Google Lays Off Hundreds on Recruiting Team (semafor.com) 38
Google is laying off hundreds of people across its global recruiting team as hiring at the tech giant continues to slow. Semafor: The company declined to cite what percentage of its recruiting workforce was impacted, but said that it plans to retain a significant majority. Workers who were laid off began learning their roles had been eliminated earlier today, according to posts on social media. "The volume of requests for our recruiters has gone down," Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said in a statement. "In order to continue our important work to ensure we operate efficiently, we've made the hard decision to reduce the size of our recruiting team. We're supporting everyone impacted with a transition period, outplacement services, and severance as they look for new opportunities here at Google and beyond."
Re:Seems to indicate low confidence in the future (Score:5, Funny)
If they are laying off recruiters, they probably don't intend to hire a lot of folks anytime soon.
Thank you for your service, Captain Obvious.
Re:Seems to indicate low confidence in the future (Score:4, Funny)
Captain Obvious with his trusty sidekick Apparent Lee!
Re: (Score:3)
Companies are getting rid of thousands of people who they never should have hired in the first place.
When times were good, the rationale was that hiring people they didn't immediately need meant they would already have people available for future expansion, while simultaneously depriving their competitors of potential employees.
But once a few big tech companies started laying off, that rationale evaporated. There are plenty of potential employees seeking jobs, and there is no point in soaking up excess talent to deprive competitors when those competitors aren't hiring.
That's just gross incompetence by Google management.
Not really. At the time, over-hiring w
Re: (Score:2)
Google might not have a crystal ball, but they *should* have had a strategic plan.
The only strategic plan they've had, for years now, has been "throw a bunch of darts at a wall; if none of them stick (ie. become hugely successful in the first six months) rip everything out, and throw a new set of darts.
With a "strategic" plan like that, it's no wonder their hiring plan was similarly flawed.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't think they really had a hiring "plan" per se. That's a rather generous description of what they do.
Re: (Score:2)
Got a better idea for coming up with something that is both going to be popular and doesn't exist yet?
Peak Digital. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't expect those jobs to return. At least not for humans. After 23 years in IT I'm looking into a (soft?) career switch myself. Our industry is fully industrialized, custom coding is by now only for mostly totally broken legacy crap that will be replaced by SOA subscriptions within the next few years and what's still left to code will be mostly done by AI quite soon I suspect. ... Time to move on. It was an awesome ride but we've now finally built the bots that will replace us. Nice. This will spell more wealth for everyone in the long run even if we are out of cushy jobs with obscene salaries. That's my take on current developments anyway.
Re:Peak Digital. (Score:5, Insightful)
This will spell more wealth for everyone in the long run
I admire your optimism that we'll end up with a Star Trek-like utopia when all current societal trends suggest The Hunger Games is the more likely outcome. :(
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
No, there will never be a spreading of the wealth. We know this because the past 50 years it hasn't happened. Productivity of Americans has went way up, but income did not. Where did all the extra money go? Into the hands of the rich
The Star Trek utopia only happened because of one thing - the rep
Re: Peak Digital. (Score:1)
We basically did create a replicator - digitally. Why have a shelf of physical books, movies, music, etc. unless you are rich and want to collect things.
A smartphone replaces almost every piece of home electronics - VCR, game system, TV, stereo, music collection and can be purchased for a days wages (a cheap android). Look at a flyer for Radio Shack from the 80s. Your phone replaces all of it, and the media to go with it.
As far as food, advances in AI and robotics will likely lead to increased food producti
Re: (Score:2)
The Star Trek utopia only happened because of one thing - the replicator.
No, the revolution in society happened before the replicator became a thing. Do you seriously think if someone made the replicator practical tomorrow it wouldn't be immediately patented, artificially neutered with DRM, and sold in tiers? Here's your entry level replicator, it can make water and white bread. Oh, you want to make clothes? You'll have to pay for that license. Food other than bread? That'll be another license. Hey, you've had it for 12 months, your license renewal is due. What, you thou
Re:Peak Digital. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you. I, too, was fortunate to spend the last three decades in the window where programming - the thing I'm best at - was valuable. I even got to do it for very important purposes even though I lacked any education in the field. I was good, it was recognized, and I built a whole career out of it.
But the writing is on the wall, and I don't think it's unreasonable that the window closes. CRUD programming is going away, and throwing rocks at the machines of these cotton mills isn't going to stop the process.
I recognized this 8 years ago - after over 20 years of development. And I made the move through the evolutionary path. Technical lead, team lead, supervisor, manager, project manager, program manager... none of which fulfilled me as much as development, but which let me escape the industry I was in, and the trap of being one of the last programmers standing.
Developers should all be planning their exit strategy. They can hope to be one of the valued few devs fulfilling the truly difficult tasks - for which the need will continue to exist - but they should be actively pursuing a plan B.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not retiring just yet. Used to be a manager, but it was a big mistake and I'm back to being a developer. I'm still writing code, still optimizing code, still debugging the assembler and pawing through the stack by hand, there are still many companies selling debuggers and debugging tools, still many companies selling chips that the mass-market developers don't know how to deal with, and many opportunities where someone says "All our programmers are stuck, they're going nowhere, we need YOU do fix it up
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Custom coding will live forever. AI isn't really going to replace it. At least not as long as there are still devices with limited memory or cpu, or with hard real time requirements. Sometimes you cannot just slap together pre-built components.
Right now ChaptGPT 3 sucks badly. ChatGPT 4 is better, but it still gets a lot of thing badly wrong because fundamentally it is a large language model using predictive text and does not _understand_ what it is doing. AI will very confidently give you the wrong an
Re: (Score:3)
"ChaptGPT 3 sucks badly. ChatGPT 4 is better,"
How much better is 4 than 3? And how much better was 3 compared to... anything... five years ago? A year from now, 4 will look primitive as a coder compared to the state of the art.
Re: (Score:2)
GPT3 you could figure out how the predictive text led to its answer. GPT4 has left some professionals scratching their heads at some of the things it can do. It can do things that really look like intelligence at times, but other times it will be flat out wrong. For example, it can do logic problems that appear to not have been a part of its training set, and yet it fails badly at tic-tac-toe.
And some of this makes me wonder about humans - are most humans unintelligent but they appear to be otherwise mere
Re: (Score:2)
Some of the talking heads on TV sure make me feel that that's true.
Re: (Score:1)
You really think all the important code has been written and there's nothing left to write a shitty AI can't do?
No offense intended but this really reminds me of the patent office commissioner from the 1800s who allegedly said, "everything that can be invented has been invented".
Our lives are very different now than only 10 years ago and 10 years before that and so on all the way back to 1899 when he (maybe) said that.
Chin up, the future is bright.
https://patentlyo.com/patent/2... [patentlyo.com].
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Development is taking an ambiguous human language and converting it into specific instructions for a machine. Making hundreds of decisions along the way guided by an understanding of what the customer/employer want to achieve
Re: (Score:2)
Not so fast.
These days, we can 3-D print houses. Are construction workers going to vanish? I don't think so.
We've had robots that build cars for a century. Have we replaced auto workers? Nope.
We have self-driving cars. Should I ditch my driver's license? Not quite yet.
For all the same reasons, programmers aren't going to be obsolete any time soon. There have been no-code / low-code systems that can write CRUD screens now for decades. Yet we still need programmers to build custom software. There have been re
Let me know when they lay off their ad team (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Sack the recruiters, hire better staff (Score:5, Insightful)
They do nothing to help companies pick the best job applicants.
Re: (Score:3)
I've had luck with two external recruiters getting me into jobs, including my current one, that I didn't know existed. One I solicited and the other found me on LinkedIn when I was soon to start a different gig. Bluntly told that dude he had five business days to make it happen before I started the new gig. Didn't think he would pull it off but here I am. It probably helps that they don't get paid without a successful placement, lol, I've never had good luck with an internal recruiter and I've certain
Re: (Score:1)
There are some really great head hunters out there. None of them work for internal HR.
Not eating or paying rent without making good placements that stick is oddly motivating for some people.
Re: (Score:2)
I find that recruiters/HR are a barrier of incompetence that you have to surmount before you can show your future colleagues what you can do and thereby (usually) get hired.
They do nothing to help companies pick the best job applicants.
Pretty much this.
I suspect a lot of companies are finding out that they don't need dozens of "talent specialists" to handle recruitment these days. Especially somewhere like Google where talent seeks them (or an employee recommends someone). A lot of recruitment is already automated and what is difficult to automate is asking technical questions, which isn't the recruiter's job anyway.
When people think that AI is going to replace the haulage driver, I laugh. Liability if nothing else will keep them th
Yet slashdotters claim jobs are plentiful (Score:3)
"Just quit, you'll get a new job tomorrow!" they say under every Return to Office article.
Sure seems like that job pool in tech is actually drying up though.
Re: (Score:3)
Google, Microsoft, and Facebook make headlines. But overall tech job demand is still high, and there's no evidence of a sustained downward trend.
https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com]
Delayed reaction? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Google/Alphabet probably held off to see how their return-to-office mandate panned out. If there was a great exit, they'd need recruiters to replace people. My understanding is there were only a few people who left, which aligned nicely with Google's need for a workforce reduction. Voluntary exits are way simpler than layoffs, so I feel like Google came out ahead in this one.