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

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

#101

Post by TulliusCicero »

Kluggy wrote: post #14
jeffbee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that is good news. You can look at it either as they slowed how much money they pour into the moonshots incinerator, or they stopped investing in potential unicorn lines of business.

I think they have proved that it's a incinerator at this point.

Waymo seems like it'll go the distance. Clear market leader in the US, and it doesn't seem particularly close, even if it's taken them (and everyone else) longer than expected to start scaling.

Cruise attempted to just start launching before the tech was really finished and it backfired horribly. Tesla is still doing Elon things, looks like the tech is mostly spinning its wheels as they work on yet another hardware revision that'll definitely handle self-driving this time.

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

#102

Post by johannes1234321 »

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…

> Isn't the solution to just shuffle people to more useful projects instead of firing them?

Yes. However how do you find those less useful positions? And identify whether it's the developer who is less productive or the position?

For top management the easiest way is to fire people broadly and assign it all over equally by pushing the decision down the management chain. Medium managers know their teams a tiny bit (but often not much ...) than too management and identify the least troublesome positions.

And then you let them bring up cases to keep their headcount or hiring new.

Works, after a short bump in productivity, if it's just (human) resources and numbers in a sheet. (Similar to other budget cuts, where you give a Mandate to reduce cost by X% everywhere and then see who cries the loudest and who adapts) Of course has impact on trust etc. which has an invisible cost.

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

#103

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

dieortin wrote: post #95
hiddencost wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming those SWEs produced absolutely zero value to Google, which I bet is not true

Also, I'm guessing legal fees and the raw cost of severance are no joke.

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

#104

Post by toxic »

gamepsys wrote: post #25
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.

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…

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.

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

#105

Post by addaon »

bradhe wrote: post #83
resolutebat wrote: post #5

Google Cloud made $864M in profit in a single quarter, more than ever before. Google Bets lost $86 3 M in the same period, much less than ever before.

What the heck is Google Bets?

When Google renamed to Alphabet, the pun was that it was an umbrella company covering those parts of the business that had exceptional financial return – mostly Ads – and the "long bets," some of which would provide future growth as the established business saturated, and some of which would fizzle – think X. The established businesses would saturate the risky investments, giving a long term growth strategy.

Market beating returns: Alpha. Long bets – Bet. Alphabet.

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

#106

Post by resolutebat »

rogerbinns wrote: post #82
Workaccount2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always imagined Google licensing the tech as opposed to spinning up a fully fledged national taxi service.

The most valuable owner in this space is whoever you communicate with to tell them where you want to go. They get to offer you a price, they get to offer you alternative destinations, and they get to offer you "deals". For example that means that a different supermarket can make an offer you come to them instead, or you can be offered a different price should a different route be taken, a ride share happen, a journey…

Color me skeptical, but I've never gotten in a car without having decided my destination first. I don't go to "any supermarket", I go to Supermarket X because they have the goods I need at a price I accept or the best promos that week or whatever.

If letting your rideshare company decide your destination was really a thing, why wouldn't Uber be doing it already be doing it with human drivers?

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

#107

Post by jsnell »

matwood wrote: post #100
VikingCoder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 0.45592705…

Google revenues come from ~90% ads. It's an ad company. The company gives guidance, so the estimates are not pulled out of thin air. Google should know their ad business very well at this point. People selling after an ad miss is medium/long term thinking. They could be wrong, but was the miss caused by a wider economic slowdown (see UPS earnings) or was it Google specific? Either way, it could be sign of Google slow…

> Google revenues come from ~90% ads.

That's not true, and hasn't been for a decade. For this earnings release, the proportion of revenue from ads was 76%.

> The company gives guidance

No, they don't. As far as I know they've literally never given guidance.

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

#108

Post by Grazester »

epolanski wrote: post #94
Grazester wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have solid numbers behind your claim? By the way people are asking chatgpt or copilot what they used to Google. Not everything but a lot. I most certainly do and I think I'm not alone.

Isn't Bing Google biggest search competition? Is the general public using chat as a general search engine to replace the more traditional search engine or is it just us tech people. I can tell you I know of no one doing this outside of tech coworkers and even then just use it for programming related tasks to a very limited way.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-18/microsoft...

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

#109

Post by resolutebat »

epolanski wrote: post #98
VikingCoder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 0.45592705…

Missing 0.5% of your core business revenue is a bad sign for long term.

Core business revenue went strongly up, it just went up slightly less than analysts hoped.

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

#110

Post by KerryJones »

hiddencost wrote: post #68
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.
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