Google employs the very elite of the elite. If you're working there you're probably at the very top of your field. Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.
> The real question is why are Google’s salaries so low?
The real question is - why are they so high? There are literally tens/hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates that Google rejects in their hiring process. This makes the remaining candidate pool small enough that they have to offer half a mill to get them. If Google's hiring wasn't so restrictive, they could pay much less. However, since they're basically printing money, there's no incentive to go there yet.
> The sole reason while your research generates millions of dollars of year of saving is because it would be applied at Google scale. So your work times google scale = $10M/year.
"Google scale" wouldn't exist without the workers that make it possible. Seems to me like they can get more of that value they enable than they currently do.
>Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic.
It would be pretty difficult to make completely objective formulas for salary. I assume it maps back to perceived performance (in the interview, or after hiring), which is always biased, conscious or not.
> ...but he was careful to say that properties of large populations don't apply on the level of an individual or selected group.
Then why bring it up if what he says doesn't matter within the context in which they are hiring people. Google isn't hiring people on a population basis. They are hiring people on an individual basis.
> If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? Zero.
I highly doubt that’s true. 50 million new employed people would almost certainly create enough economic activity that would directly or indirectly lead to increased activity on some a google service that would cause them to hire more people.
It is simply not the same organization as it was when you worked there. The 2011 employees account for at most 10% of the workforce today once attrition is taken into account.
> there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google
I think this is largely because of brand cachet and good pay. How many people would take a serious paycut to work for Google? I'm sure there are some, but I doubt there are many. And amongst those I bet a non-trivial amount would just be in it for the perks (free food, busses to work, childcare, etcetera).
I obviously have no way of verifying this, but amongst my circle of friends (not representative of the general population at all) most people no longer want to work for Google. It's more than just talk - I just turned down a job offer from Google recently.
I don’t work at a FAANG so I could be totally off but I think there’s only about 1,000 L6+ at google [0] and they employ the most. So it’s not thousands of people at this level within a company. Maybe only a few thousand in total of all companies in the US.
> probably this is an emergent effect from the size alone and the bureaucracy such size sadly requires.
One of the top complaints I've seen from former Google employees is that they have a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy involved in getting anything at all done. So I'd say there's a lot of credence to that assumption in this instance.
> Just because people exist and have some skills doesn't mean a company can find them and hire them.
I claimed it's technically possible with 'exponentially more resources', not that any private organization could feasibly possess the resources or cachet to, in practice, hire a million top notch people.
Maintaining the literal same average quality with Googler #1001 to #10000 would probably have required spending 10x more per hire, compared to hiring #1 to #1000.
> The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time
Does Google have a major issue with their hiring process? They seem to be able to hire the talented people they need. I guess it's an issue for the individuals that get rejected, but not for Google, who seems to get as many people as they want.
> and you hire as many as you can within your budget
If you believe this then what's your explanation for why Google hires a smaller number of expensive engineers, rather than a larger number of cheaper engineers? They could hire 10x if they went for only lower-tier college new-grads!
Is there a reason why Google cannot hire more people?
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