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at the kind of scale, one engineer can drive that much value. Google's ads business is huge, and 1% improvement you can do (which happens all the time) could ha
by tehlike 10y ago
at the kind of scale, one engineer can drive that much value. Google's ads business is huge, and 1% improvement you can do (which happens all the time) could have outsized impact. It doesn't really have to be that complex of an improvement, either.
PS: google employee
- austenallred 10y agoI don't doubt it. I can think of several small tweaks at companies I've worked at that have swung things $10m one way or another, and we're a tiny fraction of the size of Google. When you have millions (or billions) of customers, small changes mean a lot.
- EGreg 10y agoPlease see https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog Why doesn't Google do this?
- cowsandmilk 10y agoThat relies on having a product that is already generating revenue, how do you apply that to R&D like autonomous cars where that revenue isn't currently present?
- EGreg 10y agoOk but you mentioned someone making a 1% improvement in existing revenue. For THAT.
- tehlike 10y agothat could create imbalance - everyone moving into ads.
- EGreg 10y agoSo why not do this for all projects that need it?
- tehlike 10y agoalso on a second thought, once things become incremental, chances of someone doing the same increment as another one (who generates that 100M) is high, hence the lower pay.
- CalChris 10y ago> at the kind of scale, one engineer can drive that much value For Google in 2007, I don't doubt that. In 2017, I'd have to see it.
- tehlike 10y agoWhat do you mean?
- CalChris 10y agoI can understand that when Google was on a technology growth curve in 2007 that a single engineer could hit a home run. I think that is much much harder today. So I would have to see it. I'm not saying it's impossible but I'd have to see it. My favorite Google engineer idea was how much autocorrect improved search results and efficiency. Awesome idea but I doubt it contributed $100M in revenue. MapReduce, good idea but I doubt it contributed $100M in revenue. One engineer, $100M is easy to say. It's really hard to do.
- uiri 10y agoGoogle's quarterly revenue is roughly $20B[1] - that's $80B per year. I think that it is perfectly plausible that an engineer could achieve a 0.125% increase in yearly revenue. Now, disentangling that from other possible contributing factors, getting the right visibility from management, etc. is distinct from that. I have no problem believing that MapReduce contributed $XB to Google's revenue over the course of the past 20 years. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204416000021/goog10-qq12016.htm#s19787FEDB03F2F55A3452F03D6A7DC1C https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204416...
- CalChris 10y agoMapReduce was published in 2004. The paper was two people; the implementation was probably a lot more. Even then, it was just a re-engineering of an earlier code base (read that as multiple available cat skinning technologies). By 2014, it was no longer used, so that's 10 years. Lastly, it wasn't exactly novel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce#Lack_of_novelty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce#Lack_of_novelty FWIW, it appears they're giving away the TensorFlow stuff because they lost the mindshare battle between MapReduce+Hadoop and don't want that to happen again. Again, the $100M figure is an easy (heroic) claim to make but hard to substantiate. Shit's hard. Big shit is really hard.