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Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

(www.taylor.gl)
128 points taylorlunt | 5 comments | 30 Jul 25 14:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.803s | source
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lokar ◴[30 Jul 25 15:20 UTC] No.44735404[source]▶
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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1. castwide ◴[30 Jul 25 15:39 UTC] No.44735648[source]▶
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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2. Aurornis ◴[30 Jul 25 16:08 UTC] No.44736026[source]▶
> 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.

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3. castwide ◴[30 Jul 25 16:20 UTC] No.44736217[source]▶
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.
4. WorldMaker ◴[30 Jul 25 16:28 UTC] No.44736308[source]▶
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".

5. quantumsequoia ◴[31 Jul 25 01:36 UTC] No.44741511[source]▶
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