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Comment by bluefishinit | Hacker News Reader

It's been about 6 months since the Google CEO blogged about how they needed to lay of 12,000 people to brace for the "difficult economic cycle". Meanwhile revenue is up 7% YoY.

https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update...

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Looks like the number of employees increased from 174,014 to 181,798. This includes the 12,000 laid-off employees.

I just added this comment on another reply further down below, copy-pasting here, the numbers compare last year Q2 to this year Q2, if you compare it to last quarter they are actually down in count.

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I thought this was interesting, so I compared it against their count last quarter (instead of last year) and they are indeed down.

  - In Q4 2022 [1] they had 190,234 employees.
  - In Q1 2023 [2] they had 190,711 employees.
  - This quarter Q2, they have 181,798 employees.

So they are down almost 9000 employees from last quarter, close to their 12K layoff number.

[1] https://abc.xyz/assets/c4/d3/fb142c0f4a78a278d96ad5597ad9/20... [2] https://abc.xyz/assets/a7/5b/9e5ae0364b12b4c883f3cf748226/go...

The layoffs aren't finished.

This is interesting because it then is such a sharp U-turn since last Q2. "Keep hiring!" -> "Layoffs!" with very little pause in between?

Yeah pretty much all major tech companies did this exact same U-turn.

Yeah, but seeing the sharpness - compared to "ok let's slow down... ok ... shoot, we probably actually need to trim some headcount" - really highlights the follow-the-herd, here's-a-handy-excuse, done-for-PR nature of them vs actually responding to revenue trends or such.

Looks like they weren’t really needed to add to that revenue.

If that is true then it means they hired more people than they needed and then instead of admitting it they gave some nonsense about macro economics

They hired more really good people to leave fewer really good candidates to the competition. Maybe it made sense. They could not publicly declare this though.

Maybe they hired more than they needed because of the shifting macro environment? The number of employees you need depends on what you want to accomplish which depends on interest rates, consumer spending, and tons of other macro factors.

They always hired more than needed, even now. I think it's a common knowledge. Most of the time it worked out because google's stock always grew, but yeah if conditions become bad they wouldn't need to think a lot before laying of 20-30% of the workforce.

I am friends of a long time, Fortune 50 CFO. Well, he was about 16 years ago before one large company went public and he made about $40M in a single day and decided he wanted to do something new (can't blame him).

He told me repeatedly that companies that lay off the moment a bad quarter appears - or if they lay off employees if they even think the market will slow down - are always terribly run companies.

He said it was a clear indicator of poor internal planning and forecasting, that any company who suddenly needed to shed 5,000 or 10,000 employees on one bad quarter was was one to avoid.

This can be true and we can also recognize that the pandemic probably made everyone’s internal forecasts bad. These tech companies have some smart people working there, I would bet their projections are pretty world class.

I've worked there, it's not any different than the rest of the business world.

How so? The motivation and competency and ownership is the same as at say Comcast?

The comcast is bad meme is interesting but what specifics do you have that it is worse at business than Google?

I am no fan of comcast and pay a premium to avoid them since I disagree with bandwidth quotas. But both Google and Comcast have bad customer service and some terrible products yet both have respective and respectable monopolies. YouTube is terrible and amazing at the same time and more teens watch it than cable tv. Yet there is awful content and no good way to screen it from children besides denying access entirely.

Google also arguably missed ChatGPT and TikTok as macro product trends. Previously, Google failed to capitalize on social networking.

I am not sure how you forecast or predict those things in any way that guarantees success. And even when you see the future to pursue and build that core competency. I don't think large companies can move fast enough because by the time you notice the competition they've already established a network effect.

And network effects seem to be the main moat. It remains to be seen if Threads really kills Twitter. It's not even clear that Musk can kill it unintentionally, i.e. the business succeeds despite its management.

A company the size of Alphabet "shedding" 5-10K employees is a notable but still minor adjustment in the grand scheme of things.

No, it isn't. Details matter, and if they hiring even 1% too many people, then what else are they getting wrong by 1%? And how many of those things?

The key is that they wouldn't know either. It could be a slow 'death by a thousand cuts' and they wouldn't even know they were bleeding.

This is why companies, even massive companies, generally die eventually. There are very few that last even 50 years without eventually being acquired or bankrupt. And how does it start? Little mistakes, lack of focus, everywhere.

> then what else are they getting wrong by 1%?

They could get 1000 things wrong by 1% and they're still 1% wrong. You can't really add them up.

Touché.

I mean, everyone knows that PPC is 95% of Google's revenue business. They could probably eject 80% of the company and the revenue trajectory would not change.

If Twitter's (or X?) performance is anything to go off of, that's probably not true.

Right. Twitter was such a money spinner before.

Comparatively more than it is now. It's a no-true-scotsman to exclude it.

All of Twitter's staff were supporting the core product. How many Google employees support no part of the Google Ads stack or a product with Google Ads revenue?

Employee count actually increased accounting for layoffs, so that's not it for sure. Looks like they did need or at least thought they needed that many.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine

... A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively ...

... Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores their tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi. The Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak. ...

Weren't most of the layoffs in big tech done to shed positions related to recruiting or kill off floundering projects in R&D? If so, revenue is the wrong number to be looking at.

no, very much not the case.

It depends. Plenty of companies did big vertical cuts, affecting every team, department, job function and level equally.

Microsoft spun the wheel and laid off all sorts of people. Not sure of the rhyme or reason.

So inflation adjusted they’ve experienced no growth.

Inflation is not at 7%.

Average global inflation was 8.7% last year, and in the US it peaked at 9.1% in June 2022. The calculation is obviously a lot more complex considering all the different jurisdictions Google makes revenue from and all the different kinds of measures, but adding it all up it won't be too far from the 7% number.

the inflation rate at June 2022 is not what you should use to normalize the growth of a company, YoY, at June 2023. You're off by a year. The US YoY inflation rate for this period was around 3% going off memory.

Idk what you define as "average" global inflation. I don't really agree that it's the correct term for what is largely an american company even if it does international business.

Inflation doesn't jump from 9% to 3% overnight but goes down day-by-day. It is only at 3% now, so it spent the majority of the last year at >6%. And Google makes 55% of its revenue from outside the US, so it makes sense to consider global inflation in the calculation not just US.

3% is the average rate over the past 12 months. "it spent the majority of last year at > 6%" is not a helpful metric because those past numbers are average of months prior to June 2022.

We are tracking growth from June 2022->June 2023. So what we care about is the inflation from June 2022->June 2023. Which is 3%.

It doesn't matter what inflation is in other countries if the vast majority of Google's earnings are in dollars.

> if the vast majority of Google's earnings are in dollars

They aren't.

True, but the word "currency" pops up 53 times in this report [1], mostly in regards to managing "foreign exchange risk", so they seem to be taking deliberate measures to stay on the inflation trajectory of the dollar.

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204423...

Every single number in this report is in dollars.

It is in many parts of the world.

There are many parts of the world though.

People make mistakes and economic conditions change...

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