Google has at least 10x as many employees as it needs. That's based on decades of revenue being decoupled from costs, and from monopoly profits. It's the double-whammy of being in tech (where costs and revenues don't couple since incremental costs are close to zero), and having a super-profitable monopoly.

You can't fire 90% of the workforce; even morale and culture problems aside, at this point, the organization is structured to need too many people. On the other hand, organizing over 100k employees turns into this superorganism problem.

At >100k employees, the influence of anyone -- up to and including the CEO -- is very, very limited. Dynamics take over.

I've been bearish on Google for a long time, but I haven't shorted the stock. Market irrationality can last a lot longer than my wallet. Fundamentally, though, one could muscle through building a new, better Google for much less than the valuation of Google.

Google could also be worth a lot more with a breakup. There is negative synergy between, for example, advertising, Google Workspace, Android, hosting, etc. If those were independent businesses, with partnerships around things like data sharing, the total value could be much higher. Alphabet was a move in the right direction, but the move should have been much deeper. Right now, Alphabet is Google + a bunch of tiny startups.

No one is incentivised to grow head count. They are incentivised to do more, produce more revenue, and expand the reach of the company; most of these goals require the application of more smart people to a problem. They are not getting a promotion or salary bump because their group increased from 200 to 300 people over the previous quarter, they are receiving rewards for being able to effectively direct those people in order to achieve some specific goal. Increasing head count by 50% while delivering 250% growth in revenue/engagement/view/etc is what is being rewarded.

- If I have a job at Google as an IC, I can look for IC jobs.

- If I have a job managing 10 people, I can get a manager-level job.

- If I have a job managing 100 people, I can get a director-level job.

- If I have a job managing 1000 people, I can look for a VP-level job.

- If I have a job managing 10,000 people, I can look for a C-suite job.

Average tenure in a position in the tech industry is around 3 years. No one will know or care what objectives a Google manager achieved, or whether those were hard or easy to achieve. If you want to grow rapidly in your career, the things which matter are:

- Connections, network, and references

- What shows up on an interview (e.g. self-improvement)

- What shows up on your CV (e.g. how many people you managed, or the brands you worked on)

The place techies get stuck in career growth is by trying to do the "right thing." By the time you're trying to rise to the top of a corporate ladder, the competition is extreme, and the people who succeed play the game as optimally as they can.

I might be able to look one level up. An IC might be able to manage a small team. However, your odds of having an IC move directly into the C-suite require nothing short of a miracle (a Nobel prize, being the author of Linux, or something similar).

Actually delivering value is a huge advantage too, but as far as I've seen is not prerequisite for getting ahead.

Appearing to deliver value is strongly advantageous. Delivering value helps you do that. Other methods:

- Good salesmanship (e.g. making easy things look difficult)

- Stealing credit (can be personal, or e.g. for market conditions)

- Lying (e.g. cooking books)

Delivering value is probably the easiest way to appear to deliver value at the IC level. The higher one moves in the corporate ladder, the more important the others become.

In any public company the CEO is just another employee. Maybe he even has less freedom than others.

Yes, responsibility and compensation are vastly greater, but in the end you don't really realize personal goals.

At some point I really hope that we can all recognize that “seemingly harmless”, “engineering-oriented”, and “data-driven” are not virtues.

Perhaps this is the point you are making: if one is data-driven and engineering-oriented without regard to the consequences, that could be seen as a vice.

Despite the amazing engineering/science, it is hard to come to peace with von Braun or Teller (just to pick two examples).

Hopefully we can get to the point of putting purpose (I think “mission” is a bit too hackneyed and neat to work here) first in discussions of culture, whether corporate or engineering culture.