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Comment by mdm12 | Hacker News Reader

> In Q2 alone, we added approximately 10,000 Googlers...

Maybe it is okay to slow hiring if 'normal' is ten thousand new hires in three months

It's from a press-release that is intended to minimize the fears among investors. So the number likely includes part-time youtube moderators, cafeteria staff, and a lot of other minor jobs with incredibly high churn.

I would assume those folks are not googlers, but are contract labor.

I'd bet the farm you are right. At the same time, I've worked at Google-sized companies (non-FAANG) for about five years now. And in my experience like anything else in corporate politics, the appearance is everything. Many of them will hire developers, PMs, designers, etc as 1099 employees and say "we treat you like everyone else!"

But you are maligned in little ways all the time. You get a desk and a computer like everyone else, but you're not invited to certain meetings. Or maybe you're forced to use only the shitty parking spaces. Worst of all you often don't get health insurance (though sometimes you do, especially if you're in a more white collar role).

I'm off on a tangent here. I've been burned by this system before as I'm sure is obvious now. But the point is, in my experience the same system that hires those people often happily will take advantage of any opportunity to include contractors as "Part of the family!" when it involves no effort beyond appearances for themselves and offers only good optics that may or may not benefit them.

They must have a lot of churn, that's a significant percentage of their entire workforce.

I don't think churn is particularly high as a percentage of total workers. The company really is growing that fast. There have been over ten-thousand positions open via careers.google.com in the last several months (although I expect that to shrink in the coming days). And 10K isn't that unusual of a quarterly number.

No inside info here, just noting that that kind of hiring is par for the course.

I know for a fact GCP is a shit show, so I'm sure they've been manscaling it.

Every engineer says that about their own products. My Amazon buddies all say AWS is a huge shitshow and my Microsoft buddies say Azure is huge mess. Technology is chaotic by nature

It isn't my own product :) Thomas Kurian is a special kind of chaos.

But yeah, no clouds run themselves. Only GCP is a spectacular kind of mismanaged, since 2018 or so.

Anyhow, who cares! :D cheers @altdataseller

You have made a lot of bold statements. Do you have anything substantial to back up your statements?

How about personal experience working with TK and a bunch of friends working at Google on Cloud? You can look up the severe production outages GCP has suffered over the past years, if you care.

All big organizations are dysfunctional in their own way.

If you know better, I'm all ears! Not trying to discount the hard work of all those fantastic Google engineers. It's just, prod issues are prod issues, regardless of good intentions.

Toxic TK, otoh, he's selfish, self-aggrandizing, out of touch, and not very nice or cool at all. Everything he touches bears his mark.

It almost sounds like he used to be an Oracle exec.

If given a choice I'd take GCP's production outages over Azure's security vulnerabilities that show a complete and total lack of any care for anything resembling security in at least a few of their products.

I saw him posting certified enterprise nonsense the other day and it didn’t make me feel very good about it.

https://twitter.com/thomasortk/status/1542601634106195968

(for some reason I’m still following one of my college professors who’s since become a director at GCP somehow)

Most of that is growth, not churn. Alphabet has hovered around 20% net headcount growth per year for awhile, per their earnings reports.

No, the company has more than doubled (maybe tripled?) in size in the last 3-4 years.

85k in 2016 -> 135k in 2022

Given these figures, hiring 10k a quarter sounds like pretty high churn and employee turnover.

Perhaps folks make their money then GTFO?

I've felt for a while that tech companies have been overhiring. Some, like Google, just to ensure that competitors don't get that talent. Others, like Coinbase, just to add an extra point to their pitch deck.

> Some, like Google, just to ensure that competitors don't get that talent.

This meme never made sense to me. How big is Google compared to it's competitors? Even if we narrow the scope down to the top 5% of talent - Google jas plenty of competition there. At best, Google can hang onto employees for a few years: not a great strategy for competing when employee churn is high.

If Google really wanted to hoard talent, they'd ensure current employees earn as much as new hires.

Google is probably larger than most of its competitors by headcount.

My working assumption on the theory is that Google is keeping talent from all companies, not specific ones. So the correct analysis would be the headcount at Google vs everyone else.

That's really low for a company as large as Google

I think they were adding around 15k annually in previous years.

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