As a person who works for a similarly-endowed company, let me tell you: no amount of money you can spend right now can give you qualified engineers you need to make every function of every business work perfectly. Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge.
And this is for positions that would increase the run rate or help make a business more profitable! But when it comes to businesses that are not profit centers - like maintaining business listings - I would expect those to run pretty lean. Google isn't a charity, after all.
> Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge.
As a happily employed engineer who has FAANG recruiter friends and gets scouted fairly regularly, I think you also forgot "and is willing to jump through the hoops you put in front of them".
Also, this doesn't sound like it needs to be an engineering problem. A customer support team could alleviate the workload. Even if its an internal-only, non-public support team, just people whose job it is to do the manual data scrubbing.
This sounds like a possible revenue opportunity as well. People would probably pay for the ability to ensure accurate data for their Places, which could also serve as a way for G to ensure the Place data is valid and meets their editorial guidelines. Don't know if this already exists or not but it sounds like it should.
Engineering is the resource you apply when you want to scale, as Google always does. The engineering they already have is doing the work of thousands (or perhaps orders of magnitude higher) of customer support people.
Paying people to manually scrub data is possible, but extremely expensive at scale. I assume that the folks in charge of the business are looking at the numbers very carefully to see what justifies that kind of very expensive personnel investment and what doesn't. Also, I suspect that a lot of people will be angry that they have to pay to correct Google's mistakes, especially if their competitors don't. That's not the kind of business model I'd want to be involved in.
I assume, then, that you would like to pay for long distance phone calls by the minute again, so that you can have a printed yellow pages that is about as accurate as Google is when it goes to press, but less accurate the day it's delivered?
The only businesses who care about the accuracy of their data are ones who depend on it to make money. In order for this to make sense, one has to deeply understand incentives.
It's kinda funny and sad that the reaction to "these companies shouldn't try to solve everything with software and invest in actual customer support infrastructure" is "but it's sooo hard to find engineers to solve all this automatically!". Which is exactly the point the parent comment made.
And this is for positions that would increase the run rate or help make a business more profitable! But when it comes to businesses that are not profit centers - like maintaining business listings - I would expect those to run pretty lean. Google isn't a charity, after all.