Amazon and Meta I can understand why. But why Microsoft and now Google? What positions were affected in Google? Just developers?
"Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc.
There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the quality and increased the communications bottlenecks. A 10% cut won't do it, though. Over-hiring is hard to recover from. Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at all efficient.
If it did that, it would be left with a ton of code with no one who understands it, a horrible reputation, and zero morale.
The only way I can think of to manage this is to build out an elite smaller unit, with a smaller codebase, with less technical debt, and then to spin out the deadweight.
Where on earth do you get that number from?
Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Guestimate. You can tell me I pulled it out of my ass, and you'd be right. But it's that type of number.
A better answer is looking at the size of Google when it was doing (approximately) the same things. Google has 20k employees in 2009. It has 155k today. I don't see Google doing much for me in 2022 that it wasn't doing in 2009.
I could probably go a long ways before that too.
A lot of what's happened from 2009 to 2022 is churn. Make-work to keep people employed.
> Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Let me spell this out: In many cases, the same thing can be accomplished in 100 lines of code as 10,000 lines of code. That's largely a function of architecture, discipline, and cleverness. 100 lines of code is orders-of-magnitude easier to maintain and faster to evolve.
The Google codebase is *massive*. If you need a new feature, with good communication channels and focus, you can architect it in. With poor communication channels, it get kludged in.
Communications scales as O(n^2) where n is the number of employees. There's a similar power law for how pieces of code can interact and introduce complex bugs.
By "more efficient," I don't mean Google would be able to do more per dollar. With a smaller, better workforce, and a smaller, better codebase, Google would be better able to maintain old products, add new features, and develop new ones.
Are you reasoning that employees paid in RSU are not amused by this and are likely to leave if not "made whole" somehow? Seems like waiting for people to quit would get headcount down fairly quickly if so.
edit: this graph shows how much of your compensation is stock by level at google https://imgur.com/a/wlpa6Wm