I've never worked for a truly large company, so maybe I lack perspective. But the idea that a company could incorrectly hire THOUSANDS of people over a few years boggles my small-company mind. Hiring is so exhausting, so time intensive and so boring. And it does nothing (directly) for the bottom line - instead it costs a ton of money! Given the ultra-mega-hyper-elaborate interview process at a lot of these companies, we're talking literal fortunes on top of fortunes worth of manpower (er, personpower?).
Imagine paying hundreds of people to hire thousands of other people and then saying "oops, we overshot by 6,000 hires!". How can any person in a leadership role that is responsible for that kind of misfire possibly keep their job?
When you believe in a new technology and mission, as many at Meta do about the metaverse and VR, hiring isn't boring. It's exciting to be able to bring on more people to execute a vision you're bought in on.
I'm a founder of an 8 person startup and we're looking for an engineer right now. It's an exciting process for me to pitch the vision of the company to these candidates. It is also exhausting and time intensive - but not boring.
because the hiring process is on autopilot and the leadership of the company has already exited / checked out so they're not incentivized to care or be in the weeds enough to preemptively put a stop to it.
Imagine paying hundreds of people to hire thousands of other people and then saying "oops, we overshot by 6,000 hires!". How can any person in a leadership role that is responsible for that kind of misfire possibly keep their job?