Alphabet employed a total of 118,899 people in 2019 [0], out of which 114,096 were at Google [1]. I've never worked at such a large tech company, but I imagine

Alphabet employed a total of 118,899 people in 2019 [0], out of which 114,096 were at Google [1]. I've never worked at such a large tech company, but I imagine there's tons of challenges with coordination at their scale. I'd conjecture that Google behaves like a distributed system because that's how it actually operates internally. There probably isn't a single orchestration node responsible for all project launches. Heck, Google is so big that they're often in direct competition with their other services and products. For example, they're currently developing three different operating systems: Android, Chrome OS, and Fuschia. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google