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 shi

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.