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Hired 10,000 people in Q2 this year alone? What percentage of those people actually do anything of value besides cash the company’s checks? That’s actually stag

Hired 10,000 people in Q2 this year alone? What percentage of those people actually do anything of value besides cash the company’s checks? That’s actually staggering to me. Cloud division I can see growing. What else?

oceanstone 4y ago
Google offers a lot. They want to offer more. The market will determine what's valuable.
- timomax2 4y ago
  Google products are mostly over rated.
  - ReaLNero 4y ago
    Google products are usually loss leaders, so as a user they feel much better to use than dedicated services that are more clearly monetized e.g. Yelp allowing businesses to remove reviews compared to Google Maps reviews, Google Docs being free and decent compared to Microsoft's Office suite.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      While Google's cloud revenues are a fairly small portion of the total overall, Google Workplace sales (i.e. supported suite) would still be pretty significant at many companies. I'm not sure it's fair to call it a loss leader.
badlucklottery 4y ago
I'm guessing it's 10k total hires not +10k net hires.
- jihadjihad 4y ago
  Even with that distinction and knowing Google's size, that's still a staggering figure for one quarter.
- kyrra 4y ago
  These stats are part of our SEC filings I believe. Various sites graph it. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-time-google-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
darkr 4y ago
Google has >= 100k employees. With a “healthy” staff turnover rate of 10%, they’re not growing.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  That would be 40%
- pyrale 4y ago
  10% per quarter? What is the unhealthy rate?
monkey_monkey 4y ago
Adwords executives eager to help you maximise the value of your future Adwords spend.
chongli 4y ago
Does that figure include interns and other temporary workers? If so, it’s easy to see how Google could hire 10,000 of those without growing the full time staff.
clintonb 4y ago
The check cashing is outsourced. I’ve toured the facility where it happens.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  Does paying by cheque have additional charges? I'm surprised it's common enough to need a "facility". Paying by credit card or an electronic transfer presumably doesn't need an office of people shuffling paper around. (I haven't used a cheque since about 2010, and I've never seen them used between businesses.)
  - clintonb 4y ago
    I don’t know of any merchants that charge extra for check processing. Depending on the volume and average value of the checks, processing fees may be cheaper than credit card interchange. Check processing typically has a fixed cost per check. This may fluctuate at lower volumes, but the price plateaus as you reach 10K checks per month. Say you get to $2 per check, and interchange is 1%. The merchant retains more revenue for check payments over $200. The downsides are it takes 2-3 additional days to get the revenue, and there is no notion of a “dispute” for checks. In the case of fraud, you lose. However, there is less risk of this happening in B2B sales, which is the primary use case for checks these days.
id 4y ago
There are still companies out there handing out physical checks??
blululu 4y ago
A lot of very smart people have also looked at the growth prospects of cloud and urged more investment, but I am not sure if their claims have panned out. The reality is that after a decade of heavy investment Google Cloud is still a distance 3rd. To make matters worse, the Cloud division's growth is mostly on the cost side of the balance sheet. GCP has a larger more expensive staff than its two leading competitors and a very unfavorable cost structure on a unit basis. (Perhaps this problem is a consequence of people advocating for more investment in Cloud). Given that Cloud a much bigger cost center than Search and somehow grows more year over year I would actually think that Cloud is what ultimately destroys the company.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Google pretty much has to make Cloud work eventually or they're toast. (Or at least a much shrunken and less relevant company that certainly needs a fraction of their current engineering staff.)
  - Gunnerhead 4y ago
    What you and the parent comment are saying is incredibly interesting. Do you have any recommended reading regarding this?
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      The usual narrative is this 1. Ad cost-per-click goes down over time. At some point, the entire population of earth will be fully online and there will be no natural growth in advertising. The ad business stagnates. Google's stock price depends on growth. 2. Google has a bazillion incredibly highly paid employees. They don't just need billion-dollar industries to supplement ads, they need 100-billion-dollar industries. There are not that many of these industries in existence. Cloud is one of them. 3. Cloud services scale well, so nothing stops AWS from eventually reaching something ridiculous like 90% market share. This means that it is not enough to be an "also-ran." 4. Cloud eventually failing and being decommissioned would so permanently trash Google's reputation for b2b services outside of advertising and would so thoroughly gut the company (laying off 10,000s of workers) that the company would never recover. I am a Googler. I don't work in Cloud. Absolutely none of this is based on internal information. I have no actual idea if this reasoning matches anything that internal leaders think.

oceanstone 4y ago

Google offers a lot. They want to offer more. The market will determine what's valuable.

timomax2 4y ago
Google products are mostly over rated.
- ReaLNero 4y ago
  Google products are usually loss leaders, so as a user they feel much better to use than dedicated services that are more clearly monetized e.g. Yelp allowing businesses to remove reviews compared to Google Maps reviews, Google Docs being free and decent compared to Microsoft's Office suite.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    While Google's cloud revenues are a fairly small portion of the total overall, Google Workplace sales (i.e. supported suite) would still be pretty significant at many companies. I'm not sure it's fair to call it a loss leader.

badlucklottery 4y ago

I'm guessing it's 10k total hires not +10k net hires.

jihadjihad 4y ago
Even with that distinction and knowing Google's size, that's still a staggering figure for one quarter.
kyrra 4y ago
These stats are part of our SEC filings I believe. Various sites graph it. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-time-google-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

darkr 4y ago

Google has >= 100k employees. With a “healthy” staff turnover rate of 10%, they’re not growing.

willcipriano 4y ago
That would be 40%
pyrale 4y ago
10% per quarter? What is the unhealthy rate?

monkey_monkey 4y ago

Adwords executives eager to help you maximise the value of your future Adwords spend.

chongli 4y ago

Does that figure include interns and other temporary workers? If so, it’s easy to see how Google could hire 10,000 of those without growing the full time staff.

clintonb 4y ago

The check cashing is outsourced. I’ve toured the facility where it happens.

Symbiote 4y ago
Does paying by cheque have additional charges? I'm surprised it's common enough to need a "facility". Paying by credit card or an electronic transfer presumably doesn't need an office of people shuffling paper around. (I haven't used a cheque since about 2010, and I've never seen them used between businesses.)
- clintonb 4y ago
  I don’t know of any merchants that charge extra for check processing. Depending on the volume and average value of the checks, processing fees may be cheaper than credit card interchange. Check processing typically has a fixed cost per check. This may fluctuate at lower volumes, but the price plateaus as you reach 10K checks per month. Say you get to $2 per check, and interchange is 1%. The merchant retains more revenue for check payments over $200. The downsides are it takes 2-3 additional days to get the revenue, and there is no notion of a “dispute” for checks. In the case of fraud, you lose. However, there is less risk of this happening in B2B sales, which is the primary use case for checks these days.

id 4y ago

There are still companies out there handing out physical checks??

blululu 4y ago

A lot of very smart people have also looked at the growth prospects of cloud and urged more investment, but I am not sure if their claims have panned out. The reality is that after a decade of heavy investment Google Cloud is still a distance 3rd. To make matters worse, the Cloud division's growth is mostly on the cost side of the balance sheet. GCP has a larger more expensive staff than its two leading competitors and a very unfavorable cost structure on a unit basis. (Perhaps this problem is a consequence of people advocating for more investment in Cloud). Given that Cloud a much bigger cost center than Search and somehow grows more year over year I would actually think that Cloud is what ultimately destroys the company.

ghaff 4y ago
Google pretty much has to make Cloud work eventually or they're toast. (Or at least a much shrunken and less relevant company that certainly needs a fraction of their current engineering staff.)
- Gunnerhead 4y ago
  What you and the parent comment are saying is incredibly interesting. Do you have any recommended reading regarding this?
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    The usual narrative is this 1. Ad cost-per-click goes down over time. At some point, the entire population of earth will be fully online and there will be no natural growth in advertising. The ad business stagnates. Google's stock price depends on growth. 2. Google has a bazillion incredibly highly paid employees. They don't just need billion-dollar industries to supplement ads, they need 100-billion-dollar industries. There are not that many of these industries in existence. Cloud is one of them. 3. Cloud services scale well, so nothing stops AWS from eventually reaching something ridiculous like 90% market share. This means that it is not enough to be an "also-ran." 4. Cloud eventually failing and being decommissioned would so permanently trash Google's reputation for b2b services outside of advertising and would so thoroughly gut the company (laying off 10,000s of workers) that the company would never recover. I am a Googler. I don't work in Cloud. Absolutely none of this is based on internal information. I have no actual idea if this reasoning matches anything that internal leaders think.