It's from a press-release that is intended to minimize the fears among investors. So the number likely includes part-time youtube moderators, cafeteria staff, and a lot of other minor jobs with incredibly high churn.
I'd bet the farm you are right. At the same time, I've worked at Google-sized companies (non-FAANG) for about five years now. And in my experience like anything else in corporate politics, the appearance is everything. Many of them will hire developers, PMs, designers, etc as 1099 employees and say "we treat you like everyone else!"
But you are maligned in little ways all the time. You get a desk and a computer like everyone else, but you're not invited to certain meetings. Or maybe you're forced to use only the shitty parking spaces. Worst of all you often don't get health insurance (though sometimes you do, especially if you're in a more white collar role).
I'm off on a tangent here. I've been burned by this system before as I'm sure is obvious now. But the point is, in my experience the same system that hires those people often happily will take advantage of any opportunity to include contractors as "Part of the family!" when it involves no effort beyond appearances for themselves and offers only good optics that may or may not benefit them.
I don't think churn is particularly high as a percentage of total workers. The company really is growing that fast. There have been over ten-thousand positions open via careers.google.com in the last several months (although I expect that to shrink in the coming days). And 10K isn't that unusual of a quarterly number.
No inside info here, just noting that that kind of hiring is par for the course.
Every engineer says that about their own products. My Amazon buddies all say AWS is a huge shitshow and my Microsoft buddies say Azure is huge mess. Technology is chaotic by nature
How about personal experience working with TK and a bunch of friends working at Google on Cloud? You can look up the severe production outages GCP has suffered over the past years, if you care.
All big organizations are dysfunctional in their own way.
If you know better, I'm all ears! Not trying to discount the hard work of all those fantastic Google engineers. It's just, prod issues are prod issues, regardless of good intentions.
Toxic TK, otoh, he's selfish, self-aggrandizing, out of touch, and not very nice or cool at all. Everything he touches bears his mark.
If given a choice I'd take GCP's production outages over Azure's security vulnerabilities that show a complete and total lack of any care for anything resembling security in at least a few of their products.
I've felt for a while that tech companies have been overhiring. Some, like Google, just to ensure that competitors don't get that talent. Others, like Coinbase, just to add an extra point to their pitch deck.
> Some, like Google, just to ensure that competitors don't get that talent.
This meme never made sense to me. How big is Google compared to it's competitors? Even if we narrow the scope down to the top 5% of talent - Google jas plenty of competition there. At best, Google can hang onto employees for a few years: not a great strategy for competing when employee churn is high.
If Google really wanted to hoard talent, they'd ensure current employees earn as much as new hires.
My working assumption on the theory is that Google is keeping talent from all companies, not specific ones. So the correct analysis would be the headcount at Google vs everyone else.
Maybe it is okay to slow hiring if 'normal' is ten thousand new hires in three months