Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Googling suggests that _Google_ employs approximately 18K software engineers, best as anyone can tell. And Microsoft maybe 40-60K. Amazon probably under 10K. (All of this is pretty much guesses and estimates, I googled around to see what people thought).

Hm.

View on HN

Google's most recent quarterly report has the following info:

" As of December 31, 2014, we had 53,600 full-time employees: 20,832 in research and development, 17,621 in sales and marketing, 7,510 in general and administrative functions, and 7,637 in operations. "

So generally in line with what you said.

i'm not sure... google is certainly a company i would expect to have any number of software engineers in all of those departments, and also plenty of non-software people (biologists, economists, psychologists etc.) in core R&D.

At a local AWS group meeting an Amazon IT guy mentioned in presentation they support around 15 000 internal software development machines in the cloud. Also surprisingly all their dev machines have a commercial Lisp IDE licensed and installed.

"Also surprisingly all their dev machines have a commercial Lisp IDE licensed and installed."

That is surprising. Was anything said about what they do with it?

That many :-) when I worked for BT the systems engineering division alone had over 50k that is not counting all the developers in other divisions Celnet, Syntegra plus contracted out staff at GCHQ

SE is/was the part of the company that is the heir to Tommy Flowers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com