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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]

#141

Post by goalonetwo »

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…

Talking to some Googler friends, it also seems like everyone there think they are "leaders". The reality is that most people at google end up working on something meaningless. That's the reality when you are in a company of 200k where the core business is at complete maturity.

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

#142

Post by sdsd »

ojbyrne wrote: post #66
username135 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more than just SWE's employed at google. Custodial, food service, administration, operations, HR, etc...

A lot of those are going to be contractors employed by agencies.

Google also outsources SWEs. My friend in Mexico worked as this. They have an acronym for this kind of worker, I can't remember. But for example, they contract out work to SWEs at https://www.epam.com.

Not contradicting your point really, just a note

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

#143

Post by goalonetwo »

I really think we are at the inflection point where Google is seen and perceived as the next IBM.

More and more people now realize that the ad/attention economy is overall a bad thing for internet/the world.

Googler who at some point were seen as above-average engineers are now seen as leetcoders TC-Maximizer with very little ethical thoughts or opinions on what they work on.

All of those changes are a positive thing.

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

#144

Post by compiler-guy »

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…

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.

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

#145

Post by dekhn »

xnx wrote: post #61
javiramos wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some promising Google moonshots apart from Waymo?

Drone delivery: https://wing.com/

there is so far only a tiny market for drone delivery and it seems like it would be unlikely to grow into a multibillion dollar business. Their competitors (who have more experience with shipping physical things) are also evaluating this with mixed success.

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

#146

Post by jeffbee »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #111
resolutebat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I've never gotten in a car without having decided my destination first. Not yet... > 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? Because Uber isn't an advertising company. They're still chasing fares like scrubs

Honestly I have no idea why you are attracting downvotes. This feature seems inevitable, and arguably desirable. I am sitting here trying to use Maps to figure out if there are any pizza places that are open in my city right now, and if I could summon a car with the destination vaguely set to "pizza" and be presented with options, that might be OK, even futuristic.

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

#147

Post by dekhn »

hiddencost wrote: post #59
tibbydudeza wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas Kurian is awesome - trained by Larry Ellison no doubt :).

The most consistent thing I hear in the hallways is "I really hope they don't make TK the CEO." People in cloud are profoundly unhappy. It's scary.

I would prefer they spin cloud off into its own bet and TK becomes the CEO of a real company (now he's "CEO at Google Cloud", which isn't its own business entity in alphabet, and he reports to "CEO at Alphabet").

I don't see any likely path by which Kurian would become CEO of Alphabet.

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

#148

Post by lancewiggs »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #132
hibikir wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite possible for the engineers to work really hard in ways that even directly harm the company, either directly, or by increasing the political costs of making a better decision. My favorite here is Bridgewater and their HR/Evaluation/Alignment system. There's books written about it. Developing it and running it took a high percentage of workers and contractors. Its implementation had all kinds of negative eff…

I'm aware of their alignment system from the book Principles, but I'm curious why/how you came to the conclusion it was a negative? Pandemic and larger-than-life CEO stepping down both seem like the major outliers in the dynamic you described. Bridgewater was very, very successful for quite some time with that policy in place.

Read "The Fund" - an entire book on the matter.

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

#149

Post by mkipper »

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…

This is anecdotal, but whenever I read details about layoffs at FAANG companies ("$foo people were fired from the $bar team"), I'm shocked by the headcounts.

I get it, developing and supporting some feature at a company like Google requires more people (both in engineering and elsewhere) than if you banged out a prototype of something similar at a startup. But I've read stories where hundreds or thousands of employees were laid off, and they were all working on some small service (or even an obscure feature of that service) that never had a chance of moving the needle for the company and offsetting their costs.

I'm sure most of those employees were hard-working, motivated, and tried to build the best product possible, but there are no other companies on earth that would pay that many people top-of-market salaries to work on anything that isn't existential to the company. Other companies would simply go out of business if they operated this way, but in big tech companies, this is lost in the noise when times are good. But when things slow down, big tech companies start to pay very close attention to this.

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

#150

Post by mustacheemperor »

solardev wrote: post #131
mustacheemperor wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope Waymo succeeds, or at the very least survives in its current markets. It is so much more comfortable, convenient, and safe than traditional ride share. I switched to more or less only using Waymo for ride-share in SF after I got into the beta last year, and almost without exception every Uber or Lyft ride I have had to take since then for timing, availability, or route reasons has been some kind of deba…

How is it so bad for you? I've had 500+ Lyft rides over 7+ years and never had an issue with a single driver...?

The jarringly bad nature of my recent experiences with Lyft/Uber compared to Waymo has likely inspired some hyberpole, but - I have been an Uber and Lyft rider for almost 10 years myself. Back then I was at town meetings in Syracuse, NY advocating for Uber to come to town. I know the experience can be good, but it seems like over the last couple years the experience has gotten considerably worse on average.

Experiencing Waymo has also altered my standards. Now I really notice how often the car is dirty and unkempt, stinks of pot or cigarette smoke, or the tire light is on, or the driver is handling the car poorly. Waymo is usually the same price, and none of that ever happens. If they pull this off I don't see the business model for human based rideshare surviving unless the cost of AV rides skyrockets once they need to be independently commercially viable.

I also live right off the highway, so I think I am more prone to getting people who pick up my ride on the way to or from somewhere else and then get upset about where they have to go. Pretty much the only place I need an Uber to these days is over the bridge to the East Bay when BART is not realistic, which is usually because I'm in a rush. One of my recent trips I wound up late anyway, because the first driver who pulled into my complex explained to me "because the uber app gives me these bad rides" I should cancel the ride for him, and pay a fee, because it was so unreasonable for me to expect him to deliver me to the destination I had called the ride for.

Edit: on another bridge trip, my driver was excited to show me his 'tiktok famous' friend on his dash mounted iPad while we went over the bridge. Diamond driver, perfect rating, surfing social media with one hand and steering with the other. Maybe Waymo has just made me picky and most rideshare users now expect to share use of an iPad with the driver in traffic

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