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This feels pretty vitriolic, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some bias here. A lot of these problems seem pretty minor and there's weird stuff like "Unlike

This feels pretty vitriolic, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some bias here. A lot of these problems seem pretty minor and there's weird stuff like "Unlike most companies in the tech space, paying engineers is one of Google's smallest expenses." According to here https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Google-have https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl... there are ~28,000 engineers in 2014, which paying at 120,00 a year (glassdoor) would be... $3.3 billion a year? And this was 2014, and doesn't include stock compensation Don't get me wrong - there are definitely problems with protobufs. But this post is citing a lot of stuff to back itself up that doesn't add up. Also, required vs optional - definitely only optional, there should be nothing required. So I flat out disagree with that one.

why_only_15 8y ago
Google's annual revenue was $110 billion in 2017 [1]. Even if headcount doubled and salary has increased, that's $7 billion a year. That's not peanuts, but at a company level it's not a massive expense. [1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/alphabet-q4-2017-earnings-834774/ https://www.androidauthority.com/alphabet-q4-2017-earnings-8...
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Anytime Pull out the revenue gun. It sounds like the revenue is actually produced by the machines though. I wonder why there isn't another search company competing with Google... Btw, if you use glass door to deduce Google's cost on employee, you probably have no idea how company works...
  - _dmurph 8y ago
    lol yeah I know, but it's at least the low bar. I would guess employees are one of the largest expenses for Google.
- _dmurph 8y ago
  True. I'm also guessing this number changes a lot with stock grants (that number was just base pay), and that yearly number seems pretty low (NYT has the entry level engineer at 124,000 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries-gender-disparity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salarie...) so glassdoor might not have good data. I wouldn't be surprised if it was much more than 6%.
  - why_only_15 8y ago
    I also wouldn't be surprised if it was more than 6% - but I very much doubt it could be over 12-15%. That's still not a very high percentage of revenue. It's most definitely a significant cost, but unlikely to be their biggest cost.
atombender 8y ago
While you're right, I'd like to point out that an employee earning 120k in wages costs an employer a lot more than 120k. Social security tax, Medicare tax, Federal Unemployment Tax Act tax, possibly state unemployment tax, health insurance, and some states have something called workers' compensation insurance. At Google, I'm sure there's also a lot of benefits included that would count towards the cost of each employee.
pdpi 8y ago
Thinking of that problem in terms of engineers not being the biggest expense is also a silly way to approach the problem. At 20000 engineers, it’s a net positive to add a full time person to save everybody else 5 seconds a day. If protobuf were such a big waste of engineering time, then working to make it more efficient for engineers while being no worse on the wire would be worth a lot of dedicated engineers.
- virtualized 8y ago
  That's why Microsoft made sure that Windows Update always runs in the background and never reboots during a presentation. Oh wait..

why_only_15 8y ago

Google's annual revenue was $110 billion in 2017 [1]. Even if headcount doubled and salary has increased, that's $7 billion a year. That's not peanuts, but at a company level it's not a massive expense. [1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/alphabet-q4-2017-earnings-834774/ https://www.androidauthority.com/alphabet-q4-2017-earnings-8...

justicezyx 8y ago
Anytime Pull out the revenue gun. It sounds like the revenue is actually produced by the machines though. I wonder why there isn't another search company competing with Google... Btw, if you use glass door to deduce Google's cost on employee, you probably have no idea how company works...
- _dmurph 8y ago
  lol yeah I know, but it's at least the low bar. I would guess employees are one of the largest expenses for Google.
_dmurph 8y ago
True. I'm also guessing this number changes a lot with stock grants (that number was just base pay), and that yearly number seems pretty low (NYT has the entry level engineer at 124,000 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries-gender-disparity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salarie...) so glassdoor might not have good data. I wouldn't be surprised if it was much more than 6%.
- why_only_15 8y ago
  I also wouldn't be surprised if it was more than 6% - but I very much doubt it could be over 12-15%. That's still not a very high percentage of revenue. It's most definitely a significant cost, but unlikely to be their biggest cost.

atombender 8y ago

While you're right, I'd like to point out that an employee earning 120k in wages costs an employer a lot more than 120k. Social security tax, Medicare tax, Federal Unemployment Tax Act tax, possibly state unemployment tax, health insurance, and some states have something called workers' compensation insurance. At Google, I'm sure there's also a lot of benefits included that would count towards the cost of each employee.

pdpi 8y ago

Thinking of that problem in terms of engineers not being the biggest expense is also a silly way to approach the problem. At 20000 engineers, it’s a net positive to add a full time person to save everybody else 5 seconds a day. If protobuf were such a big waste of engineering time, then working to make it more efficient for engineers while being no worse on the wire would be worth a lot of dedicated engineers.

virtualized 8y ago
That's why Microsoft made sure that Windows Update always runs in the background and never reboots during a presentation. Oh wait..