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I don’t understand how a company where 5% of the workforce is responsible for the product that drives 95% of the revenue is so seemingly vulnerable to employee
by bradleyjg 8y ago
I don’t understand how a company where 5% of the workforce is responsible for the product that drives 95% of the revenue is so seemingly vulnerable to employee pressure. I can’t imagine Bell Lab employees had all that much leverage against Ma Bell.
- spyspy 8y agoI’ve often wondered this myself. Google has literally thousands of engineers working on search alone. I can’t even fathom what they’re all doing. And then what is everyone filling their time with?
- ak39 8y agoDeveloping Thanos snap gimmicks and other region specific Easter eggs?
- lbotos 8y agoAs much as we joke about this, a google doodle is such a great sticky "come back and see what's new tomorrow, and while you are here, maybe search which will make us money" tactic.
- throwaway55554 8y agoRewriting code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378 > Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years.
- skybrian 8y agoGoogle builds a lot more of its own infrastructure than other companies can afford to do, all the way down to the hardware. They also change things more often internally than you will see with public-facing API's. What I'm wondering, though, is about why headcount continues to expand. Besides the new buildings in Mountain View and NYC there's a whole new campus planned in San Jose, so there are apparently no plans to slow down. Where does it end? https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-microsoft-yahoo-google-and-facebook-9ede22a37824 https://medium.com/gabor/timeline-employee-count-growth-for-...
- puzzle 8y agoThe new headcount is coming from cloud. Lots of sales people in particular.
- LaserToy 8y agoWorked there, It might be that I was in a wrong place (and folks I know), but high quality standards, sometimes vague deadlines that can be moved desire to do the best thing result in a very slow dev process. I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago> I might be wrong, but there is a reason AWS is far ahead of GCP. And I feel gap is increasing I disagree. I feel AWS definitely has more options, functionality, and better enterprise support, but in many areas GCP is much easier to manage for smaller teams. For example, if I were starting a startup, I would definitely favor GCP over AWS right now.
- differentView 8y agoThey're not working for the competition.
- gojomo 8y agoPosting to HN via Tor.
- ma2rten 8y agoThat's not true. The majority of google employees are in areas that directly impact the bottom line such search, ads, sales, technical infrastructure.
- dmead 8y agoI believe ads, but search core search stuff can't be that many people.
- sanxiyn 8y agoWhy not? Search is an incredibly complex problem.
- thucydidesofusa 8y agoIt probably has a healthy engineering staff, but as Wall St. sees it, Google could just cut out dev work, scale back to minimal ops and print money the whole way down the death spiral.
- dekhn 8y agosearch is complex, but google spend well over a decade building infrastructure to enable search to scale without massive people count. it's a modest number of very productive people.
- thrower123 8y agoI kind of suspect that the eight or ten people that made Bell Labs influential might have had some kind of leverage.