I think... there will still be work. I think it means they will be going heavier on contractors, so they have more 'cushion' to preserve FTE when things unexpectedly go south. At this point, companies simply don't know how the rest of the year will pan out.
I have been asking my friends to speculate how us pandemic survivors will be different from other people in the future? How we will be characterized in novels? How would Sherlock Holmes distinguish us from the privileged ones who by luck of birth were not involved in the pandemic? Dr. Watson would say, after Holmes spotted the survivor, "If you worked from home for two years, you'd behave that way too."
I always pose this a little more colorfully, but the part that gets the response is the two years.
You hope. The consequences of this lockdown frenzy were never going to remain limited to just service workers and shop keeps. I predict a sudden increase of interest in more flexible policies as professional workers start getting pinched.
I work in digital advertising. Spend* is up. Companies are diverting their traditional advertising budgets into digital. I'd be surprised if Google is unable to capitalize on this.
edit: I want to clarify it's strictly ad spend/booking. It's companies committing budgets. They know they will want to run ads and will run more ads. The ads haven't actually run yet, so ad payouts will tank.
It depends on market segment. We have seen a contraction for the vertical I work in. BUT the big players are spending more. It’s the little companies that are pulling out.
The vertical I work in is Legal. It is probably one of the least elastic when it comes to demand. Courts are closed, but that’s temporary. I have spoken to a lot of firms across the nation. The firms who are in better financial shape see this as a time to acquire market share. Some practice areas will see a bigger demand in the coming months.
That is totally not true across the board. I know for a fact that at one point the big online travel sites (booking.com, expedia.com) were some of the largest buyers of adwords among any companies. Can guarantee that is not happening now.
I would guess spend is up only among companies that still have robust revenue. Tons of sectors have essentially been frozen for the time being.
Ah, yeah, can confirm the travel segment cratered into the ground. I can see adwords being an unpopular product overall at the moment. It's just an awful format for rebranding/storytelling/marketing.
This is super interesting. I never thought of search ads from the lens of storytelling, only from the lens of click through. Interesting that a lot of SEO-built brands have no way to even reach customers to repair brand now, since search volume is so down.
I suspect this is one of the reasons advertising on Instagram is going gangbusters. The combo of better targeting + a format that naturally lends itself to storytelling makes for a much more compelling advertising platform.
If I was running travel business, I would be selling 20-50% off coupons set to expire in December, 2022. This does reduce future revenue but will at least normalize the hole today a little bit. I know many people would jump on deals like this.
How does that pair off against the reports that YouTube channels are seeing their ad earnings cut in half as digital ad spend drops?
Don’t doubt there are companies going against the tide but seems clear as spend has declined. Clearly an opportunity to get good rates for those looking to spend.
Google's advertising focuses heavily on ROI/CTR metrics min-maxing and for the most part, well timed and targeted ads. That's not what companies seem to care about right now. Everyone is running feel-good awareness campaigns.
If I had to guess, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat will come out of this better than Google would.
> The ad reductions will occur in news programming, late-night NBC and Bravo shows, reality programming, competition shows like America’s Got Talent and other cable originals.
The only reason they're doing this is they don't have enough buyers to fill the slots. Traditional media is great for brand advertising, but it's so hard to show ROI, I can see the wisdom to shifting budget to Facebook and Google.
It's briefly mentioned in the article, but Google actually shed jobs during the financial crisis. Facebook is the company that ramped up hiring newly available talent.
Eric Schmidt says that's the worst mistake he made as CEO of Google, though. They were well-positioned to clean up all the good engineers in Silicon Valley (lots of cash, solid business) and instead Facebook catalyzed their growth. I think they haven't forgotten, and that's why this isn't a blanket hiring freeze, it's them getting more selective. (Technically, '09 wasn't a hiring freeze either: I was hired in Jan 2009. My Noogler class had 13 people hired across all of Google for the 3 weeks it covered, and half of them had received their offers in July '08 - so effectively it was a hiring freeze.)
Anecdotally, I've been told they require you to come onsite to get onboarded and receive Google hardware and their offices are locked up. Some recent hires are not able to work and now being paid to do nothing.
They are mailing out the required hardware and doing remote onboarding for the time being. But hardware shipments are getting delayed leading to some new hires being paid to do nothing for a week or two.
Actually it doesn't. Everyone is working from home. We have little idea when this may end and if there would be next waves. Fully functioning without need to be in-person is absolutely essential for every tech company. If your stack is so undocumented that someone must sit down with you and give every single new hire 1:1 hand holding in repetitive manner, something is very broken.
With the number of people who go through Google's interview process, this might actually change the industry to think more carefully about the interview process. If Google isn't making whiteboard interviews the norm, who will keep it going?
I’ve been stuck in the final SVP approval part of their hiring process for a week. At this point I think I’m just going to keep my current job. Too bad — seemed like a good time to get equity at a good “strike” price
I think everybody who interviews at Google gets “stuck in the final process for a week”. That’s kinda how they do things. I interviewed there and they rejected me at the final stage after many days of no-communication; but they told me I almost made it, which made me feel good until I talked to other people and found out they say that to everyone. Still: best of luck to you :)
If you made it to the full slate of interviews, you're already in the 1% of top applicants. If you made it through to hiring committee submission as well, you were very close to getting hired (they don't even try otherwise) and they're serious if they suggest you try again later.
Google has a notoriously slow hiring process. For new grads and internships, the time between initial coding assessment to final hiring confirmation is often several months.
They've been slow on "poaching" experienced folks as well. One person I know was offered a king's ransom to switch to Google, refused a "please stay" premium from the home company, and it still took half a year to walk through the door.
A friend interviewed with Google a few years ago and the process took well over six months before he actually got an official offer. It really is amazing how slow they are.
My story: Interviewed October 2014, they wanted me to start December 2014, I pushed them to Jan 2015. My friend interviewed a week or two after me, started 1 week after me.
Counter point:
The time between my on site interview and hire date was 1 month and 1 day.
I skipped the phone interview so the time from initial referral to offer was under a month.
Having an internal reference may have helped, as did the fact that I told them I was actively interviewing and had offers.
Similar experience here. Having internal references seems to be very useful, not just for skipping the phone interview but for getting through the hiring committee. My start day is exactly one month after my interview, but even then that is because I put it back a week.
Does anybody get hired for SWE positions at Google _without_ an internal referral? When I was interviewing there 6 or so years ago I was under the impression that you, in practice, had to have an insider vouch for you.
The only internal reference I had was a distant acquaintance who - as they said themselves - just submitted one that basically read "don't know them much but they don't seem to be a jerk".
So you can absolutely get hired in engineering without internal references. (I'm also on a hiring committee myself.)
That seems longer than typical. From my first phone call with a recruiter to my first day of work was less than 4 months, and that includes me intentionally delaying my interview until after the holiday season, giving the job I left more than the standard 2 weeks notice, and my Google start date being pushed back due to the coronavirus situation
I purposely delayed my interview despite recruiter encouragement to get it over with, but I interviewed on March 20th, I was hired on the 30th (I think, it was in the week after the interview, I team matched by the end of the week), and I will onboard (unless something bad happens) next Monday. I’ve found Google to be much faster than I thought.
One has to think why the concept of employment is still considered like marriage that require such an extensive ultra-deep multi-level deliberations. Let's say you were local, why it shouldn't be possible to give someone on-the spot offer after half-day of interviews as well as let them go with, say 2 weeks of standard severance if things don't work out?
Bringing someone up to speed in a large complicated ecosystem is extremely expensive. They will have to invest months into you before you will be capable of contributing in a way that isn't a net loss and a drag on existing team members.
At worst you pose a massive threat to the company/codebase. LOL i accidentally leaked all our secrets to china/apple/MS whoops.
But most of these companies/teams already employ massive numbers of contractors. They typically sign NDAs and often work on same code.
I've been on development teams which had contractors as 20% or more members. We had just couple of interviews and next-day offers for contractors while full timers went through multi-month process. Both worked on same code, often similarly complex tasks and used same on-boarding docs etc. One difference was that full timers were given more longer term tasks although, looking back, I feel many longer tasks simply became longer term because of tribal knowledge full timers developed and kept to themselves. The contractors were required to extensively document everything all the time :).
At a large technology company with its own software stack it takes several months before a new hire isn’t a net-negative to the team they join. And it will be months after that before they reach full productivity. A bad hire is an extremely expensive mistake.
A bad hires are expensive mistake if you can't get rid of them until some artificial annual event. While I understand onboarding complexities, my experience is that the teams/companies which hasn't create good automated process so new hire can commit their first change within 2-days are big red flag (this was insisted upon by Zuck extensively at Facebook scale). I would also argue that culture of hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa.
A congenial but mediocre developer may actually be more valuable than a rowdy and talented one because she pisses off less number of other brilliant developers.
But that congenial/mediocre developer is still taking up a headcount that could hold a congenial/high-performing developer instead. There is also a separate issue where mediocrity discourages high-performers.
I mean, in some places, with some companies, they hire people as temps or contractors and later make them permanent. That effectively amounts to the arrangement you describe. This can't be obscure, so I don't understand your tone as if it was. It's just a matter of what kind of employment you consider worth applying for.
Yep, we took advantage of that at Netflix. Our average time from first contact to walking in the door was about two weeks if you wanted to move as quickly as we did.
We got a few folks who were in the final stage at Google, and we contacted them, interviewed them, made the offer, and got them in the door before Google ever got back to them.
Pretty much all of my University friends got into team matching at Google for an internship position (myself included). All of them would have taken the job, and none of them were able to because the process was too long. It's pretty absurd, they even set up a call with myself and a dozen other people in team matching to basically tell us that we should take any other offers we have because Google is too slow. And then for full time it was the same thing - my time from application to on-site to offer was like 2 weeks for Jane Street, why is it 3 months for Google? The worst was that the deadline kept getting pushed back - for a month, I was told that I would be matched with a team that week, and I never actually got matched before my other offer deadlines.
I was one of the "special" ones who didn't make it past Google's final hiring committee review (although I now suspect this is a lot more common than they let on). And that happened after the recruiter had already called to check my references, matched me with a team, given me a verbal offer and told me it was "basically" final. The entire process took over 3 months. It has been years but I'm still annoyed by how they wasted my time.
Same thing happened with me -- I wouldn't quite go as far as receiving a verbal offer, but had been discussing compensation and they were asking about my other offers to send off to the comp team after I matched with a team. Such a long, drawn out process to come up with nothing.
Yeah, I was brought back after the final interview to do another round and was verbally told by the recruiter that everything looked great and that she would be extremely surprised if I didn't get an offer.
Being brought back to do another interview is not a good sign at Google. Best case is your interviewers totally forgot to cover something important, but more commonly it means somebody has serious doubts about something and they need to check it again.
Or that you're being considered for a similar job but under a different hiring manager.
Another thing to note about Google hiring is that it's very different for different role types. Specifically, for SWEs, Sales, and other roles that are expected to function in a largely boilerplate manner, it's fairly cut & dried how things work, but for roles that are less clearly defined (for example, "program manager" or "solutions consultant") the actual responsibilities can be so highly variable (or so niche) that interviewing for them is a specialization in itself. These kind of one-off situations is where Google's "automate all the things" general mentality falls apart.
Is it surprising that some people may value things other than just money? Of course there are people who would decide against an opportunity to go work for Google, FaceBook, Twitter, et al. I like to think there are more than a few, but I've no sources to backup any assertions right now.
It’s possible they would have just built yet another chat app for Google to shutdown. I’m not sure what Google even does anymore innovation wise with all their wealth and resources.
I was rejected by an SVP at Google. Recruiter was surprised but said it happens. Said I did a good job and could pick a different role (wasn’t for SWE), got the offer the second time around but had to start all over and got passed to a new recruiter.
How does that happen? The way interviewing should work is that every person that interviewed you should vote, and if its unanimous that you should be hired, then some SVP a few levels up decided to veto it, I'd be livid if I was a hiring manager.
They are free to do so, but when they do it for arbitrary reasons, it instills a lack of trust in leadership. Leaders that lead through fear are much less effective than leaders that are able to motivate their followers in positive ways.
If you so lack in trust that the people on your team can make good hiring decisions, even to the point of rejecting somebody you haven’t actually met...well... that’s just nuts.
So, your described situation almost never happens. There are candidates who get 100% hire votes, and they get hired. Most candidates have some variability- it is rare that everyone is 100% onboard. The svp review is to make sure that the hiring process has worked and nothing major has been missed.
For many (although not all) people being hired at Google, the SVP approval process happens before you're matched with a manager. The SVP approves you to work in their PA, and then you're matched with a manager within the PA.
My theory was that it was a comp/background mismatch. I was interviewing for a role that someone with more of a sysadmin background could do but I had a SWE background and was trying to command that comp level.
I wish I could want to work at Google, but, between the hazing rituals on the front end, the long lead times, and these mysterious vetoing robed elders on the back end, they make it so unattractive.
I wonder whether their approach has been alienating entire large categories of people, and what diversity of ideas and influences they're missing as a result.
I'm in the same situation. That whole process makes me feel like a mindless cog about to enter a well oiled machine without the possibility to question some of those nonsensical steps.
Yeah, I think most normal people would just never apply and that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think working at Google is FOR normal people. I am a normal person and I'm pretty sure Google is not suffering from the lack of me! :D
You know, I work in tech but I have never attempted to have a Career in Tech. I definitely don't own a whiteboard and I'm sure I'd never get past the resume stage. (I've only actively applied for a couple of jobs in my life and all in the past year, purely because I thought I should REALLY get some experience with applying for jobs. I actually just had an interview and bombed it so much, omg, at one point I claimed not to know JavaScript! :D I don't think it's for me.)
But out of the rareified circles of HN, I've not found any of the career stuff talked up on here to be necessary anyway. There's more code that needs writing than coders to write it and so long as that's true there'll be work going. I work a few days a week for a company and the rest for myself. I have fun and write code and invent things and people generally give me enough money to pay my bills so I'm happy with that. It's a pretty sweet deal! Before I was a coder I was an unpaid family caregiver (hence no school or credentials or career) so compared to that I can't really imagine a programming job that could really genuinely be BAD. They are all simply gradations of sweet.
My brother (who did massively go to school) works at Google and loves it. I drop in and hang out with him there sometimes and it does seem great for a certain kind of person. And they have so many resources and work on loads of fun games and obviously it would be great to be rich as well. I think it's really clear why it's so attractive. If you think you have a shot then go for it!
But if you know you don't have a shot, why break your heart over it, is my view. It's not a bad thing to be clear eyed about your prospects in life.
Good luck. I recently went through the google interview process and it took months. The lockdowns were starting and the economy was melting down around me, and then I myself got sick with covid-19. It was a stressful time.
I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.
Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.
Google is a one trick pony that just took a baseball bat to the knee. I hope covid knocks them from their heights and forces them to create better products. Years of easy advertising money from their search monopoly has led to internal rot and fat, a thinning of the heard could force them to use their employees productively. Or alternatively, nothing will change, they will experience no pain, and the world will go on in six months.
Probably because it is perceived to be a fairly uninformed question. It's sort of like talking about the USPS potential insolvency and someone asking how many postmen will be replaced with gig economy workers.
As far as I'm aware, major leading American tech companies have never really exported jobs to India, it has been almost entirely companies that need mediocre quality work contracting out to companies that fill those contracts with workers from India or elsewhere. Without carefully developing an office, culture, and employee pipelines over 3-5+ years you carry extremely large risk outsourcing important work.
In many industries it's not uncommon to subcontract a service by a subcontractor which himself subcontract the same service to another subcontractor (usually cheaper).
In the end it is only a question of money!
Actually top american tech companies don't have to go directly to India to get cheaper workers but instead they call american subcontractor to get cheaper workers anywhere in the world. Even more with restricted green cards thanks to Donald TRUMP. :-)
It was right 10-15 years ago, but less so now. There's been a huge pushback on off-shore development in the past decade for a variety of reasons, mainly poor results, issues with time zone differences, and the negligible cost savings. Most of the big consulting firms we associate with off-shore contracting (like TATA) are supplying mostly on-shore (engineering) consultants to domestic companies (but maintaining services like help desk offshore).
Middle management got tired of having daily meetings at midnight or 6 AM, and it got too expensive to bring people over who were fine with doing so. The India job market got pretty tight around '14 or so, to the point where engineers were leaving jobs every 4-6 months for greener pastures. And even though the consulting companies are supposed to be in charge of KT, so that transitions don't impact the clients, the rate of change was just too high to maintain good quality.
Probably some of the less than 20 % of indian readers who prefer to hide the destruction of american jobs by India but actually by overpaid american tech leaders in the silicon valley. ;-)
May be you should consider posting some data-driven citation.
AFAIK, jobs have stopped going to India for sometime now. Indian IT companies which relied heavily on offshoring had significant contraction as a result. A lot of modern IT jobs in India are in fact for new startups/companies meant for Indian population itself. Before COVID, India was seeing China like internal uprising with equivalent of many US tech companies poping up all over with jobs that were starting to match US salaries outside of tech hubs. Also, visa process had became unsustainably hard for most companies there so on-shore workforce augmentation sector has been quickly drying up as well.
The Indian ITO firms have been seeing pressure for a while, but that doesn't also mean US tech companies have stopped hiring in India (or that they've stopped hiring contractors through those Indian firms).
I recently posted a Ask HN asking about the effect of how drop in ads money would affect Google/FB and someone did a quick and dirty analysis for their runway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884042
It can't be more than a simple slow. This crisis decimated their revenues while increasing their huge subsidized operational costs like bandwidth.
Take for instance YouTube. Just imagine the cost to operate the site increasing exponentially overnight (because of all the quarantined people) while their ad business goes down. You're in the worst possible situation for a business with a model that is heavily dependent on that particular ad revenue.
That's like a supermarket having three times more foot traffic but people only buying gum.
On the contrary they’re getting a lot more eyeballs so YT has never been in a better position. Advertisers can reach a large chunk of the populace through YT now.
When things go south is when consumers stop purchasing. The unemployment and cut in disposable income will have a massive effect on purchasing power... but the federal government is deficit spending like crazy. So... it’s not clear what the consumer market will look like just yet.
The spike in usage means that YT needs content creators to make more, but also earn less money. A forward-thinking startup could capitalize on this by paying content creators more to migrate to their own service, and work to get the attention of those eyeballs which are bored of YT content.
I don't think Blind is a trustworthy source for this kind of thing. I know some companies that are actively hiring - new employees still showing up every week - but have been reported to be on a freeze.
The first step on the road to a freeze is a headcount cap. If you have 10k engineers and 2% are fired/quit each year that still means 4 new people are starting each week.
I wonder if so many layoffs, freezes etc. happening at the moment are directly due to the crisis or something that was long overdue and can now be done without much negative PR.
That was the case in the past several recessions. The only question is the relative mix in each company.
And then if this recession persists then more and more knives come out as people fight each other for jobs within each company. Many people behave like shit when their livelihoods are on the line. Fun times.
Also this bloodletting is happening at several levels. The VCs are performing the same decimation to their portfolio companies that companies are to their workers and vendors. Departments or groups in the company are drawing up lists.
That sounds like... exactly the reality of such times, indeed. Well worded.
There is a question, each time, of concurrent or even deeper cycles coinciding. The last recession is often thought to have been a prime factor in the revolutions of 2011 (Arab Spring etc). Regardless of their eventual conclusion, the push is deemed to stem (as always in history) from the economic situation. European kings knew all too well that hunger is a pretty sure path to insurrection.
I wonder, given the predictable magnitude of this (by predictable I mean "even if we low-ball it"), what will happen in the next few years worldwide, and in particular in the US. I reckon "Occupy Wall Street" didn't really go far itself (although it's very likely a major factor in Bernie's rise in the years after, among many other things ofc).
I expect to see a much deeper, less superficial reaction this time. A real history-mover. Time will tell.
The initial reaction from the private sector we're witnessing as we speak is unprecedented in magnitude already; hitting the middle-upper class super hard (when Occupy Wall Street was mostly a lower-middle class fight versus the lavish establishment, from one extreme to the other; this is by contrast very "core").
Biological knowledge points to the current perception largely underestimating the eventual situations we'll have to face for the next 12-18 months (at least, assuming we are extremely lucky with a vaccine on first try, essentially; which I've heard no expert claim as particularly easy let alone a done deal, they're all cautious and don't even claim to be "certain" a vaccine is even possible, although "confident" certainly).
Could be 24, 36 months of living with this thing disrupting the economy left and right, two steps forward, one back, two forward, three back, and on and on.
The bloodletting and free-for-all has only just begun. I'm extremely afraid it'll be worse than any of us has seen since before WWII.
What are you talking about? White collars are working from home, by and large. None of my engineer friends have lost their jobs yet (one is getting furloughed for a week though)
> None of my engineer friends have lost their jobs yet
Most middle-upper class employees are not engineers.
> White collars are working from home
People can only work from home if they work for a company that has money to pay them - a company that hasn't shut down due to lack of business. A white collar employee working for an airline, hotel chain or car manufacturer (and all of these huge companies have huge ranks of middle/upper management in marketing, operations, HR, accounting, etc.) probably doesn't have a lot of job security right now.
Also, the key word in your sentence is "yet". I'm a software developer, and I'm sure that if my employer's revenues drop significantly during the upcoming recession, layoffs will be inevitable.
In contrast, in the Atlanta and Nashville focused tech slack teams I'm a part of almost every day I see more developers announcing they've been laid off. My last two employers have had massive layoffs that included developers.
That's because we are only in the fourth week of this. The revenue of non-essential companies plummeted. They are going to start cutting headcount by mid-may.
People might be consuming 10x advertising but 1) people can't go out to the store and buy what's being advertised or use it outside after it's been boughts and 2) a lot of people are freshly unemployed or terrified about being unemployed in the near future and are not going to buy anything nonessential. Therefore, their ad impressions are worth less and so companies are spending much, much less on advertising.
Most Americans (richest country in the world btw) don't know how they will pay their rent next month or buy food. No one's signing up for a new subscription now lmao.
Yeah, if they, as a family, made $198K last year and filed jointly then they won't get a check. But I think you'll agree that it'd be ridiculous to shovel money to families making $200K+ a year. For single earners the cutoff is 99K.
Lower-income Twitter is jubilant at this development, BTW. Something they'll remember in November for sure. And the check is not conditioned on whether you're still employed (which most people are).
TL;DR: a lot of people who are still working are getting what to them is a substantial amount of money. They'll be spending it.
>But I think you'll agree that it'd be ridiculous to shovel money to families making $200K+ a year.
I wouldn't; reality is more nuanced and circumstantial than your blanket generalization would like it to be. While it's true that in many places $200k is a substantial amount of money, there are places (California, for instance, particularly the Bay Area) where the cost of living is high enough that a couple earning $200k may still be living paycheck to paycheck and $2900 doesn't even cover rent. The loss of even one income in that household could be devastating.
>And the check is not conditioned on whether you're still employed (which most people are).
I alluded to that condition by my use of the phrase, "If they're unemployed".
>TL;DR: a lot of people who are still working are getting what to them is a substantial amount of money. They'll be spending it.
While I am sure that many people will spend it in ways that are more recreational than others, I am not so sure that as many people will be doing that as you assume. Jobless claims are expected to reach a whopping 15% soon[1], many people still employed are finding themselves working reduced hours resulting in reduced pay[2], and hiring is down[2]. The current data available is from March, which means we're likely to see data for April reporting even fewer hours worked - which means a continued decrease in take-home pay for many people still working - and even fewer jobs hiring.
The reality is that there is a lot of uncertainty right now. Many people still working are probably on the edge of their seat about their company's long-term prospects - sure they can make it for now, but how does a shutdown that could go on for many more months allow their workplace to continue to sustain itself? It's foolish to assume that the employment numbers we are seeing now have leveled off and won't continue to rise, especially if this continues through summer. More businesses will close or cut back on hours and more people will be out of work.
That thought process is likely playing out across the country in many homes, so I would expect more people to pocket the money and use it wisely than to sign up for new subscriptions that they don't need than you would think.
One time payment. If they were getting $2900 every month, it would be a different story entirely (probably a worse one). Most of that money is going to living expenses.
During recessions, people reel back in their spending, even if they are garbagemen or teachers who don't lose their jobs in recessions. This is shaping up to be the mother of all recessions, so you do the math.
> Most Americans (richest country in the world btw) don't know how they will pay their rent next month or buy food. No one's signing up for a new subscription now lmao.
Precisely what part of anything in the preceding paragraph is meant to be modified or somehow accentuated by the "lmao?"
On the other hand, Amazon is going gangbusters. I wonder if covid-19 will ironically prompt a longer term re-alignment away from virtual interaction in favour of real-world connections, as people realize how much they miss real things during lockdown.
I imagine Amazon will do well in some areas (consumers) initially, but overall will see a drop in demand as the crisis really bites - businesses have stopped ordering, and consumers will stop ordering soon to save money. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but I think US markets are far too optimistic at present, and this is going to have a very large impact economically, because it won't be over as soon as say Trump hopes, and premature attempts to reopen will be disastrous.
Strangely enough I think the disease and its impacts will have far less impact on our behaviour than the economic impact of mass layoffs and shuttering the world economy for months. I don't think we've ever seen a drop in consumption of this magnitude and the road back to normality will be slow.
There may be more page views ("supply") right now, especially on certain types of social media, but I suspect that advertising demand has taken a huge hit.
Lots of companies out there, especially retail, are taking huge hits and I would suspect that an advertising budget is one of the first things to be reduced.
They call it a race to the bottom for a reason, perhaps for more than one reason, and for multiple definitions of bottom, and of the bottom of what exactly. What are we talking about again?
That's always possible. The version I heard from a company I may or may not work for: investors watch revenue vs expenses. If you expect a downturn in revenue, you cut expenses to avoid problems.
Comparing Chinese tech companies with Google here feels like comparing apples and oranges and also "Chinese tech companies" is too big a entity to be compared with a single company.
But scenes at Yahoo/Reddit/Baidu and other smaller ads-driven companies aren't pretty
The tech sector as many other industries is always recruiting cheaper workers anywhere in the world to make more profits distributed in priority to the leaders.
This is just getting started. Everything is so interconnected. Each chunk of the economy that falls away will have a cascade effect that takes weeks or months to knock the next piece out. Once everyone finally heads back to work it will take years to regrow everything to the point it was.
Before everyone starts painting bleak picture, reminder: Facebook's Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated hiring spree this year, opening massive 10,000 more positions! Google as well as Facebook both depend on ads so I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion.
Exactly right. For example, many media organizations right now are reporting record traffic numbers, but are struggling to make ends meet as advertisers pull out.
Is there actually any numbers people can point towards?
I’ve read similar comments over different forum postings about advertisers tending to cut advertising during times like these to help their financials. And it makes sense to me. But now I’m sitting here, just wondering if anyone has actually looked at numbers during other financial downturns. Or is it just some catching conversation that’s been kicking off....maybe I need to go outside and smell some fresh air.
Even apart from the advertisement coming from the platform, most creators (podcast/Youtube) that I follow report that their direct ad placements have basically dropped to 0 and the only ones they have running now were negotiated pre-pandemic.
People are not working, hence no money. (less money to spent) advertising doesn't make much sense except your target are the wealthy working (or not working class)
Google has too many projects, from wifi on Indian railways stations to dozens of messengers to a virtual phone service. Some of these units are going to suffer and I expect them to shut down. These people will then move to other more important areas.
I do not expect google's search business to go down.
Facebook may well be the worlds most powerful sentiment capture and analysis engine ever built but Google tracks conversions and has pretty stellar sentiment capture/analysis capabilities.
Google appears to also have twice as much cash on hand as Facebook. Wonder what they’ll use it for if not to hire competent people to prevent them from starting the next big thing...
its got me baffled. I wonder if this changed consumer behavior in such a way that it benefits facebook ads and detracts from google. I dont understand it, but it appears to be the message we are seeing
tik tok.... they have a real competitive threat, and probably want to make sure when the recession is over, they are still the #1 in social space
Also, back in 2008, Google didn't hire/freezed its hiring, but Facebook and Amazon were still hiring like mad, and it worked well for them. They are used to ride out recessions.
True, but their value to advertisers depends on users. Facebook is likely seeing a massive spike in (ad-viewing) users, whereas Google a much more modest one. I'm sure Google Search and YouTube have gone up, but the former won't have gone up much, and the latter has not yet been profitable for Google in the first place.
> I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion
Neither needs to tighten belts. Both have enormous amounts of cash.
Not sure why RivieraKid was getting downvoted - there's no "just a message to the stock market". Lying in this context would be illegal, and would open FB up to shareholders suing the company IMO.
I'm not a securities lawyer, but I would assume that there is little deterrence for "sending a message to the stock market" with statements about hopes, plans, or predictions for the future. As long as there's nothing definitively false as of the moment you say it...
Besides New Hiring, I would be impressed if large companies honour their existing job offers; Which IT services firms which does bulk recruiting in India seem to be doing.
IT firms such as TCS (30,000 recruits this financial year), Wipro (12,000), Cognizant (20,000) and Capgemini (10,000 over January-June) say they are sticking by their offer letters[1].
I've personally witnessed jobs from these companies lift several out of poverty in India (Most of them being the first graduate in their family).
But, obviously those who pass out this year especially the Engineering freshers are going to be the worst hit.
For bean counters looking to cut costs, outsourcing to India is going to look pretty attractive. Especially since the actual costs of doing this will only become apparent later...
I'm not sure if this will happen again so soon. Mostly because it seems like wages in technology flattened or even declined on the low-end due to the glut of college graduates capable of filling these roles. I see lots of applicants with non-CS/CE degrees applying for programming and analytics positions.
Should be easier for FB and Amazon to fill those positions now that Google is not sucking as much air from the atmosphere. I think Google may come to regret its decision for this reason. Part of the reason for these companies to hire is "area denial": the employee is not only hired to do great things, but also to prevent them from doing great things for a competitor. If you stop hiring, you allow a lower-paying competitor like Amazon or Microsoft to scoop up the engineers that would previously be inaccessible to them.
One of the best offensive strategies you can have is to make sure all talented people work for you, rather than the competition.
If smaller companies and startups fade away due to coronavirus-induced instability, making sure that their talent winds up with you is a smart move. If you are big enough to afford it, that is, which both of these companies arguably are -- regardless of whether their Q1 and Q2(?) results are worse this year than last.
Even if startups don't fade away, uncertain times means people look for stability. Unless a startup is in one of the sectors benefiting from the lockdown, top talent is likely looking to leave for stability at one of the big players. Which will just accelerate the fall of marginal startups or those struggling.
If I were to guess, Facebook's recruiting pipeline is centralized. Whether or not to hire is done at the executive level. When Facebook hires someone, they are first a "Facebook employee", go through the bootcamp, and decide on a team 1-2 months into the job.
Google on the other hand, the recruiting pipeline is more spread out. Whether or not to hire is done at the organizational level (i.e. Cloud, Ads, Search, Core, etc), and that depends on whether or not there are openings in any teams. You are matched with a team before you are even hired.
So, like, obviously, if you have the cash to burn, now is the right time to hire employees. You can get good talent pretty cheap right now. So it's in Google's best interest to ramp up hiring. Unfortunately Google's recruiting pipeline does not support hiring a bunch of people and figuring out what team to be on later.
So yeah, basically, Google has shitty hiring practices. It has nothing to do with them "losing money", they have so much cash in the bank which will easily last till this is over.
Going by your words, Google’s hiring process seems to be hurting them right now (which makes sense). But what are the benefits of hiring this way over Facebook’s style? (or rather where does centralized hiring fall short?)
I always thought it was just political/bureaucratic cruft nobody bothered to fix, because they're Google, and they can have the shittiest interview process in the world and it wouldn't really matter. It seems inferior in every way to Facebook's process. Even outside of this Coronavirus thing they lose out on a lot of good talent because of how long it takes
Good. Shut down the bootcamps. Stop telling people to learn to code. Lower the salaries. Move companies out of SV and spread across the country. We are long overdue for a bloodbath like 1999. It's not over until Level 10s are laid off and the computer science departments are empty.
Maybe the travel, restaurant etc industries have stopped paying for clicks so Google gets less cash? My work cut down on PPC by a lot and we spent a lot of money on it.
One color I would add - hearing the tax season deadline moving to July drastically reduced the ad spend from tax filing software services companies. Of course, ad spend is also just down overall.
So what? They have enough money to last trough years of economic depression. Long term plans might be as important as short term plans, or more important.
They don't send a good signal to investors.
Micromanaging makes sense when you are in deep trouble - see LA Times. Is Google in trouble? I believe not. Yet they send the message they are in trouble.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadI always pose this a little more colorfully, but the part that gets the response is the two years.
edit: I want to clarify it's strictly ad spend/booking. It's companies committing budgets. They know they will want to run ads and will run more ads. The ads haven't actually run yet, so ad payouts will tank.
I would guess spend is up only among companies that still have robust revenue. Tons of sectors have essentially been frozen for the time being.
Don’t doubt there are companies going against the tide but seems clear as spend has declined. Clearly an opportunity to get good rates for those looking to spend.
If I had to guess, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat will come out of this better than Google would.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873272
> The ad reductions will occur in news programming, late-night NBC and Bravo shows, reality programming, competition shows like America’s Got Talent and other cable originals.
The only reason they're doing this is they don't have enough buyers to fill the slots. Traditional media is great for brand advertising, but it's so hard to show ROI, I can see the wisdom to shifting budget to Facebook and Google.
1: https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/nbcuniversal-will-permanentl...
Yeah but they were like 500 employees back then, so only really significant as relative growth.
Nevertheless, seems like a great time to acquire talent on the cheap, so long as you can effectively use it.
Having an internal reference may have helped, as did the fact that I told them I was actively interviewing and had offers.
So you can absolutely get hired in engineering without internal references. (I'm also on a hiring committee myself.)
At worst you pose a massive threat to the company/codebase. LOL i accidentally leaked all our secrets to china/apple/MS whoops.
I've been on development teams which had contractors as 20% or more members. We had just couple of interviews and next-day offers for contractors while full timers went through multi-month process. Both worked on same code, often similarly complex tasks and used same on-boarding docs etc. One difference was that full timers were given more longer term tasks although, looking back, I feel many longer tasks simply became longer term because of tribal knowledge full timers developed and kept to themselves. The contractors were required to extensively document everything all the time :).
> hire/replace team members in agile manner would help enforce this process more naturally and vice versa
Places where this happens are normally considered very high stress and competitive.
You're arguing in favour of high turnover - that can't be good neither for the company nor for the employees.
A congenial but mediocre developer can stick around forever in most places once they're in.
This performance management weakness also makes me suspicious of various companies claiming to have nailed the interview process.
But that congenial/mediocre developer is still taking up a headcount that could hold a congenial/high-performing developer instead. There is also a separate issue where mediocrity discourages high-performers.
But it'll give you a reputation that makes it difficult to entice the sort of people whose current employers don't want them to leave.
We got a few folks who were in the final stage at Google, and we contacted them, interviewed them, made the offer, and got them in the door before Google ever got back to them.
Note: I don't represent Google.
Guess who got to tell me I didn't get it (again)?
Note to recruiters: don't say that stuff.
Fortunately, I'm still happy in my current job.
Another thing to note about Google hiring is that it's very different for different role types. Specifically, for SWEs, Sales, and other roles that are expected to function in a largely boilerplate manner, it's fairly cut & dried how things work, but for roles that are less clearly defined (for example, "program manager" or "solutions consultant") the actual responsibilities can be so highly variable (or so niche) that interviewing for them is a specialization in itself. These kind of one-off situations is where Google's "automate all the things" general mentality falls apart.
If you so lack in trust that the people on your team can make good hiring decisions, even to the point of rejecting somebody you haven’t actually met...well... that’s just nuts.
I wonder whether their approach has been alienating entire large categories of people, and what diversity of ideas and influences they're missing as a result.
You know, I work in tech but I have never attempted to have a Career in Tech. I definitely don't own a whiteboard and I'm sure I'd never get past the resume stage. (I've only actively applied for a couple of jobs in my life and all in the past year, purely because I thought I should REALLY get some experience with applying for jobs. I actually just had an interview and bombed it so much, omg, at one point I claimed not to know JavaScript! :D I don't think it's for me.)
But out of the rareified circles of HN, I've not found any of the career stuff talked up on here to be necessary anyway. There's more code that needs writing than coders to write it and so long as that's true there'll be work going. I work a few days a week for a company and the rest for myself. I have fun and write code and invent things and people generally give me enough money to pay my bills so I'm happy with that. It's a pretty sweet deal! Before I was a coder I was an unpaid family caregiver (hence no school or credentials or career) so compared to that I can't really imagine a programming job that could really genuinely be BAD. They are all simply gradations of sweet.
My brother (who did massively go to school) works at Google and loves it. I drop in and hang out with him there sometimes and it does seem great for a certain kind of person. And they have so many resources and work on loads of fun games and obviously it would be great to be rich as well. I think it's really clear why it's so attractive. If you think you have a shot then go for it!
But if you know you don't have a shot, why break your heart over it, is my view. It's not a bad thing to be clear eyed about your prospects in life.
I had a strong preference for a position in NYC, but I decided to accept a team match in mountain view to get the offer signed asap just in case google announced a hiring freeze. Thankfully I'm very happy with the team I'm starting with.
Google's process is designed for people who already work at other big tech companies who have months to kill and lots of spare cash in case it doesn't work out. It was nerve wracking for me, who had just been laid off from my job and gotten sick. I don't know what they can change about it, but I will note that the interview process at Facebook is significantly less confusing and much shorter.
I’m genuinely asking.
In many industries it's not uncommon to subcontract a service by a subcontractor which himself subcontract the same service to another subcontractor (usually cheaper).
In the end it is only a question of money!
Actually top american tech companies don't have to go directly to India to get cheaper workers but instead they call american subcontractor to get cheaper workers anywhere in the world. Even more with restricted green cards thanks to Donald TRUMP. :-)
Middle management got tired of having daily meetings at midnight or 6 AM, and it got too expensive to bring people over who were fine with doing so. The India job market got pretty tight around '14 or so, to the point where engineers were leaving jobs every 4-6 months for greener pastures. And even though the consulting companies are supposed to be in charge of KT, so that transitions don't impact the clients, the rate of change was just too high to maintain good quality.
Probably some of the less than 20 % of indian readers who prefer to hide the destruction of american jobs by India but actually by overpaid american tech leaders in the silicon valley. ;-)
AFAIK, jobs have stopped going to India for sometime now. Indian IT companies which relied heavily on offshoring had significant contraction as a result. A lot of modern IT jobs in India are in fact for new startups/companies meant for Indian population itself. Before COVID, India was seeing China like internal uprising with equivalent of many US tech companies poping up all over with jobs that were starting to match US salaries outside of tech hubs. Also, visa process had became unsustainably hard for most companies there so on-shore workforce augmentation sector has been quickly drying up as well.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/how-indian-it...
It probably doesn't help that elsewhere in the thread they're making comments that make them sound kind of crazy:
> [open source orgs are] communist organizations living on private money from anticompetitive tech giants.
Take for instance YouTube. Just imagine the cost to operate the site increasing exponentially overnight (because of all the quarantined people) while their ad business goes down. You're in the worst possible situation for a business with a model that is heavily dependent on that particular ad revenue.
That's like a supermarket having three times more foot traffic but people only buying gum.
When things go south is when consumers stop purchasing. The unemployment and cut in disposable income will have a massive effect on purchasing power... but the federal government is deficit spending like crazy. So... it’s not clear what the consumer market will look like just yet.
The spike in usage means that YT needs content creators to make more, but also earn less money. A forward-thinking startup could capitalize on this by paying content creators more to migrate to their own service, and work to get the attention of those eyeballs which are bored of YT content.
Anecdotally, I wonder the same thing myself.
And then if this recession persists then more and more knives come out as people fight each other for jobs within each company. Many people behave like shit when their livelihoods are on the line. Fun times.
Also this bloodletting is happening at several levels. The VCs are performing the same decimation to their portfolio companies that companies are to their workers and vendors. Departments or groups in the company are drawing up lists.
There is a question, each time, of concurrent or even deeper cycles coinciding. The last recession is often thought to have been a prime factor in the revolutions of 2011 (Arab Spring etc). Regardless of their eventual conclusion, the push is deemed to stem (as always in history) from the economic situation. European kings knew all too well that hunger is a pretty sure path to insurrection.
I wonder, given the predictable magnitude of this (by predictable I mean "even if we low-ball it"), what will happen in the next few years worldwide, and in particular in the US. I reckon "Occupy Wall Street" didn't really go far itself (although it's very likely a major factor in Bernie's rise in the years after, among many other things ofc).
I expect to see a much deeper, less superficial reaction this time. A real history-mover. Time will tell.
The initial reaction from the private sector we're witnessing as we speak is unprecedented in magnitude already; hitting the middle-upper class super hard (when Occupy Wall Street was mostly a lower-middle class fight versus the lavish establishment, from one extreme to the other; this is by contrast very "core").
Biological knowledge points to the current perception largely underestimating the eventual situations we'll have to face for the next 12-18 months (at least, assuming we are extremely lucky with a vaccine on first try, essentially; which I've heard no expert claim as particularly easy let alone a done deal, they're all cautious and don't even claim to be "certain" a vaccine is even possible, although "confident" certainly).
Could be 24, 36 months of living with this thing disrupting the economy left and right, two steps forward, one back, two forward, three back, and on and on.
The bloodletting and free-for-all has only just begun. I'm extremely afraid it'll be worse than any of us has seen since before WWII.
What are you talking about? White collars are working from home, by and large. None of my engineer friends have lost their jobs yet (one is getting furloughed for a week though)
Most middle-upper class employees are not engineers.
> White collars are working from home
People can only work from home if they work for a company that has money to pay them - a company that hasn't shut down due to lack of business. A white collar employee working for an airline, hotel chain or car manufacturer (and all of these huge companies have huge ranks of middle/upper management in marketing, operations, HR, accounting, etc.) probably doesn't have a lot of job security right now.
Also, the key word in your sentence is "yet". I'm a software developer, and I'm sure that if my employer's revenues drop significantly during the upcoming recession, layoffs will be inevitable.
Also, if they're unemployed because of this and just received $2900, the wise move would be to save that money for essentials, not new subscriptions.
Lower-income Twitter is jubilant at this development, BTW. Something they'll remember in November for sure. And the check is not conditioned on whether you're still employed (which most people are).
TL;DR: a lot of people who are still working are getting what to them is a substantial amount of money. They'll be spending it.
I wouldn't; reality is more nuanced and circumstantial than your blanket generalization would like it to be. While it's true that in many places $200k is a substantial amount of money, there are places (California, for instance, particularly the Bay Area) where the cost of living is high enough that a couple earning $200k may still be living paycheck to paycheck and $2900 doesn't even cover rent. The loss of even one income in that household could be devastating.
>And the check is not conditioned on whether you're still employed (which most people are).
I alluded to that condition by my use of the phrase, "If they're unemployed".
>TL;DR: a lot of people who are still working are getting what to them is a substantial amount of money. They'll be spending it.
While I am sure that many people will spend it in ways that are more recreational than others, I am not so sure that as many people will be doing that as you assume. Jobless claims are expected to reach a whopping 15% soon[1], many people still employed are finding themselves working reduced hours resulting in reduced pay[2], and hiring is down[2]. The current data available is from March, which means we're likely to see data for April reporting even fewer hours worked - which means a continued decrease in take-home pay for many people still working - and even fewer jobs hiring.
The reality is that there is a lot of uncertainty right now. Many people still working are probably on the edge of their seat about their company's long-term prospects - sure they can make it for now, but how does a shutdown that could go on for many more months allow their workplace to continue to sustain itself? It's foolish to assume that the employment numbers we are seeing now have leveled off and won't continue to rise, especially if this continues through summer. More businesses will close or cut back on hours and more people will be out of work.
That thought process is likely playing out across the country in many homes, so I would expect more people to pocket the money and use it wisely than to sign up for new subscriptions that they don't need than you would think.
[1]https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jobless-claims-might-top-5...
[2]https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/3/21203199/state-of-employ...
During recessions, people reel back in their spending, even if they are garbagemen or teachers who don't lose their jobs in recessions. This is shaping up to be the mother of all recessions, so you do the math.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_effect
Precisely what part of anything in the preceding paragraph is meant to be modified or somehow accentuated by the "lmao?"
2. All companies are facing a cash crunch, gov loans are slow to arrive and they have fixed costs like rent
3. Companies need to conserve cash, turning off ads is a click of a button, and given no demand, it's an obvious choice
This is going to be bad for google and Facebook if it lasts any significant amount of time.
Strangely enough I think the disease and its impacts will have far less impact on our behaviour than the economic impact of mass layoffs and shuttering the world economy for months. I don't think we've ever seen a drop in consumption of this magnitude and the road back to normality will be slow.
Lots of companies out there, especially retail, are taking huge hits and I would suspect that an advertising budget is one of the first things to be reduced.
Which apparently becomes self fulfilling.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift
Are you ready for the dot com bubble 2.0? :-D
Open source have to die to give back value to the software industry.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/bytedance...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-a-job-big-tech-is-s...
Sorry about the paywall, I couldn't get outline.com to render it.
Nothing new in a capitalist world...
There are only so many Google searches I can do in a day. Many of them end on Amazon where I may or may not purchase something.
I’ve read similar comments over different forum postings about advertisers tending to cut advertising during times like these to help their financials. And it makes sense to me. But now I’m sitting here, just wondering if anyone has actually looked at numbers during other financial downturns. Or is it just some catching conversation that’s been kicking off....maybe I need to go outside and smell some fresh air.
"L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22872711
"As YouTube traffic soars, YouTubers say pay is plummeting" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856324
WSJ: Facebook Ad Rates Fall as Coronavirus Undermines Spending https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ad-rates-fall-as-coron...
Bloomberg: Facebook’s Ads Business Weakening Despite Surge in Usage https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/facebook-says-ads-...
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp... is >90% of Facebook.
People advertising on youtube is the problem, that number is only going down
I do not expect google's search business to go down.
Facebook may well be the worlds most powerful sentiment capture and analysis engine ever built but Google tracks conversions and has pretty stellar sentiment capture/analysis capabilities.
Google appears to also have twice as much cash on hand as Facebook. Wonder what they’ll use it for if not to hire competent people to prevent them from starting the next big thing...
Also, back in 2008, Google didn't hire/freezed its hiring, but Facebook and Amazon were still hiring like mad, and it worked well for them. They are used to ride out recessions.
True, but their value to advertisers depends on users. Facebook is likely seeing a massive spike in (ad-viewing) users, whereas Google a much more modest one. I'm sure Google Search and YouTube have gone up, but the former won't have gone up much, and the latter has not yet been profitable for Google in the first place.
> I'm wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion
Neither needs to tighten belts. Both have enormous amounts of cash.
That was a message to the stock market. In reality I haven't heard from a Facebook recruiter in a month now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement
IT firms such as TCS (30,000 recruits this financial year), Wipro (12,000), Cognizant (20,000) and Capgemini (10,000 over January-June) say they are sticking by their offer letters[1].
I've personally witnessed jobs from these companies lift several out of poverty in India (Most of them being the first graduate in their family).
But, obviously those who pass out this year especially the Engineering freshers are going to be the worst hit.
[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
If smaller companies and startups fade away due to coronavirus-induced instability, making sure that their talent winds up with you is a smart move. If you are big enough to afford it, that is, which both of these companies arguably are -- regardless of whether their Q1 and Q2(?) results are worse this year than last.
Google on the other hand, the recruiting pipeline is more spread out. Whether or not to hire is done at the organizational level (i.e. Cloud, Ads, Search, Core, etc), and that depends on whether or not there are openings in any teams. You are matched with a team before you are even hired.
So, like, obviously, if you have the cash to burn, now is the right time to hire employees. You can get good talent pretty cheap right now. So it's in Google's best interest to ramp up hiring. Unfortunately Google's recruiting pipeline does not support hiring a bunch of people and figuring out what team to be on later.
So yeah, basically, Google has shitty hiring practices. It has nothing to do with them "losing money", they have so much cash in the bank which will easily last till this is over.
They don't send a good signal to investors.
Micromanaging makes sense when you are in deep trouble - see LA Times. Is Google in trouble? I believe not. Yet they send the message they are in trouble.