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Comment by spyspy | Hacker News Reader

I’ve often wondered this myself. Google has literally thousands of engineers working on search alone. I can’t even fathom what they’re all doing. And then what is everyone filling their time with?

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Google builds a lot more of its own infrastructure than other companies can afford to do, all the way down to the hardware. They also change things more often internally than you will see with public-facing API's.

What I'm wondering, though, is about why headcount continues to expand. Besides the new buildings in Mountain View and NYC there's a whole new campus planned in San Jose, so there are apparently no plans to slow down. Where does it end?

https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-...

The new headcount is coming from cloud. Lots of sales people in particular.

Rewriting code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378

> Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years.

Worked there, It might be that I was in a wrong place (and folks I know), but high quality standards, sometimes vague deadlines that can be moved desire to do the best thing result in a very slow dev process.

I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing

> I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing

I disagree. I feel AWS definitely has more options, functionality, and better enterprise support, but in many areas GCP is much easier to manage for smaller teams. For example, if I were starting a startup, I would definitely favor GCP over AWS right now.

They're not working for the competition.

Posting to HN via Tor.

Developing Thanos snap gimmicks and other region specific Easter eggs?

As much as we joke about this, a google doodle is such a great sticky "come back and see what's new tomorrow, and while you are here, maybe search which will make us money" tactic.

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