There are more than just SWE's employed at google. Custodial, food service, administration, operations, HR, etc...

A lot of those are going to be contractors employed by agencies.

Google also outsources SWEs. My friend in Mexico worked as this. They have an acronym for this kind of worker, I can't remember. But for example, they contract out work to SWEs at https://www.epam.com.

Not contradicting your point really, just a note

TVC

Yes! Can't believe I forgot. He was an interesting guy - a biologist who was deported to Mexico after living in the US since childhood without citizenship, and then tried working in a lab in Mexico, but the pay was so bad he learned to code and eventually became a TVC.

Extremely cool individual who I miss. Maybe I should say hi to him.

Just wait, they will outsource to “AI agencies”.

I don't think you realize how many products Google has. Cruise had ~ 4k employees at its peak. Waymo is just one tiny project in Google. Splunk had 8000 employees, GCP has a competitor to it. Bigquery is a competitor to Snowflake, who has around 5,000 employees. Databricks had 4k employees, which GCP also has a competitor to. This is just a fraction of the software just in cloud.

That's not apples to apples, though. Snowflake has 5,000 employees in the entire firm. The BQ Product+Eng+partnerships team is a fraction of that, and the SG&A functions are all shared services across all of Cloud, just like your Databricks comparison.

I think that says as much about those other companies as it does about Google. Namely, that despite Google's reputation for having become a bloated bureaucracy, there are in fact economies of scale happening at Google, and in fact it's those other companies that are bloated. 8,000 employees for collecting and searching logs? 5,000 employees for a data warehouse? Even accounting for the share of sales, marketing and G&A employees that contribute to Google's equivalent products, I'd be shocked if Google has anywhere near as many employees working on these things.

In fact it's even worse than that. A lot of Google's employees are dedicated to maintaining tools and infrastructure that Google built up over decades and hundreds of thousands of engineer-years because "the cloud" didn't exist when Google started. These other companies get all that "for free" (or rather, for nominal pay-as-you-go fees -- but certainly without the massive engineering investment that Google put in over the years) by building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Without public clouds and the vast growth in open-source cloud infrastructure tooling, those other companies likely wouldn't be viable businesses.

Waymo and Cruise are valid comparisons. GCP competitor to Splunk (Stackdriver) is a complete joke. I would be shocked if more than 500 people are working on that thing

I do realize Google has a lot going on. They have to, to keep all these people even remotely busy.

180k people? That's not how many people were fired. 8k were fired, which is less than 0.5% of the company. Finding useful projects for that many people doesn't sound that ridiculous.