What does FTE stand for?:
> From what I can tell, there have been about 4 FTE from Google over this period
> From what I can tell, there have been about 4 FTE from Google over this period
It's a measure of time spent working on something, to standardise comparisons of work capacity and acknowledge that it's not always full time, especially when aggregating the time from different people. One full time person = 1 FTE.
For example if you work 20 hours a week on project A and 20 hours on project B, then project A will count your contribution as 0.5 FTE while you're assigned to that project.
If you also have two other people working on it full timee, and a project manager working 1 day a week on it, then project A will count the contribution from all three of you as 2.7 FTE. (2.7 = 0.5 + 2 + 0.2).
Though in this context it just seems to be the number of people working on the code on a consistent basis.
* “Full Time Employee” (which can itself mean “not a part-timer” in a place that employs both, or “not a temp/contractor” [in which case the “full-time” really means “regular/permanent”]) or
* “Full Time Equivalent” (a budgeting unit equal to either a full time worker or a combination of part time workers with the same aggregate [usually weekly] hours as constitute the standard for full-time in the system being used.)
This is the case at many companies to avoid contractors being considered employees.