In the highest comp regions (where new revenue generating projects almost always get staffed) it’s a common ballpark estimate of the allin cost of a SWE including all benefits, office, hiring, infra costs, ancillary roles. Consider that a senior SWE alone is pulling about $400k in direct comp. Also consider Google’s total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm and many of those are not engineers or in high comp regions. Of course a new org with no big sales/marketing/compute costs will have different cost structure vs search ads but it really is a workable ballpark.

Google isn’t spending 1M on an employee making 400k.

> total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm

Where did you get this figure? It doesn’t sound right at all..

Anyone can sound confident on the internet, but you don't seem to have anything to back it up. In my experience, 1 million per SWE in the Bay Area is actually about right across the industry.

You can look at public numbers to see that Google's revenue per __global__ employee is about 1.5 M and of that about 400 k is net income. SWEs in California make a lot more than the average global employee.

Costs also include server/DC/sales/marketing etc. you can’t include the server cost of say google maps as part of the people-headcount costs of google maps.

aren’t Google’s payouts for ads to websites/content creators/etc. included in their costs?

and of course all the other stuff the other comments mentioned and also including paying various contractors hired through other companies..

> Anyone can sound confident on the internet,

I’m not that sure about that