I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire.

From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.

The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.

I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?

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blehn 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles

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icedchai 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This sort of corporate rot even infected smaller companies. Teams where we have a 1:1 PM to Engineer ratio, 3 person dev teams with a dedicated "engineering manager" that invents useless meetings to justify their position, individuals claiming they have no time for hands-on work due to all the meetings...

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skirmish 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also: telling a senior SWE (L5) that for good performance reviews they must act as a tech lead and spend most of their time in "alignment" meetings with other TLs and managers. Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews.

	▲	ryandrake 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews. This kind of forced role inflation is infuriating, and happens at every company I've worked for, big or small. You can't just get by on technical mastery anymore--you always have to be seen as a "leader" of some group or "leading" some project. Even if you just want to stand still in your career and get cost-of-living raises, there is this widely held expectation that you're always cosplaying as a leader of something.

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Ferret7446 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Define "natural". IMO the demand absolutely was natural, you just don't agree with it (perhaps for perfectly good reasons)

	▲	GreenWatermelon 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think "natural" here would refer to genuine project rrquirequirements that will translte directly to value to customers e.g. customers demand x features in y time and we don't have enough manpower to handle it. This is natural, it's business survival. Contrast with the Unnatural cause of "manager just wants a promotion at any cost" which, in a sense, is akin to Embezzlement. The manager worsens business prospects and contributes to organizational rot for their personal gain.

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lokar 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m talking about like 2003 to 2010 or 2015

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castwide 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.

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WorldMaker 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Some of that is easily explainable as just the ancient corporate mistake of seeing and paying recruiters as a commission-based sales force. They have vacations to pay for and sales quotas to meet and the easiest way to do that is volume over substance.

But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".

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Aurornis 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.

Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.

At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.

It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.

	▲	castwide 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.

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quantumsequoia 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's called pooled hiring, and it makes sense when a company is hiring lots of people for lots of teams. Most large companies do this when hiring rates are high. You end up with better employee-team match when you interview a candidate first and then match them based on their skills/interest, rather than contacting them for a specific role they may or may not be interested in.

Has nothing to do with whether hiring is for headcount or other reasons

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ryandrake 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Every company and every team I've ever worked for has had somewhere between 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog that they were staffed to do. Entire projects that were seen as priorities, but never even started because there was just no staff available to do them. Hundreds of "P1 important" bugs not getting fixed (and never getting fixed) because the limited staff was working on "P0 emergencies" all the time.

For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.

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OldfieldFund 3 days ago | parent [-]

> 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog

This is an old trick to get people to work hard. It's no accident that every tech company does this.

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ryandrake 3 days ago | parent [-]

I mean, if you worked at any of these companies, you could see the bug list for yourself. These are not fake bugs filed by corporate conspirators. They're actual software defects that affect real users.

	▲	OldfieldFund 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not saying the bugs aren't real. But there is a non-specific frontier of control, so to speak. And the stock prices of the big companies are always going up, and there aren't any major disasters. Usually. With more people, there could still be more bugs, and disasters could still happen. Limiting resources can work well in corporations.