It's also wild internally. It feels like headcount is incredibly tight, and even tighter now. Like 20% of my time as a manager is spent being asked to propose large new projects only to be told "nope, no HC for that." But somehow the company is like 4x larger than it as when I joined.

Wow, really? So where is it all going?

I suspect it is a property of subexponential growth. If every team gets new HC then the entire company grows at ridiculous pace. But it does feel disempowering to see the company grow like mad while we are told "not you."

Honestly as an end user, the growth seems to be backwards. Search results are worse than ever, YouTube recommendations are broken, and for the first time in years, Google Maps is showing me weird as hell routes.