It's not understandable, Google is doing financially fine. If they determine they made a mistake they should have to pay a penalty. You would not get that grace in your own personal life, I don't know why we grant it to companies in employment contracts. Sign an apartment lease and change your mind? You'll be on the hook for a huge payment. Companies revoking offers should be subject to penalties and to make the other party whole.
No, the cost for individual would-be employee and a big FAANG company is nowhere near "symmetric".
You're misunderstanding the timing. Google doesn't hire for a specific team -- it determines you pass the bar for hiring, then they have to match you to a team.
They applied in April and passed in the interviews by June -- 2 months is pretty normal to handle scheduling rounds of interviews etc. Then things were delayed by a hiring freeze, totally understandable.
It wasn't until October it got unfrozen, and then in November they matched with a team, and got their job offer in December -- again, pretty standard. Then it two 2 months to process a visa, which has nothing to do with Google.
It's all pretty reasonable. If a team inside of Google needs a new employee, it usually only takes a couple of weeks, whether it's an internal transfer, or whether it's a new hire waiting to be matched with a team. Obviously it can take a little longer for someone who needs to move cities or countries, but that's nothing to do with Google.
From the candidate's perspective, it took a year. But from the team's perspective, it might have been only a month or so, because team matching typically starts only after interviews are complete and the hiring packet has been reviewed.
I wonder why these companies don't try and emulate something like what a military does: take in the willing and motivated, give them all the basic skills valued by the organization, asses their existing capabilities, and then place them where needed after more targeted training.
Now I'm not sure that's quicker, cheaper, more efficient, or less bureaucratic; rather I'm just surprised none of these companies have at least tried it in the face of their current systems.
This was how many German giants operated. You got in with 16 as a trainee/apprentice and rose up the ranks.
The problem is, employers risk taking up duds with that, and paying the fees for the dual-education schools ("Berufsschule") and exams isn't cheap either, so they went for requiring university degrees as a proxy instead. Bonus effects for employers:
- the government picked up the tab on running the university, which means that employers can save on that as well and only provide new hires organization-specific knowledge
- you can't be a complete moron if you managed an academic degree
- it weeds out normally-protected classes such as people with mental health issues or, frankly, poor and immigrant people as well because belonging to either (or multiple) of these categories is closely correlated with lower success ratios in academia.
Nowadays, almost all the apprenticeship trainees come from small tradespeople-style companies, at a lot of expense to them, and the big companies come in and sweep the freshly exam'd people with sometimes twice or thrice the tradespeople's wages. Understandably the small companies are pissed at that, but they can't do anything.
how do you select the willing and motivated among the millions of resumes you receive?
Ever wondered why you say that about a company which is living off the network effect (ie monopoly) and fails at pretty much everything they try except for two products they did two decades ago?
I didn't say that about a company
During the dot com bubble burst, 2008, or March 2020, sure. Or if something is happening to that specific company.
There wasn't that during this window with Google. This was just sloppy HR. With how they were dragging their feet, I doubt many people were in this position (which is actually an argument for sucking it up and actually hiring him).
That said, it sounded like Google was more cagey than usual, so that should be a red flag. Demand some contractual protections, and if they're denied, wait another 3 months to see how things shake out.
What I find truly incredible though is that it took a full year to go from application to having a start date. That's glacially slow even for a giant company. How can any team get anything done if it takes that long to bring additional resources in?