Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

abc.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 192 posts

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#71

Post by bloppe »

tomcar288 wrote: post #23
tra3 wrote: post #4

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.

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. event…

You don't just multiply employees x time = revenue. Google develops IP, systems, and processes over the course of years which pay out on long time scales. You would probably start feeling the financial effects of these layoffs in a couple years, and continue feeling them basically forever.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#72

Post by jeffbee »

ra7 wrote: post #30
disillusioned wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo _might_ be the sole survivor here... they are ABSOLUTELY trying their damndest with it. It's remarkable to not go a single day without seeing a driverless Waymo doing its thing. (I live in Central Phoenix, they're _everywhere_.) The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any…

> I've heard each Jag costs ~$250k fully loaded They said it costs as much as a “moderately equipped S-Class” 3-4 years ago. At the time, that would be ~$140k. That includes the base car cost, sensor hardware, compute, redundant vehicle systems and their integration. So not quite $250k, but still steep. I think the Waymo-Geely robotaxis coming next year will be interesting cost-wise. > That being said, it's not gener…

There's a significant amount of cope involved when someone steps up to say that Waymo only works on rails, doesn't work in conditions where they have operated for years, etc. It is necessary to continue believing that Tesla is still in this race.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#73

Post by awa »

blahpro wrote: post #62
awa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costs do not impact revenue only profits.

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.

+1. Employees can generally boost revenues (if used correctly).

The post I was replying to was implying that cutting employees boosted revenues somehow.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#74

Post by boomfunky »

jsnell wrote: post #20
boomfunky wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There could be other factors in play like the recent volatility in Netflix within the same sector, as well as the upcoming FOMC meeting tomorrow causing increased fear. Markets aren't always as accurate and efficient as some believe, and stock prices always become more volatile around earnings.

All those other factors would have been priced in at the end of the day. The only new information since then would have been the earnings release. If the absolute numbers are better than expected, then maybe it's the relative numbers (as compared to Microsoft who also released earnings) that are worse than expected?

Completely true, it would be a combination of both. Clearly it didn't meet a lot of expectations indicated by the selloff, but selling could also be aggravated by a sell day in the Nasdaq/XLC and high impact economic events on the horizon. This is all conjecture from me, I am by no means a market expert, just offering a way to rationalize the above comment on how a good/"not that bad" earnings report can still result in a stock having a large selloff.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#75

Post by QuercusMax »

ehsankia wrote: post #26
tomcar288 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. event…

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…

In my org at the Goog, we didn't have any layoffs, but we also aren't expecting any new headcount any time soon. Projects that need more staff are expected to cannibalize it from other projects under the same VP.

I feel like this is actually a good way of doing things, and wish Google did this more broadly. Just think if everyone who would have been laid off was instead transferred to a project that needs their skills, or given training to move into a role that's needed. Can you imagine what type of employee loyalty and morale that would engender?

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#76

Post by QuercusMax »

shermantanktop wrote: post #70
asdajksah2123 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

More than a fraction of recent hires. I had long-tenured teammates (10+ years) who were let go, for no particular reason.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#77

Post by dboreham »

etamponi wrote: post #3
samspenc wrote: post #2

Summary from the release for Q4: - Revenue increased from $76B to $86B (13% increase) - Operating income increased $18.1B to $23.7B - Net income increased $13.6B to $20.7B - Diluted EPS increased $1.05 to $1.64

Okay so why is GOOG -4% in after hours this time? :)

Two things:

1. "sell on the news"

2. results vs "expectations"[1]

"expectations" is a weird Wall St concept where some small number of people who don't necessarily know much get to invent a set of numbers for the company results in the future. Then a bunch of other people who know even less believe/pretend that those expectations mean something, and will buy/sell the stock accordingly when the actual results are revealed. Yes Kabuki Theater. Actually it's about as bogus as software project planning/management, so perhaps all fields have similar made up nonsense. Hopefully not the people designing bridges. Or airplanes. Oh wait...

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#78

Post by VirusNewbie »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #53
ehsankia wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good luck finding useful projects for 180k people. That's just a ridiculous amount of people and projects.

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.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#79

Post by Grazester »

matwood wrote: post #24
atorodius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm there it says Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs: $72.32 billion vs. $70.97 billion expected ($63.12 billion in Q4 2022) Adjusted earnings per share: $1.64 vs. $1.59 expected ($1.05 in Q4 2022) Cloud revenue: $9.19 billion vs. $8.95 billion expected ($7.32 billion in Q4 2022) Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022) I hope that 0.3 is not the reason for that slip h…

Google missing on ad revenue is like Apple missing on iPhone revenue. It's even worse for Google because it's a larger part of their business. Is the miss a blip or a signal of a slowing ad market or are LLMs eating into their business? Hard to know, but that's the concern.

LLM is not doing anything given that Bing's growth since adding chat-gpt has been negligible.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#80

Post by VikingCoder »

matwood wrote: post #24
atorodius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm there it says Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs: $72.32 billion vs. $70.97 billion expected ($63.12 billion in Q4 2022) Adjusted earnings per share: $1.64 vs. $1.59 expected ($1.05 in Q4 2022) Cloud revenue: $9.19 billion vs. $8.95 billion expected ($7.32 billion in Q4 2022) Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022) I hope that 0.3 is not the reason for that slip h…

Google missing on ad revenue is like Apple missing on iPhone revenue. It's even worse for Google because it's a larger part of their business. Is the miss a blip or a signal of a slowing ad market or are LLMs eating into their business? Hard to know, but that's the concern.

Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022)

Right, they got $300 million less than expected.

Which means they only got 99.544072948% of what the analysts expected.

That means they missed analyst expectations by 0.455927052%.

Not for total Revenue. Not for EPS. Not for net income. Not for diluted EPS. For the one category, Ad Revenue.

Resulting in a 6% after-market drop.

0.455927052% miss. 6% drop.

I think it's entirely possible that people focus too much on short term metrics and not enough on long-term growth.

Post reply on HN