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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]

#151

Post by matwood »

jsnell wrote: post #107
matwood wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, I divided the search revenue into the revenue number above, but it’s missing TAC. 76% is still the vast majority of revenue.

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

#152

Post by jsnell »

matwood wrote: post #151
jsnell wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ok, I divided the search revenue into the revenue number above, but it’s missing TAC. 76% is still the vast majority of revenue.

TAC shouldn't be part of that computation. It's an expense, not revenue. (Yes, it's confusing that it's in the same table as the revenue numbers, but so is the headcount and you wouldn't try to work it into the equation somehow.)

Also, if you only consider the search revenue you'll err in the opposite direction. It's 55% of their revenue, so pretty soon not even a normal majority. You should look at the "Google Advertising" line.

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

#153

Post by NtochkaNzvanova »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #78
KeplerBoy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I think that says as much about those other companies as it does about Google. Namely, that despite Google's reputation for having become a bloated bureaucracy, there are in fact economies of scale happening at Google, and in fact it's those other companies that are bloated. 8,000 employees for collecting and searching logs? 5,000 employees for a data warehouse? Even accounting for the share of sales, marketing and G&A employees that contribute to Google's equivalent products, I'd be shocked if Google has anywhere near as many employees working on these things.

In fact it's even worse than that. A lot of Google's employees are dedicated to maintaining tools and infrastructure that Google built up over decades and hundreds of thousands of engineer-years because "the cloud" didn't exist when Google started. These other companies get all that "for free" (or rather, for nominal pay-as-you-go fees -- but certainly without the massive engineering investment that Google put in over the years) by building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Without public clouds and the vast growth in open-source cloud infrastructure tooling, those other companies likely wouldn't be viable businesses.

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

#154

Post by resolutebat »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #150
solardev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Experienc…

I'm afraid any cleanliness advantage is temporary. People are filthy enough in cars driven by actual humans, can you imagine what they'll get up to when there's nobody at the wheel?

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

#155

Post by NtochkaNzvanova »

goalonetwo wrote: post #141
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…

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.

> Talking to some Googler friends, it also seems like everyone there think they are "leaders".

I guess we have different friends, but that doesn't match my experience. Of course, pumping yourself up and making yourself look more impressive for perf/promo is a huge thing, and accounts for a lot of pointless stuff being done just so you can say you "launched"/"landed" something. But the flip side of that is the recurrent memes about stuff like so-and-so over in that other division solved some incredibly hard technical problem, and "I'm just here copying protos around." Lots of Googlers realize they are just worker drones.

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

#156

Post by herdcall »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #36
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.

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

In what way is he awesome? His primary job was to improve Google Cloud's market share and it isn't any better as far as I can see, perhaps worse as Azure has increased the lead.

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

#157

Post by rkagerer »

phantomwhiskers wrote: post #121
KerryJones wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I were to guess, I'd say that this estimate is including hardware, cloud resources, software licenses, benefits, stock options, and probably more that I can't think of in addition to salary, but I too would like a more detailed explanation on how they came by that number.

Probably also the HR, legal, etc. support staff amortized across headcount.

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

#158

Post by mupuff1234 »

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.

It's was more like

2021: this is clearly a bubble

2023: execs do "shocked Pikachu", "we have hired for a different economical environment!"

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

#159

Post by jfim »

sdsd wrote: post #142
ojbyrne wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

TVC

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

#160

Post by sotix »

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

You missed some important bits!

Total costs increased from $57.9B to $62.6B, and Net income increased from $13.6B to $20.7B

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