- 2022: 190,234
- 2023: 182,502
Total increase in revenue of 10 billion.
Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.
the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.
They'll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.
Because all the high value stuff(high ROI stuff) is already done or already being worked on. all that's left is low ROI projects which take up huge amounts of time but bring little value. employees and managers know they generate little value, so they end up doing more of them to compensate which makes the problem even worse as there's less and less high value stuff to do.
there's just too few opportunities, hence the need to expand into new industries.
i sometimes wonder if they would have more success with atoms based innovation rather than bits (reference to avc article on the matter). but that would necessitate hiring something other than software engineers.
Not contradicting your point really, just a note
Extremely cool individual who I miss. Maybe I should say hi to him.
In fact it's even worse than that. A lot of Google's employees are dedicated to maintaining tools and infrastructure that Google built up over decades and hundreds of thousands of engineer-years because "the cloud" didn't exist when Google started. These other companies get all that "for free" (or rather, for nominal pay-as-you-go fees -- but certainly without the massive engineering investment that Google put in over the years) by building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Without public clouds and the vast growth in open-source cloud infrastructure tooling, those other companies likely wouldn't be viable businesses.
I feel like this is actually a good way of doing things, and wish Google did this more broadly. Just think if everyone who would have been laid off was instead transferred to a project that needs their skills, or given training to move into a role that's needed. Can you imagine what type of employee loyalty and morale that would engender?
Values shifted with the focus on earnings and growth getting less impressive.
Imagine how obnoxious code reviews would be if everyone wanted to submit as many lines as possible for their salary to go up, that is how management headcount requests works today.
Middle managers serve a role but honestly many of them can be replaced without really disrupting anything. At a certain point, you become too far removed from the actual work that is being done to really matter.
On the other hand, there are many low level managers with teams of fewer than 10 people who can be very valuable and hard to replace. People with deep expertise in the specific area they work on.
Measuring a manager by their headcount is just a lazy way to evaluate impact and calculate salary.
Yes. However how do you find those less useful positions? And identify whether it's the developer who is less productive or the position?
For top management the easiest way is to fire people broadly and assign it all over equally by pushing the decision down the management chain. Medium managers know their teams a tiny bit (but often not much ...) than too management and identify the least troublesome positions.
And then you let them bring up cases to keep their headcount or hiring new.
Works, after a short bump in productivity, if it's just (human) resources and numbers in a sheet. (Similar to other budget cuts, where you give a Mandate to reduce cost by X% everywhere and then see who cries the loudest and who adapts) Of course has impact on trust etc. which has an invisible cost.
I suspect that many good jobs went to people who learned about them in some way other than official job postings. (This is generally true.)
My favorite here is Bridgewater and their HR/Evaluation/Alignment system. There's books written about it. Developing it and running it took a high percentage of workers and contractors. Its implementation had all kinds of negative effects on everyone else, including the people doing the actual investment. But it took a pandemic, and the CEO being sidelined, for the whole thing to be basically thrown away.
Pandemic and larger-than-life CEO stepping down both seem like the major outliers in the dynamic you described. Bridgewater was very, very successful for quite some time with that policy in place.
I guess we have different friends, but that doesn't match my experience. Of course, pumping yourself up and making yourself look more impressive for perf/promo is a huge thing, and accounts for a lot of pointless stuff being done just so you can say you "launched"/"landed" something. But the flip side of that is the recurrent memes about stuff like so-and-so over in that other division solved some incredibly hard technical problem, and "I'm just here copying protos around." Lots of Googlers realize they are just worker drones.
I get it, developing and supporting some feature at a company like Google requires more people (both in engineering and elsewhere) than if you banged out a prototype of something similar at a startup. But I've read stories where hundreds or thousands of employees were laid off, and they were all working on some small service (or even an obscure feature of that service) that never had a chance of moving the needle for the company and offsetting their costs.
I'm sure most of those employees were hard-working, motivated, and tried to build the best product possible, but there are no other companies on earth that would pay that many people top-of-market salaries to work on anything that isn't existential to the company. Other companies would simply go out of business if they operated this way, but in big tech companies, this is lost in the noise when times are good. But when things slow down, big tech companies start to pay very close attention to this.
2019: 118,899
2020: 135,301
2021: 156,500
2022: 190,234
2023: 182,502
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
So could there still be 10-20% extra as workers?
- 2021: 156,500
2023: What?!?! Laying off a fraction of recent hires? The world is ending!!
Obviously this sucks for the laid-off, but…you don’t need a very long memory to put this in perspective.
Yes, some tenured people suck. But it’s their salary that drives this behavior.
2021: this is clearly a bubble
2023: execs do "shocked Pikachu", "we have hired for a different economical environment!"
[0] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
Of course, the counter argument is that technology allows Google to do more with less people. I am not convinced by this argument, because Google's competition has about the same ability to do more with less people. If you can improve individual productivity than why not scale that across more people.
To summarize, this indicates to me that Google is reducing their value on human capital.
I mean that in several ways: Google doesn't have nearly as good a record of successfully recruiting (or retaining) top-tier talent as they did just 5-10 years ago. It is no longer seen as a dream position, or even a strong candidate's first choice. Similarly, hiring managers who see Google on a resume don't treat it as highly as they did 5-10 years ago.
Google is rapidly on its way to becoming just another big boring technology company, like SAP or Salesforce or Oracle. Now the culture of those around it has finally started to catch up.
Say that made 3 revenue products revisions slip by 2 quarters, and not ship six cost-saving optimizations (if you make google search 0.001% faster, you save millions in compute). Further, say that made 100 companies not renew their 7-figure ad contracts. If all of this was evenly spread throughout the year, it still hits revenue and profit only a comparitive small amount in one year.
It takes time for those sorts of changes to propagate all the way through the system until they finally impact revenue and costs. The effects are long term.
I'm on record as saying that Google hired way too much and way too fast, but it isn't quite as simple as, X-people produce Y-revenue, so (X-1)people produce Y-Z revenue.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4060311-alphabet-falls-4-as-ad...
The post I was replying to was implying that cutting employees boosted revenues somehow.