Also 3 If you have a need for hiring, it is likely for a higher priority project in need of a skill / domain you don't have free resources for internally.

Simply having a hiring freeze means you hamstring high priority projects you'd have allocated resources for, while letting others that may lower priority ride due to inertia.

Must be difficult to work in a company that can't reallocate resources.

Some companies can't for cultural reasons. Sometimes, it's really just that you got your strategy wrong and now you have a bunch of domain/technical experts who specialise in stuff that's altogether useless for your new direction.

at the same time many of those big tech companies never interview for domain or stack knowledge. both can not be true

You can't just tell guy that moves boxes in CSS for a living to start writing database code

You say that, but plenty of job adverts are for fullstack developers, e.g. backend experience in C# with dapper or EF, and frontend in Angular or React. It's not an absurd transition for an experienced developer, even if there is a learning curve.

As a DBRE, I assure you there is a world of difference between Fullstack Dev, and people who actually understand databases. Especially RDBMS.

As someone who works with database engineers, there's also a world of difference between the ones that know what they are doing and the ones that don't.

To be fair, this is true in all fields.

Precisely.

I was internally retasked from python to java full stack development. I have a bachelors in computer science, it's expected that I can just pick up, with a little time, any tool that fits the task. 95% of software development is just connecting pipes together. We are glorified digital plumbers for the most part, with only a few people working as the equivalent of civil engineers actually doing important design work.

If you chose to save a few bucks by hiring limited devs, that's a choice you made. In our orgs, the guy who moves CSS boxes for a living absolutely can write some SQL queries. Most places don't write database code, they write code that uses an ORM or other framework to interact with existing databases.

Taking an extreme, stupid, recent example - Let's say the ad market has slowed down and you really don't need so many ad salesmen. And you decide to switch gears to a subscription model so you need to do some work in payments. But you have a hiring freeze.

Do you think the ad sales guys can help with the Square integration?

Or let's say you've decided to bet your social graph / web / mobile app centric company on VR. How many of those existing devs are going to be useful in VR if you have a hiring freeze? Or when you realize it's a debacle and scale down VR, how many VR devs are going to be good iOS app update churners? Etc.

heh, indeed... I'm a contractor and I got shuffled around into a team that's not really picking the steam it was expected to. Talked to the previous EM -- whose teams are under significant load -- and yeah, what a pity: budgets are locked so shrugs.

Right, to me this is the challenge of "freezes". You lock in the an existing state of the world, regardless of how that begins to vary from reality.

Wrong team sizes, wrong skillset matches, etc.

EMs become greedy and hoard whoever they have regardless of the quantity need or size fit.

and 4, when things are going well companies in general avoid firing anyone who isn't like harassaing people or something like that. Because it gives a bad outlook and the ones who can start to look for something else

Now they just use the old "never let a crisis go to waste" to let those who isn't good enough or overpaid go anyway

> promoting over hiring

Where are these companies you speak of?

Companies I have worked for where there has been implicit (and sometimes even explicit) overestimation of staffing needs when requesting extra people to counter the fact that the entire hiring round will not complete before the inevitable next hiring freeze.

I'm not talking the large scale stuff like Meta assuming the metaverse was a trend that would require their company to grow 50%, but the medium scale stuff like a department in a 1000 person company putting in to hire 12 people instead of 8, etc.

Oh, you mean "promoting over hiring" as in "encouraging over-hiring", and not "promoting employees into positions that would otherwise be new hires"?

Of everyone I’ve managed (surely 50+ managers by now), I can only think of one who was heavily biased towards under-hiring. Most were biased towards over-hiring (some strongly so) and that’s the makeup of most companies’ middle management ranks. Many identified (often correctly) that the more people they had in their org, the more important they were. (Some leveling guidelines even make this explicit.) Add periodic freezes to the mix and this gets amplified during the “open season” times.

Every place I’ve worked I’ve heard things like “you better hire someone for that req before it goes away”, “if you think you need 4, ask for 6”, “make sure you don’t lose that backfill”.

I mean when almost every single tech company says "we over hired during Covid" there is a clear pattern...

Not true at all. Meta was still hiring new people just before announcing the layoffs.

Got myself a call from some Meta recruiter just a week before the announcement in November.

And HashiCorp had opened positions listed on their site too.