8 ms·

This caught my eye, total employees - 2022: 190,234 - 2023: 182,502 Total increase in revenue of 10 billion. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but

by tra3 3y ago

This caught my eye, total employees - 2022: 190,234 - 2023: 182,502 Total increase in revenue of 10 billion. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.

eitally 3y ago
I wonder how the TVC headcount has changed y/y. They don't publish that data.
candiddevmike 3y ago
That doesn't include the army of contractors they have/had that were laid off.
bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
Clearly, those 8000 employees were producing -$10,000,000,000 per year.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  Math checks out. Imagine what happens when they lay off 800k!
- hiddencost 3y ago
  A Google SWE costs the company around $750k average, fully loaded cost. So if those were all SWEs, $6B/yr isn't an unreasonable estimate.
  - dieortin 3y ago
    Assuming those SWEs produced absolutely zero value to Google, which I bet is not true
    - bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
      Also, I'm guessing legal fees and the raw cost of severance are no joke.
    - hiddencost 3y ago
      Nothing about my post was estimating the added value of the SWEs, only the cost.
  - KerryJones 3y ago
    Where did you get the $750K figure? I'm in the Bay Area, Sr Engineer, on the higher end of the pay scale, and no-where close to that figure.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      How do you know how much your benefits and support staff cost?
    - phantomwhiskers 3y ago
      If I were to guess, I'd say that this estimate is including hardware, cloud resources, software licenses, benefits, stock options, and probably more that I can't think of in addition to salary, but I too would like a more detailed explanation on how they came by that number.
      - rkagerer 3y ago
        Probably also the HR, legal, etc. support staff amortized across headcount.
    - hiddencost 3y ago
      Fully loaded cost. Typically you estimate that an employee costs 2x their total compensation, across various expenses.
      - KerryJones 3y ago
        Where is that typically? Most of those are had costs for an employee, not % based. Google has employees from $50K to $1mm+, I very much doubt that all expenses double as income doubles.
  - hdesh 3y ago
    The median in 2021 was close to $300k as per this[0] source. [0] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/alphabet-retains-top-median-employee-salary-hits-lowest-ceo-pay-gap-in-tech-71896693 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
saiya-jin 3y ago
Well, if total average costs per employee for G would be very roughly 1 million, there you have it. I think it may be half of that if at all, but it impacts the increased revenue significantly in any case.
- awa 3y ago
  Costs do not impact revenue only profits.
  - blahpro 3y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but costs do impact revenue when those costs represent an investment in something that can be used to increase revenue, like employees.
    - awa 3y ago
      +1. Employees can generally boost revenues (if used correctly). The post I was replying to was implying that cutting employees boosted revenues somehow.
tomcar288 3y ago
I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don't matter. When every single thing that needs working on is already being worked on, a lot of people are going to be doing busy work. There was a post by Stevie Yeggie where he talked about working at google. he looked really hard to find a new project to lead but absolutely everything was already being worked on, he found. eventually he just couldn't see himself leading or doing meaningful work there and quit. the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.
- ehsankia 3y ago
  But isn't that just bad management / prioritization? Isn't the solution to just shuffle people to more useful projects instead of firing them? Especially at a company that hires general engineers who can work on any project, and also at a company that has a lot of internal tooling which makes ramping up new engineers slow and tedious. They'll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.
  - tomcar288 3y ago
    the problem is there's not enough high value projects to do. to much labor, too many employees and too much funding relative to the number of projects that actually bring value. Because all the high value stuff(high ROI stuff) is already done or already being worked on. all that's left is low ROI projects which take up huge amounts of time but bring little value. employees and managers know they generate little value, so they end up doing more of them to compensate which makes the problem even worse as there's less and less high value stuff to do. there's just too few opportunities, hence the need to expand into new industries.
    - feoren 3y ago
      Of course there are enough high-value projects to do. You just need to be willing to experiment, expand horizontally, and let your employees go out on a limb with new ideas; something that no corporate leadership anywhere has ever been willing to do. They didn't run out of valuable problems to solve, they just have shit-ass worthless leadership just like every other (public) corporation in America.
gamepsys 3y ago
To me it shows that Google doesn't know how to generate significant revenue with those eight thousand people. I am worried it indicates Google is running out of good bets and has limited future growth. Of course, the counter argument is that technology allows Google to do more with less people. I am not convinced by this argument, because Google's competition has about the same ability to do more with less people. If you can improve individual productivity than why not scale that across more people. To summarize, this indicates to me that Google is reducing their value on human capital.
- toxic 3y ago
  The folks who make up "human capital" have been reducing the value that they place on Google the employer, too. I mean that in several ways: Google doesn't have nearly as good a record of successfully recruiting (or retaining) top-tier talent as they did just 5-10 years ago. It is no longer seen as a dream position, or even a strong candidate's first choice. Similarly, hiring managers who see Google on a resume don't treat it as highly as they did 5-10 years ago. Google is rapidly on its way to becoming just another big boring technology company, like SAP or Salesforce or Oracle. Now the culture of those around it has finally started to catch up.
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  One year is barely enough time for the marginal impact of those 8k people to matter. Say that made 3 revenue products revisions slip by 2 quarters, and not ship six cost-saving optimizations (if you make google search 0.001% faster, you save millions in compute). Further, say that made 100 companies not renew their 7-figure ad contracts. If all of this was evenly spread throughout the year, it still hits revenue and profit only a comparitive small amount in one year. It takes time for those sorts of changes to propagate all the way through the system until they finally impact revenue and costs. The effects are long term. I'm on record as saying that Google hired way too much and way too fast, but it isn't quite as simple as, X-people produce Y-revenue, so (X-1)people produce Y-Z revenue.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  google doesn't want more bets. It wants best bet possible and for now this bet is ads, that's why so many products are killed
asdajksah2123 3y ago
I think this is just unwinding from overhiring during the pandemic. - 2021: 156,500
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  2021: Yay! Crazy hiring! 2023: What?!?! Laying off a fraction of recent hires? The world is ending!! Obviously this sucks for the laid-off, but…you don’t need a very long memory to put this in perspective.
  - QuercusMax 3y ago
    More than a fraction of recent hires. I had long-tenured teammates (10+ years) who were let go, for no particular reason.
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
      Sure, it’s not LIFO, and this churn can be a nasty way to get rid of the expensive oldsters. But as a percentage, the bigger companies are generally still well above 2020 staffing levels.
    - oh_sigh 3y ago
      I bet either their comp was very high due to their tenure relative to their output, or they spent too much time at the same level and weren't showing upward trajectory. I know that you only need to be an L4 officially to get past the up or out stage, but that doesn't mean that they won't find people to lay off who have been an L5 for 12 years
      - shermantanktop 3y ago
        Top grading is the MBAs dream. Replace someone who doesn’t stand out and get someone who on average will be average, so presumably better than the 10y vet you just exited. Don’t worry about what they know, because coders are monkeys. Yes, some tenured people suck. But it’s their salary that drives this behavior.
saos 3y ago
I reckon they’ll be a deeper cut
wtf_is_up 3y ago
> The company added that for 2023, it's taken charges related to employee severance of $2.1B, with $1.2B in exit charges taken for the last three months of the year. It's also continuing work to optimize global office space. https://seekingalpha.com/news/4060311-alphabet-falls-4-as-ad-sales-growth-falls-shy-of-forecasts https://seekingalpha.com/news/4060311-alphabet-falls-4-as-ad...
quatrefoil 3y ago
Revenue increase of 10 billion is about 3%, essentially tracking inflation.
summerlight 3y ago
Short term revenue gain (2~3 years) can be all done by "optimizing" core ads businesses but that's not sustainable for a decade. The real question is how to build a longer term growth potential for Alphabet, and probably more than half of the employees are working on less certain business areas to figure it out.
voytec 3y ago
[flagged]
pkaye 3y ago
I got the total employees for the past few years for a comparison: 2019: 118,899 2020: 135,301 2021: 156,500 2022: 190,234 2023: 182,502 https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  It is absolutely mind-boggling that a company as large as Google could increase their headcount by 62% in three years.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    Not really, their annual revenue went from 161.857 B (2019) up 89% to 307.394 B (2023).
    - SeanAnderson 3y ago
      Nah, I'm pretty sure that's just also mind-boggling lol
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Has Google done anything new and major in these years? Like as a product. So could there still be 10-20% extra as workers?

by tra3 3y ago

eitally 3y ago

I wonder how the TVC headcount has changed y/y. They don't publish that data.

candiddevmike 3y ago

That doesn't include the army of contractors they have/had that were laid off.

bqmjjx0kac 3y ago

Clearly, those 8000 employees were producing -$10,000,000,000 per year.

shermantanktop 3y ago
Math checks out. Imagine what happens when they lay off 800k!
hiddencost 3y ago
A Google SWE costs the company around $750k average, fully loaded cost. So if those were all SWEs, $6B/yr isn't an unreasonable estimate.
- dieortin 3y ago
  Assuming those SWEs produced absolutely zero value to Google, which I bet is not true
  - bqmjjx0kac 3y ago
    Also, I'm guessing legal fees and the raw cost of severance are no joke.
  - hiddencost 3y ago
    Nothing about my post was estimating the added value of the SWEs, only the cost.
- KerryJones 3y ago
  Where did you get the $750K figure? I'm in the Bay Area, Sr Engineer, on the higher end of the pay scale, and no-where close to that figure.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    How do you know how much your benefits and support staff cost?
  - phantomwhiskers 3y ago
    If I were to guess, I'd say that this estimate is including hardware, cloud resources, software licenses, benefits, stock options, and probably more that I can't think of in addition to salary, but I too would like a more detailed explanation on how they came by that number.
    - rkagerer 3y ago
      Probably also the HR, legal, etc. support staff amortized across headcount.
  - hiddencost 3y ago
    Fully loaded cost. Typically you estimate that an employee costs 2x their total compensation, across various expenses.
    - KerryJones 3y ago
      Where is that typically? Most of those are had costs for an employee, not % based. Google has employees from $50K to $1mm+, I very much doubt that all expenses double as income doubles.
- hdesh 3y ago
  The median in 2021 was close to $300k as per this[0] source. [0] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/alphabet-retains-top-median-employee-salary-hits-lowest-ceo-pay-gap-in-tech-71896693 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

saiya-jin 3y ago

Well, if total average costs per employee for G would be very roughly 1 million, there you have it. I think it may be half of that if at all, but it impacts the increased revenue significantly in any case.

awa 3y ago
Costs do not impact revenue only profits.
- blahpro 3y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but costs do impact revenue when those costs represent an investment in something that can be used to increase revenue, like employees.
  - awa 3y ago
    +1. Employees can generally boost revenues (if used correctly). The post I was replying to was implying that cutting employees boosted revenues somehow.

tomcar288 3y ago

I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don't matter. When every single thing that needs working on is already being worked on, a lot of people are going to be doing busy work. There was a post by Stevie Yeggie where he talked about working at google. he looked really hard to find a new project to lead but absolutely everything was already being worked on, he found. eventually he just couldn't see himself leading or doing meaningful work there and quit. the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.

ehsankia 3y ago
But isn't that just bad management / prioritization? Isn't the solution to just shuffle people to more useful projects instead of firing them? Especially at a company that hires general engineers who can work on any project, and also at a company that has a lot of internal tooling which makes ramping up new engineers slow and tedious. They'll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.
- tomcar288 3y ago
  the problem is there's not enough high value projects to do. to much labor, too many employees and too much funding relative to the number of projects that actually bring value. Because all the high value stuff(high ROI stuff) is already done or already being worked on. all that's left is low ROI projects which take up huge amounts of time but bring little value. employees and managers know they generate little value, so they end up doing more of them to compensate which makes the problem even worse as there's less and less high value stuff to do. there's just too few opportunities, hence the need to expand into new industries.
  - feoren 3y ago
    Of course there are enough high-value projects to do. You just need to be willing to experiment, expand horizontally, and let your employees go out on a limb with new ideas; something that no corporate leadership anywhere has ever been willing to do. They didn't run out of valuable problems to solve, they just have shit-ass worthless leadership just like every other (public) corporation in America.

gamepsys 3y ago

To me it shows that Google doesn't know how to generate significant revenue with those eight thousand people. I am worried it indicates Google is running out of good bets and has limited future growth. Of course, the counter argument is that technology allows Google to do more with less people. I am not convinced by this argument, because Google's competition has about the same ability to do more with less people. If you can improve individual productivity than why not scale that across more people. To summarize, this indicates to me that Google is reducing their value on human capital.

toxic 3y ago
The folks who make up "human capital" have been reducing the value that they place on Google the employer, too. I mean that in several ways: Google doesn't have nearly as good a record of successfully recruiting (or retaining) top-tier talent as they did just 5-10 years ago. It is no longer seen as a dream position, or even a strong candidate's first choice. Similarly, hiring managers who see Google on a resume don't treat it as highly as they did 5-10 years ago. Google is rapidly on its way to becoming just another big boring technology company, like SAP or Salesforce or Oracle. Now the culture of those around it has finally started to catch up.
compiler-guy 3y ago
One year is barely enough time for the marginal impact of those 8k people to matter. Say that made 3 revenue products revisions slip by 2 quarters, and not ship six cost-saving optimizations (if you make google search 0.001% faster, you save millions in compute). Further, say that made 100 companies not renew their 7-figure ad contracts. If all of this was evenly spread throughout the year, it still hits revenue and profit only a comparitive small amount in one year. It takes time for those sorts of changes to propagate all the way through the system until they finally impact revenue and costs. The effects are long term. I'm on record as saying that Google hired way too much and way too fast, but it isn't quite as simple as, X-people produce Y-revenue, so (X-1)people produce Y-Z revenue.
Moldoteck 3y ago
google doesn't want more bets. It wants best bet possible and for now this bet is ads, that's why so many products are killed

asdajksah2123 3y ago

I think this is just unwinding from overhiring during the pandemic. - 2021: 156,500

shermantanktop 3y ago
2021: Yay! Crazy hiring! 2023: What?!?! Laying off a fraction of recent hires? The world is ending!! Obviously this sucks for the laid-off, but…you don’t need a very long memory to put this in perspective.
- QuercusMax 3y ago
  More than a fraction of recent hires. I had long-tenured teammates (10+ years) who were let go, for no particular reason.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    Sure, it’s not LIFO, and this churn can be a nasty way to get rid of the expensive oldsters. But as a percentage, the bigger companies are generally still well above 2020 staffing levels.
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    I bet either their comp was very high due to their tenure relative to their output, or they spent too much time at the same level and weren't showing upward trajectory. I know that you only need to be an L4 officially to get past the up or out stage, but that doesn't mean that they won't find people to lay off who have been an L5 for 12 years
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
      Top grading is the MBAs dream. Replace someone who doesn’t stand out and get someone who on average will be average, so presumably better than the 10y vet you just exited. Don’t worry about what they know, because coders are monkeys. Yes, some tenured people suck. But it’s their salary that drives this behavior.

saos 3y ago

I reckon they’ll be a deeper cut

wtf_is_up 3y ago

> The company added that for 2023, it's taken charges related to employee severance of $2.1B, with $1.2B in exit charges taken for the last three months of the year. It's also continuing work to optimize global office space. https://seekingalpha.com/news/4060311-alphabet-falls-4-as-ad-sales-growth-falls-shy-of-forecasts https://seekingalpha.com/news/4060311-alphabet-falls-4-as-ad...

quatrefoil 3y ago

Revenue increase of 10 billion is about 3%, essentially tracking inflation.

summerlight 3y ago

Short term revenue gain (2~3 years) can be all done by "optimizing" core ads businesses but that's not sustainable for a decade. The real question is how to build a longer term growth potential for Alphabet, and probably more than half of the employees are working on less certain business areas to figure it out.

voytec 3y ago

[flagged]

pkaye 3y ago

I got the total employees for the past few years for a comparison: 2019: 118,899 2020: 135,301 2021: 156,500 2022: 190,234 2023: 182,502 https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...

SeanAnderson 3y ago
It is absolutely mind-boggling that a company as large as Google could increase their headcount by 62% in three years.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  Not really, their annual revenue went from 161.857 B (2019) up 89% to 307.394 B (2023).
  - SeanAnderson 3y ago
    Nah, I'm pretty sure that's just also mind-boggling lol
Ekaros 3y ago
Has Google done anything new and major in these years? Like as a product. So could there still be 10-20% extra as workers?