adapting to these things too.

> We need more houses, which means construction and jobs.

So construction needs labor but also lumber, land and financing. We don’t have the last three enough right now. We don’t have enough land to build near the bigger cities where housing is needed most, due to absurd zoning laws. We don’t have easy financing because of higher interest rates. None of these are short term problems.

Basically, I’m saying labor is unusable when you can’t actually construct.

> but there's always money sitting on the sidelines somewhere

That’s cute but still that’s an assumption.

NYTimes summarized it better [1]

> What’s causing the shortage itself is complex. The home-building industry lost about 1.5 million workers in the Great Recession of 2007-9 and has been in a labor shortage since. Land has grown more expensive. Lending tightened for builders, just as it did for home buyers after the bubble. The cost of lumber and other materials has risen.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/upshot/housing-shortage-u...

There are hundreds of new homes being planned for construction in my area, and I know this isn't the only area around the country that is the case - as I've shouted on here countless times, real estate and construction are local and trying to extrapolate them to the national picture is at best an echo of reality.

I'm already seeing new type of financing available for homebuyers in response to interest rates - think seller carry, Australian mortgages, and yes ARMs. Life finds a way and the market responds to keep deal flow going. The past few years were very special in history, and today's 5.5% 30-year fixed is still easy money by comparison.

re: That's cute but it's true - there's always someone looking to make a return. There's always someone who wants to start a business. You and me - we may not have money in our pocket, but there's a lot of money in the world and there's always someone who sees opportunity where others see danger and who will move money around to the corners that are generating a return.

> there's always someone who sees opportunity where others see danger and who will move money around to the corners that are generating a return.

That makes sense. It won’t be just traditional lenders who’d be funding new investments. I hope that’s going to be enough if interest rate hikes even further.

Here in the UK figures were announced today that show the economy bounced back to marginal GDP growth in May.

Don't forget to get a really good insurance in case you lose the ability to work in the industry.

Every single large company is expecting a long economic winter.

I'm just stating this in case people fool themselves in any way at the moment. Things are bleak and those who aren't lay people have pessimistic outlooks.

For advertising companies, yes...rates went up a huge amount last year, earlier this year I started hearing about companies moving ad spend to TV, flyers, anything but online because the ROI is so poor (and a lot of consumer-facing companies are facing a slowdown in demand after the boom last year left them with too much inventory now, this will impact advertising too).

For companies connected to these trends or the capital cycle, yes...it is going to be bad, most companies that failed to IPO won't survive, a lot of the late stage flippers have already lost everything (they just aren't marking down yet).

But this is a small part of tech, and a small part of the world. US tech had the fun on the way up...well, this is the next part. But the general economics of demand for tech are still good. The problem with large tech companies is that they took profitable businesses and then started hiring like mad and setting fire to cash (this isn't only unprofitable companies, Google is a tech company with a bureaucracy attached, the way that company is run is just comical). Tomorrow has come.

> moving ad spend to TV, flyers, anything but online because the ROI is so poor

So… deciding to move to channels where ROI is unknowable?

Actually you do know- ROI on legacy mediums can be even worse than online. Grandparent comment is spreading FUD.

> can be even worse than online

It can also be much better. Everything depends.

> ROI is unknowable

In the case of things like trade shows, mailing physical brochures/flyers/offers to address lists, and so on, the knowability is higher than many online alternatives.

> Google is a tech company with a bureaucracy attached, the way that company is run is just comical

And not much consequence for that, and that too in a slowing economy.

And yet labor participation is above pre pandemic levels, wage growth is accelerating, we just hit three year highs on new jobs in June, gas prices are finally dropping…

If you think companies are some kind of accurate leading indicator here, you’re being highly selective in the data you’re evaluating.

The economy is complex, it’s safe to slow down hiring, no one will remember a company that left money on the table when the storm clouds started forming, but they will remember a company that ignored “obvious” signs of a problem.

The data is really mixed, it depends what numbers you are looking at. By some measures, wage growth is slowing and employment has stalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/opinion/employment-wages-...

(I know people don’t like Krugman, but this piece is nuanced and apolitical)

Labor force participation rate is below pre pandemic levels, not above. 63.4 in February of 2020, 62.2 in June.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Real wages are declining not growing. $393/week median in Q2 2020, $362/week in Q4 2021.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Number of job openings are declining after peaking in March. 11,855,000 in March, 11,254,000 in May.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL

Gas prices went from $1.94 a gallon in May of 2020 to $5.03 in June of last month.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...

Yes, prices might have come down slightly since June. But overall, the statistics you cite are all trending negative.

Things aren’t bleak in the US - wild growth is slowing down but we’re not obviously in a recession, technical or not. And if we’re in a technical recession, you’re not losing your job, just don’t buy any yachts.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-23/morgan-st...

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

If people are worried about their jobs (or being laid off/unable to find new jobs), they'll spend less...

It's easy to forget that these systems have so many players in place outside of the technical roles, but they're the ones that keep the ship moving. I will be curious if this has an at all stagnating affect, but this is Google, so it is doubtful.

Interesting because I was approached by two different recruiters from Google in the past few months.

I don't know if it's impostor syndrome or just sheer brand strength, but my first reaction was "why would Google be interested in me?".

Judging by the tone of those emails it might be that Google turned up the heat in HR already and people are racing to meet KPIs.

Google hires a lot of people for a variety of roles. I'm sure you're very good at what you do :) but also they're a large company like any other that has a desire to recruit new talent.

Google recruiters will get in touch regardless of whether you have a chance of passing the interview or there’s actually a role open that makes sense. Just went through 6+ weeks after passing their interview where they couldn’t find me a team, so took a job at another company.

I feel for the kids these days, last couple years under lockdowns and now they probably won’t have too many entry level tech jobs out there since everyone seems to be tightening their belts.

I can't speak much for those graduating this year, but anecdotally those who graduated e.g. last year had a very competitive market ahead of them. I'm hearing things from this year like not providing offers to interns, which is definitely going to suck for them, but the market overall isn't what I'd call "cool" yet though it's definitely moving in that direction.

This looks like a more nuanced pullback than back in 2008 when it seemed like they stopped hiring almost completely. Back then it was more out of fear than logic.

Due to the literal hoard of cash sitting around, any meaningful then existential threat would have required a large rapid change of the world economic order and demanded a large scale reorg and mass firings anyway - so they may as well have assumed the world wasn't ending and just kept hiring. That decision then really ended up mucking things up internally.

So the companies that actively sucked up all the new graduates because of the glut of cash now have to learn frugality. Poetic, don't you think? It's not even a sign of bad times - the times are totally normal. What was happening was abnormal.

A software engineer who does't care about gaming the FAANG Leetcode interview process is still valuable - even more valuable.

I know it's partially out of context, but to read about the CEO of a trillion+ company talk about "more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days", with focus on the word "hunger", is kind of neo-capitalist dystopian. Especially right now, as more and more people around the world are actually experiencing real hunger, not the made-up "hunger" meant to bring in even more profits for said trillion+ company. Completely tone-deaf.

I am working as a Security Engineer(SE) for a (well-known; not FB) social media platform, and got an offer for a similar SE role at Google. Career wise, making the change will not necessarily make me happier; however Google's financial situation and stock perspectives feel better in this troublesome period, and makes me think that it will be better for my young family. What would you do?

I worked at a well known, non-Facebook social media platform during a turbulent time where my grant went down 50% and the company went through a botched acquisition offer. Thankfully I was still compensated well afterwards and it didn't affect me too much, but I do know colleagues who had to reconsider home purchasing decisions. Google's not impervious to market forces, and I obviously have no information as to how it will perform in the future, but in general it's probably safer than smaller companies. If you don't have much of a safety net, or have specific goals you'd like to meet in terms of compensation, picking Google may not be a bad idea. On the flip side, if you like the culture of working for a smaller company, are confident in your ability to switch jobs on your own terms, or are compensated primarily in cash it may be less attractive to join. It's really up to you, but the only general advice I can give you is that it never hurts to explore your options and make a decision once you have more information, such as actual offer letters. I work as a security engineer and as far as I am aware there are still plans to hire additional headcount in our team and many others, so you might as well give it a try.

Google and Amazon keep sending me emails, so I guess not so much slowing! GCP site of the house for the latest role, Engineer, SRE type.

I am still getting the mails too, but as a hirer myself, I can tell you the mails and LinkedIn job postings are the last thing to get turned off.

Right now probably isn't a great time to negotiate an impressive comp package with Big-G, Facebook, Oracle, SAP, or Netflix.

But what about stock prices? May be a good time to reach a particular equity package that is likely to go way up in the future vs fewer shares at a time when prices are high.

Right now is the PERFECT time to negotiate an impressive comp package at FAANG!

Comp bands themselves aren't changing, only the numbers of hires are being reduced. If you are good enough to get and pass the interview loop at FAANG during a recession, the company really wants you - so you can probably negotiate the maximum comp package - which is doubly beneficial as stock prices are low right now.

Source: I and some of my friends have recently received offers from FAANG

SRE is software reverse engineer, correct?

Site Reliability Engineer. Basically an extremely high-level sysadmin.

Site Reliability Engineer. Broadly speaking, Google divides software engineering into two categories:

- software engineers, who create, initially maintain, and develop long term maintenance plans for software

- site reliability engineers, who keep existing products healthy, deal with unexpected complications in realtime, and continuously engineer improvements on how to do their jobs so they can carry more and more active software per SRE.

> keep existing products healthy

Are we talking about the same Google?

Someone needs to keep things running for search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, …

We are. Because of Google's sheer size, it does have user-visible outages, but the ratio of outages to (uptime X services supported) is pretty much best-of-industry.

... it has to be, because at their size, outages are catastrophic for people.

https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/devops/what-is-sre

I wish it was, reverse engineering is fun!

But no, it's site reliability engineering.

That seems technical to me

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