What do 16,000 people 'do' at Google?
I'm beginning to think that besides search advertising, hiring is the thing Google does best.
On Thursday, the company reported gains of 50 percent or so in quarterly profit and revenue from a year ago, beating analyst expectations. It wasn't a stellar quarter, but it was pretty darn good.
The notable thing was the hiring. The company added 2,130 workers to its roster, bringing the head count to 15,916. What do nearly 16,000 people do at a company that doesn't make widgets (at least in the hardware manufacturing sense of the word)?
That's an average of about 35 people showing up for their first day of work each business day during the past three months. Granted, that is in offices around the world, but still, that's impressive. By comparison, Yahoo has 13,600 employees, after hiring 1,200 during the past quarter. (Actually, when you think about it, that's even more crazy given the need for Yahoo to retrench right now.)
Those numbers may seem surprising given the fact that Google attributed last quarter's 3-cent earnings miss to overspending on hiring, and promised to curb that impulse. However, during the conference call with analysts Thursday afternoon, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said many of the people hired during the quarter had been given offers before the previous quarter had closed.
The fast pace of hiring at the search giant is the one concern Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, mentioned in an interview with CNET News.com after the Google earnings call.
"Half the company has been hired in the last 12 months. That's chaotic," he says. "The new employees find it difficult to figure out how to get things done. It's not a normal company."
I can only guess that the new hires are working on the much-anticipated "Google phone," which is probably going to be a Google operating system for mobile devices, and on the new copyright content filtering technology deployed at YouTube this week. They're also probably tasked with taking over the advertising world with the company's lucrative online automated ad platform.
"They have possibly the best core business in the history of the Internet," Rohan says. "That is supporting them as they attempt to find an Act II. I don't know if it will be media, display, mobile or what."
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
company is the purity test attitude towards hiring - only people
from the "best" schools need apply, (Google decides which ones
are best) and there have been lots of credible charges of ageism
- including Google's "recent grad only" job posts. I can
understand the reluctance to bring bad habits into your
company, but excluding people withproject management and
development experience doesn't seem like a valid hiring model.
Apple has a similar number of employees. They manage to
create a great number of complex products. Until the 16k
Googlers actually build a product portfolio that makes sense and
start capitolizing on it, I'll remain less than impressed.
click on google ads a few or a dozen times a day.
away from Viacom without having to pay out billions. If I was one
of those 16,000 I'd already be looking through the classifieds
before it's too late..!!
"Good morning Googlers and Googlettes - welcome to day number one of "WE PSUCK (the P is (p)silent) DEAD WEB PAGES FROM THE INTERNET." Let me explain troops. Here in front of you are 16,000 vacuum cleaners, Hoovers, Eurekas, Panasonics, and other brands that are capable of PSUCKING up trash, garbage, dust and also DEAD AND MEANINGLESS WEB PAGES THAT ARE FLOATING ABOUT ON THE INTERNET. Each of you, will be required to find and to remove, repeat, REMOVE, at least 10 dead web pages daily from the internet. Yes, youi in row number 2, "What is a dead web page?" Well, good question....a dead web page is out there on the internet, it has a link, a url, but doesn't exist anymore - it is NO LONGER FUNCTIONING, but it is there, so, if you find one, and your quota shall be 10 per day, PSUCK IT UP, clean up the internet and make it safer once again so that when a GOOGLE Search is performed we won't include these dead web pages to the query. GOT IT? OKAY TROOPS.......grab your vacuum cleaners and let's CLEAN UP THE INTERNET."
End of the charade.
Thank you for this opportunity to Talk Back, and have a wonderful weekend.
- 16,000 googlers
- by cesium62 October 24, 2007 10:59 PM PDT
- Actually, Nooglers show up at Google on Monday mornings and not throughout the week.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(16 Comments)Even though half the company may have been hired in the past year, those are fairly bright people being hired. Software development is a fairly standard process, and Google has better than average mechanisms in place to help people quickly come up to speed in generating new software.
16,000 Googlers are hard at work figuring out how to make the things you want to do faster, easier, and cheaper.