<story><title>Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]</title><url>https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ehsankia</author><text>But isn&amp;#x27;t that just bad management &amp;#x2F; prioritization? Isn&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.</text></item><item><author>tomcar288</author><text>I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don&amp;#x27;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.  eventually he just couldn&amp;#x27;t see himself leading or doing meaningful work there and quit.&lt;p&gt;the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.</text></item><item><author>tra3</author><text>This caught my eye, total employees&lt;p&gt;- 2022: 190,234&lt;p&gt;- 2023: 182,502&lt;p&gt;Total increase in revenue of 10 billion.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>QuercusMax</author><text>In my org at the Goog, we didn&amp;#x27;t have any layoffs, but we also aren&amp;#x27;t expecting any new headcount any time soon. Projects that need more staff are expected to cannibalize it from other projects under the same VP.&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is actually a good way of doing things, and wish Google did this more broadly. Just think if everyone who would have been laid off was instead transferred to a project that needs their skills, or given training to move into a role that&amp;#x27;s needed. Can you imagine what type of employee loyalty and morale that would engender?</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]</title><url>https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ehsankia</author><text>But isn&amp;#x27;t that just bad management &amp;#x2F; prioritization? Isn&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.</text></item><item><author>tomcar288</author><text>I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don&amp;#x27;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.  eventually he just couldn&amp;#x27;t see himself leading or doing meaningful work there and quit.&lt;p&gt;the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.</text></item><item><author>tra3</author><text>This caught my eye, total employees&lt;p&gt;- 2022: 190,234&lt;p&gt;- 2023: 182,502&lt;p&gt;Total increase in revenue of 10 billion.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomcar288</author><text>the problem is there&amp;#x27;s not enough high value projects to do.  to much labor, too many employees and too much funding relative to the number of projects that actually bring value.&lt;p&gt;Because all the high value stuff(high ROI stuff) is already done or already being worked on.  all that&amp;#x27;s left is low ROI projects which take up huge amounts of time but bring little value.  employees and managers know they generate little value, so they end up doing more of them to compensate which makes the problem even worse as there&amp;#x27;s less and less high value stuff to do.&lt;p&gt;there&amp;#x27;s just too few opportunities, hence the need to expand into new industries.</text></comment>