To be honest, I feel like Google and Meta both had far too many employees.
"Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc.
There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the quality and increased the communications bottlenecks. A 10% cut won't do it, though. Over-hiring is hard to recover from. Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at all efficient.
If it did that, it would be left with a ton of code with no one who understands it, a horrible reputation, and zero morale.
The only way I can think of to manage this is to build out an elite smaller unit, with a smaller codebase, with less technical debt, and then to spin out the deadweight.
Guestimate. You can tell me I pulled it out of my ass, and you'd be right. But it's that type of number.
A better answer is looking at the size of Google when it was doing (approximately) the same things. Google has 20k employees in 2009. It has 155k today. I don't see Google doing much for me in 2022 that it wasn't doing in 2009.
I could probably go a long ways before that too.
A lot of what's happened from 2009 to 2022 is churn. Make-work to keep people employed.
> Also, they have a 27% operating margin, how much more "efficient" do they need to be?
Let me spell this out: In many cases, the same thing can be accomplished in 100 lines of code as 10,000 lines of code. That's largely a function of architecture, discipline, and cleverness. 100 lines of code is orders-of-magnitude easier to maintain and faster to evolve.
The Google codebase is *massive*. If you need a new feature, with good communication channels and focus, you can architect it in. With poor communication channels, it get kludged in.
Communications scales as O(n^2) where n is the number of employees. There's a similar power law for how pieces of code can interact and introduce complex bugs.
By "more efficient," I don't mean Google would be able to do more per dollar. With a smaller, better workforce, and a smaller, better codebase, Google would be better able to maintain old products, add new features, and develop new ones.
Cost of employees has gone up as stocks drop due to such high RSU compensation. Stock is 40% off its highs which means they have to make up that difference in either cash or more stock, and neither look good to investors at the moment so smooth the financials 10% layoffs is the go to for large tech here.
I don't follow. RSUs being worth less than they used to be means employees are cheaper. You gave out $X a couple of years ago and when it finally vests it's worth 0.6*$X or similar, that's a direct drop in employee compensation.
Are you reasoning that employees paid in RSU are not amused by this and are likely to leave if not "made whole" somehow? Seems like waiting for people to quit would get headcount down fairly quickly if so.
Ya basically people will feel they are getting a pay cut, and since the higher you go in the company the larger percent of your salary is from RSUs those are the people most likely to be unhappy. You potentially lose your high level core employees while entry level are much less affected
edit: this graph shows how much of your compensation is stock by level at google https://imgur.com/a/wlpa6Wm
Employees will (fairly reasonably, IMO) expect a same dollar-value RSU grant in the upcoming grant cycle. That will result in Google having to grant additional RSUs in an upcoming round. (The currency to Google for past grants is the number of shares/RSUs, which doesn't change as the stock goes up or down, but new grants are cheaper to Google in terms of dilution if the stock keeps going up.)
When Meta stock started going into the toilet, they gave out huge top-up RSU bonuses. Amazon is much slower to react, but they give you a target comp that they hope is fulfilled by stock price growth. If it isn’t, they give out-year grants to get you to target.
Beside Apple (whose YoY growth on its workforce was consistent before and after the pandemic), I think almost all tech company made a wrong bet that economical changes will be accelerated by "going online" and thus dominated by FOMO.
