People are so quick on HN to say "why does company X need 1000 employees when clearly it could be done with 10?" but I find people tend not the ask the even more obvious question "Why does company X need 100,000 employees when they seemed to be doing just fine with 50,000?"

I do get that there is a lot of extra complexity that goes from a startup solving a hard technical problems to a pre-IPO company that is solving a bunch of business problems as well as technical challenges. Yes companies gain less efficiency per hire as they grow, and many do grow for growth's sake these days, but it does make sense that some companies need a thousand people to do what a startup thinks they can do with 10.

But it certainly doesn't seem like Google is making great use of doubling headcount. On a product by product basis, at least for me, it feels like most Google products are worse than they were pre-pandemic.

If they had shown revenue growth highly correlated with headcount I would see strong evidence that my view is wrong, but the facts don't seem to point that way.