5 ms·
What is this attributable to?
by arthurcolle 4y ago
What is this attributable to?
- colinmhayes 4y agoBasically the entire business I guess. Cost of revenue, R&D, ales/marketing, and general are all up around 15%.
- hotpotamus 4y agoThose developer salaries have to come from somewhere I assume.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoHeadcount almost double since the Pandemic.
- arthurcolle 4y agoThere it is. This makes sense, I must have missed this. That is bonkers. So many engineers but still shut down products every few weeks. EDIT: Still FURIOUS they shut down Stadia. I hate you Google
- bushbaba 4y agomakes you wonder, what exactly the headcount is going to. Double the headcount, but sure doesn't feel like double the innovation/product-growth.
- UncleMeat 4y agoIt's also wild internally. It feels like headcount is incredibly tight, and even tighter now. Like 20% of my time as a manager is spent being asked to propose large new projects only to be told "nope, no HC for that." But somehow the company is like 4x larger than it as when I joined.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoHonestly as an end user, the growth seems to be backwards. Search results are worse than ever, YouTube recommendations are broken, and for the first time in years, Google Maps is showing me weird as hell routes.
- deegles 4y agoMany are still furious about Google Reader.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago>Still FURIOUS they shut down Stadia You're the first person I have ever seen with this opinion. I want to know, back when this was released, what made you ignore all the people that said that the product would be a failure and that Google would shut it down quickly? I always saw that as the majority opinion.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arthurcolle 4y agoI thought that they would be serious about it given how much investment it took to get it off the ground and also how they were actively seeking relationships with indie devs to maintain vast amounts of quality titles. Obviously I was wrong and have been actively ending my own usage of Google products because I have been burned for the last time.
- andsoitis 4y agoIn what way were you burned with Stadia? I thought they reimbursed folks and you got some entertainment while you subscribed. Ultimately, they couldn't convince enough people to sign up, but that's a whole different story about product strategy.
- arthurcolle 4y agoI'll never get to finish Cyberpunk lol I'm not playing that again. Sure, the refunds are nice.
- gundmc 4y agoI'm pretty sure you can transfer your save game for Cyberpunk off of Stadia to PC or consoles. It's not true of every game, but I think it works for Cyberpunk if you plug it into your search engine of choice.
- subsubzero 4y agoregarding stadia, What did you think they would happen? They have a graveyard of great projects that should still be used by millions. The only things I see continuing are android, ads, search, I even feel with the severe losses their cloud unit is seeing even GCP could be shut down. Hell I could even see them abandoning Waymo, I mean this is google after all :)
- colinmhayes 4y agoThey're not killing chrome. I doubt they kill their office suite either, it has really good numbers among young people, and microsoft's entire business is built on the back of its enterprise productivity software. It's a trillion dollar market cap business.
- CydeWeys 4y agoThe Office suite is used by every Googler every day (and that's every Googler, not just eng). It's what the company runs on. There's no way in hell it's getting shut down when it's that critical to business operations.
- bushbaba 4y ago...they killed some productivity apps. Don't say never. Hangouts, dead. Keep App, dead. Enterprise Search, dead. etc
- chrisconroy 4y agoKeep isn't dead. I use it everyday on my personal and business account. I love keep. I will be sad when the inevitably kill it though.
- hn_go_brrrrr 4y agoKeep is dead?
- CydeWeys 4y ago
- time_to_smile 4y agoPeople are so quick on HN to say "why does company X need 1000 employees when clearly it could be done with 10?" but I find people tend not the ask the even more obvious question "Why does company X need 100,000 employees when they seemed to be doing just fine with 50,000?" I do get that there is a lot of extra complexity that goes from a startup solving a hard technical problems to a pre-IPO company that is solving a bunch of business problems as well as technical challenges. Yes companies gain less efficiency per hire as they grow, and many do grow for growth's sake these days, but it does make sense that some companies need a thousand people to do what a startup thinks they can do with 10. But it certainly doesn't seem like Google is making great use of doubling headcount. On a product by product basis, at least for me, it feels like most Google products are worse than they were pre-pandemic. If they had shown revenue growth highly correlated with headcount I would see strong evidence that my view is wrong, but the facts don't seem to point that way.
- Johnie 4y agoThere's diminishing returns as the company grows in headcount. When you hire large number of engineers, you need to hire engineers to support those engineers. Then you need to hire people to support the engineers that are supporting the engineers and so on...
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> On a product by product basis, at least for me, it feels like most Google products are worse than they were pre-pandemic. I dunno, MSFT products seem to have only gotten worse since 1995 - and their profits are doing just fine. The quality of a product and its ability to make money seem to almost be inversely proportional. In Google's case - what matters is - they're doubling headcount (largest expense) and revenue has barely budged. It'd be nice if the products got better - but all they should really care about is if they're making more money.
- vadym909 4y agoThis is pretty common in most large companies. Remember the mini-msft blog? This doesn't happen as much on product teams but in all the support functions which don't hire world class people like they do on software engg. Basically as companies revenues grow, every cost center gets to put in a request to grow headcount. If you don't your colleagues will and you'll be looked down upon. then you take on shiny new non-essential projects and find ways to justify it. Launch it get promoted and leave. The next person comes in- decides it is crap- shuts it down and starts their own new project to reinvent the same thing . Org politics.
- lucasgonze 4y agoOr: what part of this isn't attributable to inflation?
- ParksNet 4y agoHow much do DEI initiatives, directly related staff (Director of 'Belonging' etc), and non-meritocratic hiring practices impact profitability? What about the alienation of staff and users considered part of 'legacy' demographics? https://about.google/belonging/ https://about.google/belonging/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- overcast 4y agoHiring 55,000 new employees in the last year is a big part of it.
- Johnie 4y agoI always put this into perspective. Google hires about 2 Uber sized companies in employees every year.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AlbertCory 4y agoR&D costs: went from 7,694,000,000 to 10,273,000,000 quarterly 2021 to 2022. whereas revenue went 65,118,000,000 to 69,092,000,000. Somewhat less of an increase. You'd assume R&D is mostly fully loaded costs of engineers, but I suppose someone who really knows the financials could tell us for sure.
- brookst 4y agoGoogle is getting deeper into silicon, both datacenter and device. That R&D has substantial capital costs which I think are still included in R&D top line.
- AlbertCory 4y agoI guess we could both read the part of the report where they explain it :) If it's capitalized, then it's not R&D, which is all expensed.
- bushbaba 4y agoThe silicon would be to save money compared to general purpose compute. The savings should overcome any fixed cost. Doubt it's having that great an impact to R&D cost growth.
- dekhn 4y agothat was one of the reasons for TPUs- they are far cheaper (TCO) than large numbers of GPUs if you're doing massive amounts of training.