MIT MBA Student: Amazon and Microsoft Are Hiring, Google and Yahoo Aren’t

Re:MIT MBA Student: Amazon and Microsoft Are Hiring, Google ... by swombat on Monday January 12, 2009 @02:21PM (#430954)

Buy cheap, sell high... now's the time to hire great people for cheap, if you have the cash... I'm surprised that Google isn't hiring much - or perhaps it's just MBAs that they aren't hiring.

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Re:MIT MBA Student: Amazon and Microsoft Are Hiring, Google ... by byrneseyeview on Monday January 12, 2009 @03:48PM (#431104)

The problem with the 'sell high' part is that you don't get to, uh, sell. If an MBA usually goes for $120K, and he accepts $80K this year because it's that or nothing, what happens two years from now if the market recovers? Does he a) get a 50% raise, or b) get another job, and force you to hire someone new?

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Re:MIT MBA Student: Amazon and Microsoft Are Hiring, Google ... by aneesh on Monday January 12, 2009 @07:47PM (#431423)

True. But you're not really "buying" either. You pay this MBA $80K, and he adds a certain amount of value (presumably more than $80K). It's all dividends. There's very little fixed cost (training, a couple weeks to get up to speed) that could be considered as "buying".

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Re:MIT MBA Student: Amazon and Microsoft Are Hiring, Google ... by byrneseyeview on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:54AM (#432074)

There's very little fixed cost

I think that's a big mistake. Getting used to people at the company, learning about the industry, learning new technology, developing new skills in general -- all of these are investments with a long-term (multi-year) payoff.

I think one way you should reconsider your statement is to invert it: how will a company behave different if they can only make investments in their employees that pay off in one year? Two years? Ten years? Japanese companies (still) train people knowing that they can afford to take a loss on them for the first couple years, and recoup it later.

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Re:MIT MBA Student: Amazon and Microsoft Are Hiring, Google ... by wolfmanstout on Monday January 12, 2009 @04:40PM (#431191)

Your suspicion is correct. I just got hired by Google as a new grad software engineer. New grads might have a better shot in situations like this, because they are cheaper. Many companies made the mistake of not hiring them during the last recession, and paid the price. Also, with companies like Google, it's always a crapshoot as to what kind of person they are looking for at a given time. A friend of mine who I thought had a better shot than myself didn't make it.

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