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Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

(www.taylor.gl)
128 points taylorlunt | 1 comments | 30 Jul 25 14:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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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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1. 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".