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Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better pr

by curt15 3y ago

Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.

23B1 3y ago
Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel. Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist. Now add 149,999 nodes.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.
- shostack 3y ago
  Are there any good examples of this?
quatrefoil 3y ago
I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes... I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
  - dzdt 3y ago
    Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy. I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
    - rlanday 3y ago
      Yes, the original Parkinson’s Law paper contains an equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law > The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other. (check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)
- neilv 3y ago
  > spherical developers This could be a physics model, or an imperative to scale back the free food.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  Organizations can't scale linearly. You need more middle managers as you add more people and organizational layers, who don't contribute any "output" so this is trivially true. Alternatively, you could have thousands of people all reporting to a single manager, and if you think that could work, I have a bridge to sell you.

by curt15 3y ago

Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.

23B1 3y ago

Think of google as a gigantic 3D matrix, and you are a node. There's four people surrounding you, and one below, all angling for your budget or job, respectively, and one above you that thinks you're either a threat or chattel. Your job then becomes CYA in every direction. Ideally you can get a few of your subordinate nodes to work on your project and maybe even do a little CYA for you; the higher you rank, the more nodes you can enlist. Now add 149,999 nodes.

ghaff 3y ago
There are a lot of things that large organizations can do that smaller ones can not. However, as organizations scale up for good reasons (it takes a lot of people to do some things) and bad (empire building), it takes a lot of people to corral most of those people in productive ways and to support them with all kinds of systems.
shostack 3y ago
Are there any good examples of this?

quatrefoil 3y ago

I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes... I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.

michaelt 3y ago
> A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
- dzdt 3y ago
  Is there a rocket equation for bureaucracy? Something to model the exponentially growing efforts of a company that are spent self-support and bureaucracy as the amount of productive work scales up?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    No rocket equation but, if you want to go to the source, see Parkinson's Law (the original essay, not the shorthand aphorism). Which was actually even worse--productive work was not scaling up in the British Navy. I'm sure there are papers that have studied what happens specifically in business though.
  - rlanday 3y ago
    Yes, the original Parkinson’s Law paper contains an equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law > The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x = (2k^m + P)/n, in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other. (check the original paper for details since this obviously doesn’t explain what n is)
neilv 3y ago
> spherical developers This could be a physics model, or an imperative to scale back the free food.
Ferret7446 3y ago
Organizations can't scale linearly. You need more middle managers as you add more people and organizational layers, who don't contribute any "output" so this is trivially true. Alternatively, you could have thousands of people all reporting to a single manager, and if you think that could work, I have a bridge to sell you.