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I don't think you realize how many products Google has. Cruise had ~ 4k employees at its peak. Waymo is just one tiny project in Google. Splunk had 8000 empl

I don't think you realize how many products Google has. Cruise had ~ 4k employees at its peak. Waymo is just one tiny project in Google. Splunk had 8000 employees, GCP has a competitor to it. Bigquery is a competitor to Snowflake, who has around 5,000 employees. Databricks had 4k employees, which GCP also has a competitor to. This is just a fraction of the software just in cloud.

KeplerBoy 3y ago
I do realize Google has a lot going on. They have to, to keep all these people even remotely busy.
eitally 3y ago
That's not apples to apples, though. Snowflake has 5,000 employees in the entire firm. The BQ Product+Eng+partnerships team is a fraction of that, and the SG&A functions are all shared services across all of Cloud, just like your Databricks comparison.
goalonetwo 3y ago
Waymo and Cruise are valid comparisons. GCP competitor to Splunk (Stackdriver) is a complete joke. I would be shocked if more than 500 people are working on that thing
NtochkaNzvanova 3y ago
I think that says as much about those other companies as it does about Google. Namely, that despite Google's reputation for having become a bloated bureaucracy, there are in fact economies of scale happening at Google, and in fact it's those other companies that are bloated. 8,000 employees for collecting and searching logs? 5,000 employees for a data warehouse? Even accounting for the share of sales, marketing and G&A employees that contribute to Google's equivalent products, I'd be shocked if Google has anywhere near as many employees working on these things. In fact it's even worse than that. A lot of Google's employees are dedicated to maintaining tools and infrastructure that Google built up over decades and hundreds of thousands of engineer-years because "the cloud" didn't exist when Google started. These other companies get all that "for free" (or rather, for nominal pay-as-you-go fees -- but certainly without the massive engineering investment that Google put in over the years) by building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Without public clouds and the vast growth in open-source cloud infrastructure tooling, those other companies likely wouldn't be viable businesses.

KeplerBoy 3y ago

I do realize Google has a lot going on. They have to, to keep all these people even remotely busy.

eitally 3y ago

That's not apples to apples, though. Snowflake has 5,000 employees in the entire firm. The BQ Product+Eng+partnerships team is a fraction of that, and the SG&A functions are all shared services across all of Cloud, just like your Databricks comparison.

goalonetwo 3y ago

Waymo and Cruise are valid comparisons. GCP competitor to Splunk (Stackdriver) is a complete joke. I would be shocked if more than 500 people are working on that thing

NtochkaNzvanova 3y ago

I think that says as much about those other companies as it does about Google. Namely, that despite Google's reputation for having become a bloated bureaucracy, there are in fact economies of scale happening at Google, and in fact it's those other companies that are bloated. 8,000 employees for collecting and searching logs? 5,000 employees for a data warehouse? Even accounting for the share of sales, marketing and G&A employees that contribute to Google's equivalent products, I'd be shocked if Google has anywhere near as many employees working on these things. In fact it's even worse than that. A lot of Google's employees are dedicated to maintaining tools and infrastructure that Google built up over decades and hundreds of thousands of engineer-years because "the cloud" didn't exist when Google started. These other companies get all that "for free" (or rather, for nominal pay-as-you-go fees -- but certainly without the massive engineering investment that Google put in over the years) by building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Without public clouds and the vast growth in open-source cloud infrastructure tooling, those other companies likely wouldn't be viable businesses.