6 ms·
Wow, they are generating ~$1.5M/employee ($220B annualized / 140k employees). Their efficiency at that kind of scale is insane.
by alberth 6y ago
Wow, they are generating ~$1.5M/employee ($220B annualized / 140k employees).
Their efficiency at that kind of scale is insane.
- oh_sigh 6y agoRealistically 10k ads employees are earning $30M each and the other 130k employees are losing $600k each.
- seaman1921 6y agoit must be great working with you
- dang 6y agoPlease don't cross into personal attack. Regardless of what you feel you owe another commenter, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- VikingCoder 6y agoLol, great explanation. Maybe they should just get rid of organic results in Search, and just show Ads. Surely that would be more profitable.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoWith the top four or five results on Google generally being ads, they have essentially already done this.
- rawtxapp 6y agoIt really depends on your queries, usually only high commercial intent queries will have these top 4-5 ads.
- pmayrgundter 6y agoThis is the case
- scrollaway 6y agoaka "you could be making so much more money if you didn't spend a bunch of your time sleeping, eating and showering".
- est31 6y agoNo, this is a fairly common criticism of public companies: stock markets don't like conglomerates, they value them at a discount [0]. It gives less power to stock holders. Investors should be able to decide whether they want to keep their position in a browser company or a mobile phone OS company instead of Google managers deciding it. Instead of having one highly profitable company focused on ads that pays out excellent dividends, Google leadership chose to spend it on lots of expensive employees instead. A good counter argument to this is that if Google didn't do it, then a significant portion of their valuation would vanish due to the issue that in technology, companies which can't transition to newer revenue models perish as technology evolves. So personally I don't agree with the criticism, but I think it's legitimate. [0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.as...
- blackoil 6y agoIt also doesn't values the leverage owning complete ecosystem gives the company. If Apple decides to split iPhone, iOS, iPad, AppStore, Music/Content in different companies the value will be much lower than of a company together. Total>Σ(parts)
- beambot 6y agoI'm confused by the conglomeration argument... even beyond the innovator's dilemma aspect. The conglomerate market cap may be less than the sum of its parts at any given instant, but that completely discounts the strategic interplay between subsidiaries that results in substantially larger growth prospects & marketshare capture. This isn't universally true -- e.g. GE Healthcare & GE Aviation probably have very little overlapping strategic benefit. However, Google Adwords, Adsense, YouTube, Gmail ads, etc all benefit from common infrastructure & distribution. Or in the case of Berkshire, the ability to gobble up new investments relies on the tax-advantaged leverage of the insurance float.
- summerlight 6y agoI know you're just being satirical, but this kinds of arguments are brought up quite frequently even in serious debates. But the reality is that: 1. Ads depends on its cloud and core infrastructures to run its system. 2. Majority of its revenue directly comes from owned and operated properties, such as Search and YouTube Ads. 3. Chrome and Android have been key strategical components for being independent from other platforms. Google Ads won't be profitable as is if other OS/browser had 100% market dominance. If you includes all of them, I think it's more of 6~70k employees rather than 10k.
- scarmig 6y agoAds doesn't depend on GCP at all.
- suprfsat 6y agoIt just runs on the cloud
- est31 6y agoWhat stops them from running it in AWS or Azure?
- scarmig 6y agoHuge, sophisticated infra investment that trumps anything MS or Amazon have on offer. No, k8s doesn't compare, and neither MS nor Amazon even have the physical machines to handle existing ads and search traffic without a multi-year, 11-figure data center build out.
- summerlight 6y agoCloud infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean only GCP as a product, but all the computing and network resources shared across the fleet.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoDoes this figure include their army of underpaid slave labor routed through shell companies as contractors? Profit efficiency isn't a net good, particularly when it involves an underclass of employees given substandard treatment who have to jump through hoops like being fired and rehired on a regular schedule to avoid admitting they're employees and giving them healthcare.
- sidibe 6y ago> slave labor This is quite ridiculous. I don't know about all the types of contractors they hire but they've sure been great to the ones that work in their cafes by paying them for the past year despite the campuses being closed.
- dang 6y agoWould you please stop using HN for this hobbyhorse? We've been through this for years now, and I feel like I've been noticing your username crossing the line again in recent threads. Thoughtful critique is welcome but when something becomes mechanically predictable, that's not the same thing, and when it's mechanically predictable flamewar that's particularly bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI was mostly pointing out that the parent's comment woefully ignored over half of Google's workforce in their calculation. The fact that that over half doesn't get stable employment, health care, or any other benefits associated with Google is also particularly relevant to their profitability on a per head basis. I will try to keep it down, there's a lot of Googlers in today's thread, and it's obvious I upset a few.
- dang 6y ago> there's a lot of Googlers in today's thread, and it's obvious I upset a few. Potshots like that make things worse, and make me fear that you don't want to use HN as intended. If you keep that up we're going to end up having to rate-limit your account again. It's not clear how you'd know how many Googlers there are in threads, and in any case taking swipes at people is against the site guidelines. Please stick to your substantive points. There's also something about conducting a campaign against any $thing (including any $BigCo), finding fault with literally every aspect of everything they do, which is in the spirit of battle rather than curiosity, and so is against the intended use of this site. Please don't use HN for such agendas. It's tedious, and it evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- samfisher83 6y agoOil companies have even higher revenue per employees.
- yao420 6y agoYes and much like tech companies outsource their entire campus staff to contractors, oil companies operate a web of companies that a handle all the hard heavy field work. A firm like NRG only has 5000 official full time employees but have tens of thousands of oilfield workers, also protects them from legal liability.
- acchow 6y agoWhat do you think is the ratio of Google non-employee campus staff to Google employees?
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- subsubzero 6y agoNo need to think what it is, we know what it is, permanent contractors make up over half its workforce according to leaked documents: see -https://www.fastcompany.com/90355826/leaked-doc-google-has-121k-temporary-and-contract-workers-globally-compared-with-102k-full-time-staff-raising-concerns-about-its-growing-reliance-on-them https://www.fastcompany.com/90355826/leaked-doc-google-has-1...
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- mbesto 6y agoAnd require SIGNIFICANTLY different capital outlay. The comparison is useless.
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- PragmaticPulp 6y agoAlphabet has a huge number of contractors that aren't counted in that number. Previous leaks suggested that they have more contractors than employees: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/alphabet-google-employed-more-contractors-than-direct-employees-report.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/alphabet-google-employed-mor...
- orzig 6y agoOK so 750k per worker. Still pretty impressive!
- iamgopal 6y agoI’m curious, What work does contractor do ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hn_go_brrrrr 6y agoThe common case is roles outside Google's core competencies, e.g. janitors and cooks. As you would expect at a company Google's size, there are exceptions to this. Security guards aren't contractors on the MTV campus, but they are on nearly every other site. On the flip side, I've heard anecdotes that some SWEs are temps but I'm not sure of the details there.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoThey are mostly content moderators, which definitely shouldn't be outside Google's core competencies.
- varispeed 6y agoThe question is if they generating this much per employee, why employee does not get 30%? They are okay to charge app developers this much in app store, so why they think the effort of employees is not worth 30%? If I was their employee, I'd quit.
- izgzhen 6y agoJob market is just a market, and there is no law on how much employer should pay. Employee chose one company over another on an absolute number basis, not on the ratio.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- colinmhayes 6y agoBecause Google is among the highest paying employers so employees leaving will never get a substantial raise?