4 ms·

A 200 person swe org is not 200MM/year of cost at google

• opportune 3y ago
  In the highest comp regions (where new revenue generating projects almost always get staffed) it’s a common ballpark estimate of the allin cost of a SWE including all benefits, office, hiring, infra costs, ancillary roles. Consider that a senior SWE alone is pulling about $400k in direct comp. Also consider Google’s total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm and many of those are not engineers or in high comp regions. Of course a new org with no big sales/marketing/compute costs will have different cost structure vs search ads but it really is a workable ballpark.
  • bushbaba 3y ago
    Google isn’t spending 1M on an employee making 400k.
  • ztrww 3y ago
    > total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm Where did you get this figure? It doesn’t sound right at all..
• t8sr 3y ago
  Anyone can sound confident on the internet, but you don't seem to have anything to back it up. In my experience, 1 million per SWE in the Bay Area is actually about right across the industry. You can look at public numbers to see that Google's revenue per __global__ employee is about 1.5 M and of that about 400 k is net income. SWEs in California make a lot more than the average global employee.
  • bushbaba 3y ago
    Costs also include server/DC/sales/marketing etc. you can’t include the server cost of say google maps as part of the people-headcount costs of google maps.
  • ztrww 3y ago
    aren’t Google’s payouts for ads to websites/content creators/etc. included in their costs? and of course all the other stuff the other comments mentioned and also including paying various contractors hired through other companies.. > Anyone can sound confident on the internet, I’m not that sure about that