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It's easy to say that from the outside, especially if you cherry pick unsuccessful companies. Google has 72k employees, Facebook has 17k. What exactly do _they
by ojbyrne 9y ago
It's easy to say that from the outside, especially if you cherry pick unsuccessful companies.
Google has 72k employees, Facebook has 17k. What exactly do _they_ all do?
- robotresearcher 9y agoTaxes aren't going to avoid themselves.
- charlesdm 9y agoMultinationals generally retain a top tax law firm for that, not an in house tax lawyer.
- Vindicis 9y agoSmaller companies will. Multinationals generally have in-house tax specialists to deal with all of that. Case and point: General Electric. Assuming by multinational you're talking about Fortune 500 and not companies operating in more than one country.
- spyspy 9y agoHow long was it before those companies broke even though?
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y agoFacebook burnt through $700M if I recall correctly. Back then this was unheard of. Though, most of it was to support their explosive organic growth while ad revenue was catching up. Google made money almost from the start I think. Reddit has been losing money since its inception.
- gogopuppygogo 9y agoFacebook paved the way for this second tech boom from my perspective. VC's suddenly had FOMO again when it came to user growth over profit.
- mschuster91 9y ago> What exactly do _they_ all do? Google and Facebook both have massive, globally spread datacenters. Staffing them and ensuring they're built out, maintained and operated alone requires loads of personnel. Then you got the massive user count: Facebook with Instagram and Whatsapp has likely over 2B users, and Google most likely the same order of magnitude. All these users must be supported - both Google and FB do their best to provide as low-quality support as they can get along with, but by law they're bound to quickly react to copyright violation and child porn; in addition Google has (via Google Apps for Enterprise, GCE, AdSense etc) a number of projects with companies - and companies who pay your company generally expect competent support. Add in all the "low paying" jobs, if they're not already outsourced... like cantinas, cleaning, facility management - and for FB, Google, Amazon and Apple at least a strong architecture and legal team.
- ojbyrne 9y agoI'm not actually disagreeing with you. My point was those same tasks had/have to be done at Digg, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
- mschuster91 9y agoDigg and Reddit, for starters, don't have hundreds of their own datacenters - and about one or more orders of magnitude less users than the "giants". Twitter seems to have operated a mixture of leased and owned DC space (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/19/twitter-adding-more-data-center-space-again/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/19/twitt...), but far, far less than FB/Google/AWS do. Digg and reddit are fairly niche, at least for advertisers - which means these sites need far less ad salespeople and support staff; reddit also can get by with having next to zero visible support staff by relying on community moderators which cost them nothing.
- charlesdm 9y agoThey're also publicly traded companies, so they need to look like they're doing stuff. Facebook could probably very easily cut back on 5.000 employees without a problem. But that wouldn't look good now to the shareholders, would it?
- rasz 9y ago72K is for whole Alphabet, and as to what they do? they burn money earned by core business of selling ads.