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Comment by allyourhorses | Hacker News Reader

> At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me.

This one really stuck out for me, I don't think that stat has ever been public before. This probably means most (if not all) of the folk who built Google's most successful services are no longer with the company. Like a successful open source project where the originators have aged out, and all that's left are hundreds of folk making incremental changes spanning years

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Yes. A handful remain. But the next big thing will come from those who yearn to be what Google had and lost. Jeff Dean jokes aside, no one person or group made Google great. It was the combined optimism and output of thousands of brilliant and supportive Googlers with imperfect but good enough leadership. Don’t deify any one person or leader, but if you can see the potential in any company’s ambition, thinking, and culture - it’s going to be worth the ride.

But this is the problem, it’s not this place anymore. Unlimited money corrupt absolutely. At some moment you just look at all these projects and they are moat to defend ads/search and napalm any even remote competition. With such priorities comes different kind of moral. On top of that Google sucks at efficient organization management and product management and just masks it with money.

It could be again though. Microsoft has already been through this hell and come out the other side. Google could too, although I suspect that it will require a similar change of leadership.

It wasn’t just a change in leadership, Microsoft also had an existential crisis. Apple, Google and Amazon threatened to make Microsoft irrelevant and the leadership at the time didn’t seem to know how to respond. I don’t think Google has reached that level of desperation yet, and it might need to before it can turn things around.

Yeah, but Microsoft reinvented itself a few times already. They started as a BASIC runtime vendor, switched to an office software suite vendor, then to an OS vendor and now to a cloud service provider.

Plus Microsoft was quite diversified very early on, about the time they started selling Office. Even now, they're the most diversified Big Tech regarding revenue, except for maybe Amazon.

According to CNBC there was 3000 employees 2004 when he began. So 90% of the workers have dropped since then. How is this attrition compared to other companies?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...

Most other tech companies that were 6 years old in 2004 are probably long gone today, so in that way they'd have 100% attrition.

That doesn't seem unusual at all. If anything, I'd say 10%+ retention over 15+ years sounds pretty good. And that's even allowing for survivorship bias in that, as someone else noted, many companies that existed in 2004 aren't even around today.

In terms of anecdata, I know that no one else from my non-SV company new hire class from 10+ years ago is still with the company.

In the medium and large companies I've worked, it's always been very bifurcated: You had a lot of people who have been with the company a long time, and a lot of people who are fresh, but there is always this huge chasm of few employees between 4 years and, say 12 years. I explain it financially. The way I think it works is typical equity vesting is about 4 years, so without refresh grants (which in my experience are rare) people churn after around 4 years due to the vesting cliff. The ones who survived to over 10 years or so are all Directors and VPs and SVPs by now, and are probably making mega-bank, so there is no incentive to disrupt the gravy train by leaving.

But on other hand Google grows so fast and has so much churn that it used to be you would be in like 50% percentile in a year and it top percentile in few years. Which it turn means that on any given moment most employees are not veterans.

I suspect most IT companies have large turnover. Folks working at a gig for more than 5+ years is likely the exception not the norm.

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